this is all good

In its written objection to the law, the ACLU claims REAL ID amounts to the "first-ever national identity card system," which "would irreparably damage the fabric of American life."

how does this damage the 'fabric of american life'?

my friend has a barcode tat on his wrist.....

this is bs. ss card/dl/cc/ - all that is not enough to track us down? give me a break. of course none of this can be exploited, no one ever looses a laptop or has their network db's hacked. crap on a halfshell.

I wouldnt worry too much about it. i heard the Mark of the beast enables you to recieve 50% off all coca cola products, 2 for 1 six flags admissions, concolidates all your credit cards into one easy to read statement and if you act now they'll even throw in a set of additional Zorbees for free. A $20 value.

ss card/dl/cc - that's the problem. it's a clusterf*ck of information between the 50 states with lots of stolen social security numbers, fraud, etc.

we need a national database with one consistent form of i.d. - like most countries have

i'm still waiting to hear how this will damage the 'fabric of american life'

the ACLU is being hysterical

I don't get why a social security card is a crappy paper card with nothing but a name, number and signature. Make the SSI card the national ID. Put a photo on it and magnetic strip like your drivers license and be done with this additional layer of bureaucracy national ID crap.

I dont get how zorbees can absorb 10,000x the water as a regular towel! Where does it go?

^ agree with aqua. Why re-invent the system when we've been apart of it since the FDR days?

I love Big Government, it makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside knowing this massive god-like entity run by an elite cadre of idiots sits over my head every second of every day.

Free Ramos - This is the problem: it implies that anyone could be called into account at any time and forced to explain who they am and what they're doing. It goes along with the Big Government mindset that anything not expressly permitted is forbidden, I think the inverse of that is a lot more humane, and realistic.

Ever been wandering around (and/or photographing) some part of the city that you'd normally have no business visiting? Been stopped by some authority figure and asked to explain yourself? Ever used the 'I'm an architect' card to get out of that situation. It shouldn't be that way, identity and intention shouldn't be so easily reducible to an occupation or an SSN. Big Gov't has no right ot know who everybody is and what they're doing at all times.

Got your papers?

i'm not even sure how this could be legal, unless they're tied to some federal program that NEEDS tracking information.

SSI is just for tracking contributions and disbursements.

drivers licenses are issued by the states.

what exactly is REAL ID tracking - what's the end game?

We have a word for this activity in NYC, its called the NYPD.

Oh, sorry 765, looks like they got to you too.

Were you by chance accosted by the po-lice in Brooklyn? Williamsburg to be specific?

Oh, and to actually add something serious to this discussion, if the REAL ID came with an RFID chip in it, like new issue passports do, the pigs could literally track your every movement as long as your near radio receivers (read: live in a city with a receiver network).

Then again, they can already do that as long as your cell phone is on.

a naive question, i'm sure, but one that i think about a lot:

why should i be concerned about being tracked if i don't do anything of interest to anyone?

good point steven. guess what people you are dull. big brother doesnt care about you. you can complain about the government and not worry about disappearing in the middle of the night. you have already been defeated as you willingly drink the koolaid of mass media and mass consumption. why should the feds spy on you? all they have to do is go to your myspace and facebook pages and wham they have all the information they need about how hard you partied on your birthday and who else was having their picture taken in front of (fill in tourist attraction here) on your last vacation...relax winston.

Yep, between cell phones, ATM cameras, wireless laptops, and parking lot cameras we're completely trackable already. I have nothing to hide.

It does annoy me that we don't have a consistent strategy and rules for using our social security numbers. I dislike that they are able to be requested by so many entities as an ID number and wish we had strong and consistent rules that you only use your SSI on tax-related documents, period. But if a national ID means we have a consistent use of the number, that can exclude places like your credit card company from asking for that number, I'm fine with it.

<humor>

If you're worried about conspiracy and overarching control, ask yourself this: over on the shackscraper thread, why does evilplatypus' link to an image take you to a new window, as is typical, while Paul's link to the pods opens in the same window, keeping you confused and mindlessly trapped in Archinect's maze of intrigue??

Some kind of conspiracy, I am certain.

Steven and vado - it's not about being watched, and it's not about whether anyone's doing anything wrong or not. Even if you're doing nothing wrong, do you want to have to explain that everytime your behavior doesn't correspond with some cops idea of how a normal person should act? Imagine being in line for a security screening at an airport, for the rest of your life.

The police have no right to know who I am or what I'm doing, unless a crime's been committed. If everyone has to have an ID on them at all times, then they can be stopped and asked to produce it.

It's not about potential surveillance, it's about potential harassment.

Have you guys really never been in some weird, abandoned, or infrastructural area of the city and been asked to explain yourself by a cop or security gaurd? Haven't you ever used that 'I'm an architect' excuse to defuse the situation? Maybe it's just me, but when these things happen, you're guilty until proven innocent, and that's just wrong. And if you've got a camera on you, forget it.

vado, speak for yourself, I ain't doing anything wrong, but I certainly ain't dull, neither. :D

perhaps you should go to the security guard house to get clearance before you go trespassing there mr. excitement.

or mayhaps we should just work in the suburbs...

yes, theres a sale dockers sale goin on!

I'm with 765 and I will take his argument a little farther. Big brother is watching, and even if what he is seeing is boring it would be easier to accept what should be a simple matter of database integration if he was using the information he gathered more appropriately.

If you look into the cases of Steven Kurtz, or Brandon Mayfield, or the illegal wiretapping cases, it is pretty clear that some individuals in the government are actively misusing the information and resources that they currently have on hand. Sometimes it is incompetence, but sometimes it is malicious. These two individuals in particular were going about their boring daily lives, with nothing to hide, got fingered for shit that they didn't do, and have only narrowed (to date) avoided getting thrown in the clink. How do you know your fingerprint won't be mixed up with someone elses, or your art project won't be deemed bioterror?

Now the courtroom is quiet, but who will confess.
Is it true you betrayed us? The answer is Yes.
Then read me the list of the crimes that are mine,
I will ask for the mercy that you love to decline.
And all the ladies go moist, and the judge has no choice,
a singer must die for the lie in his voice.
And I thank you, I thank you for doing your duty,
you keepers of truth, you guardians of beauty.
Your vision is right, my vision is wrong,
I'm sorry for smudging the air with my song.

Oh, the night it is thick, my defences are hid
in the clothes of a woman I would like to forgive,
in the rings of her silk, in the hinge of her thighs,
where I have to go begging in beauty's disguise.
Oh goodnight, goodnight, my night after night,
my night after night, after night, after night, after night, after night.

I am so afraid that I listen to you,
your sun glassed protectors they do that to you.
It's their ways to detain, their ways to disgrace,
their knee in your balls and their fist in your face.
Yes and long live the state by whoever it's made,
sir, I didn't see nothing, I was just getting home late.

I can see you all.



Vado is the third string from the left.

I see the National ID Card as another incremental loss of personal freedom and privacy, and I would not take the issue quite so lightly as some here are suggesting. Good posts, 765 and Janosh.

For those of you wondering what the big deal is with a national ID card -- "after all", you say, "I didn't do anything wrong."

Remember, this nation once blacklisted or arrested artists and writers who were considered too left wing.

It once ran an operation called COINTELPRO, which infiltrated groups on the "new left."

In recent history, it practiced something called "extraordinary rendition," in which a number of innocent people were flown to foreign countries where they were tortured.

Innocent minorities are still stopped and questioned by the police in this country without reason, in a practice called "profiling."

You can say that these things don't affect you. Until they do. You wake up one morning and you're the one being profiled or detained.

Free speech and privacy laws exist only partly to protect you as an individual. The main reason for their existence is to make sure that our government never devolves into the tyranny of a police state. And the first hallmark of a police state is constant surveillance.

Ask any citizen of the former East Germany, the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, or Oceania.

i know about and understand all of those things, farwest. don't see what an id has to do with any of them. i expect those things can happen to people without national ids and don't think carrying an id will make it more likely.

i appreciate the enthusiasm with which you guys are arguing this but, if you think this id card is somehow sinister, i sure hope you don't carry credit cards or grocery discount cards!

I guess my point isn't so much that a national ID card is automatically insidious. It could be a great convenience. After all, as you say, we do already have credit cards and social security cards and the like. All of which reference gigantic databases that track us at every moment of our lives.

My point is: what the government does under the auspices of protecting us often involve incremental erosions of our privacy.

One of the reasons our country is so fully democratic and free is its belief in personal privacy -- specifically the 1st and 4th Amendment. Anything that erodes these is, to my mind, bad.

I'd be much more supportive of a national ID if I felt the government (and the Bush administration) were in any way concerned about individual privacy.

A single ID will allow individual citizens to be tracked and monitored incredibly efficiently.

Why cant we just put all our credit cards and grocery cards onto the national id card and then even just put it on a chip in our skin - that would be the most convienant.