NATIONAL ID FRAUDBy J. Bradley JansenFree Congress CommentaryFebruary 13, 2002This week, the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA)convened in Washington, DC and lobbied Congress for a handout to implement a defacto National Identification system. The AAMVA claims that they need federal taxdollars before they will raise standards and that their proposal would not be anational ID.In effect, the AAMVA members work for our state legislatures. Both associations ofstate legislators oppose their plan to seek federal funds to standardizeprocedures and link their databases together with those of law enforcement. TheAmerican Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the National Conference of StateLegislatures (NCSL) both signed letters circulated by the Free Congress Foundation(along with Eagle Forum, the American Civil Liberties Union and the ElectronicPrivacy Information Center) to President Bush and Secretary Mineta opposing theAAMVA proposal specifically as well as the idea of a national ID generally. Atotal of 43 national organizations joined together to express our opposition tothe proposal.Many other organizations expounded on their respective reasons for signing theletter. Twila Brase, R.N., president of the Citizens' Council on Health Care (oneof the signers of the letters), “views the national ID as a tool that will allowgovernment tracking of private medical decisions, government health caredatabases, unconsented medical research, and use of health care data to createpublic policy supportive of health care rationing.”When I debated the head of the AAMVA on TechTV, we agreed that there is a need toimprove standards used by the state motor vehicle bureaus, but we differed on manyother points. When she claimed that they do not consider their plan a national ID,I pointed out that it fails the duck test, “If it looks like a duck, walks like aduck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck.” A new system with one set of standardsestablished by the federal government, with federal money, with one network ofdatabases linked to federal law enforcement agencies, set up despite theopposition of state lawmakers, looks, walks and quacks like a national ID.Pardon my mixed metaphor (and don’t cry fowl), but the AAMVA has an albatrosshanging around their neck. They go out of their way to claim that their proposalis not a call for a national ID because they know most thoughtful Americans opposethat idea. Many patriotic Americans throughout our history have fought, many withtheir lives, for us to enjoy our constitutional liberties. We would dishonor theirsacrifices to forfeit those protections now.Adding insult to injury, we would give up more of our privacy and otherconstitutional liberties as well as some of our security if we adopted a nationalID plan such as the AAMVA proposal. Such a scheme would make us less safe as itviolated our privacy. Such a proposal would nationalize lesser problems that wouldbe harder to solve without sufficiently adding any appreciable benefit. Such aproposal, had it been in place, would have done nothing to prevent the tragediesof September 11th.Soundbite calls for a national ID should not become an excuse not to raisestandards. As our letters to Messrs. Bush and Mineta explain, “An identity card isonly as good as the information that establishes identity in the first place.Terrorists and criminals will continue to be able to obtain-by legal and illegalmeans-the documents needed to get a government ID, such as birth certificates and
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