Too late to stop national ID

By Roger F. Gay
web posted December 3, 2001

"Imagine a state in which you must register your name and
address with the authorities, just so they can find you in case you
break the law. In an age when bills vaunting protections for
privacy abound, and when surveys of consumers rank privacy as
a top concern, could that happen here? It is already happening.
When we rely on the federal government to solve our problems,
we invite it to intrude upon our privacy. We are asking Big
Brother to come in and make himself at home."
— How Big Brother Began, Solveig Singleton, Cato Institute 

Changes in technology have left a nation confused about how the
modern national ID system is implemented. Visions of passports
with stamped pages need to be replaced with the modern reality
of the computer age. Centrally located file cabinets filled with
hand written cards have been replaced by interconnected
databases in a huge distributed system.

It has long since been understood that safeguarding our freedom
requires limiting the government's access to personal information.
Where a legitimate purpose is served, government agencies have
been allowed to accumulate limited information for specific
purposes. Over the past decade a dramatic shift has taken place.
The government has developed the ability to accumulate the
maximum amount of information and provided central access to
an army of low level bureaucrats. All signs indicate that this is
just a beginning.

During the eight years of the Clinton administration, the federal
government spent approximately four billion dollars developing a
national database system for keeping track of intimate details of
the lives of all Americans. Funding, and in fact the project itself
was never held up for close public scrutiny. Most of the people
reading this article have never heard of the project. Of those who
have, many probably believe it was either shut down for lack of
public support, or limited in purpose.

In order to understand the potential of such a system it is
worthwhile to consider its cost. Four billion dollars is a huge
amount of money to spend on development of a computer
system. It could buy more than sixty million hours (thirty
thousand years) of engineering consulting time. It is enough to
pay 130,000 people an average income for one year. It is more
than enough to buy a million modern desktop computers; each
one powerful enough to manage a database containing
information about every man, woman, and child in the United
States, and then some.

Four billion dollars is a lot of money. It would buy almost ninety
B-2 stealth bombers. It is enough to pay for about forty
thousand average homes. It is enough to send about one hundred
thousand students to college for one year or buy hot lunches for
every elementary school child in the United States for five
hundred years.

As awesome as the price tag is, the excuses for its existence
have been poor. The premier reason it was built, according to
most official reports, is to track child support payments and
people who are supposed to make them. But state and county
governments, already armed with their own computers resisted.
Propaganda campaigns exaggerated claims of non-payment to
the level of a national emergency, but were countered with real
data from the national census and other research showing that
fully employed fathers pay well. Fathers of children supported by
welfare are often poor, unskilled, too sick to work, in jail,
unknown, or dead. Another database system does nothing to
reduce poverty.

The database would be used to catch illegal aliens. This was a
short-lived excuse. One only needed to point out that illegal
aliens would probably be the only people not registered.

As weak as the justification is, the child support excuse still had
the necessary characteristics. The government wanted to look
into every important detail of a person's life. Laws were passed
to require financial institutions to provide detailed information on
transactions. Systems were integrated so that information
obtained from all government sources would be available in one
search, and so that businesses and other private organizations
could contribute and access information. "Deadbeat dad"
propaganda was intense. As long as people could believe that
fathers do not deserve fundamental human rights, they could
accept the logic of unconstitutional privacy infringements.

States were initially asked to pay half the cost. The problem that
states were not interested was overcome by a creative funding
strategy. The federal government paid the cost of developing the
system and added incentive payments of more than one billion
dollars per year to encourage states to use it. With the inclusion
of this funding, every politician, bureaucrat, judge, and
prosecutor instantly became a "deadbeat dad" hunter. The
combined state / federal system now employs more than fifty
thousand people nationwide.

Those in Congress who promoted the system promised
repeatedly that it would only be used to track child support
payments and people who are supposed to pay. But as soon as
the system could function, that cover was blown. The database
became known as the "National Directory of New Hires." The
name reflected the first strategy for registering people. Rather
than registering child support debtors, everyone taking a new job
would be registered. This strategy eventually shifted to
registration of everyone with a job, a social security number, a
driver's license, a bank account, a telephone; anyone for which
there is a source of information. You can be located whatever
you do, and the government will know what you do.

The Bush administration does not appear to be set to improve
the record. Amidst a flurry of anti-terrorism legislation,
administration officials have issued several denials that a national
ID system is even contemplated. We already have a modern
computerized system in place that is far more effective than any
identification and tracking system the Nazis or the Soviet
Communists ever had. Common sense suggests that possession
of such an Orwellian tool has not escaped their notice.

The primary contractor for the database system was Andersen
Consulting. The company broke from international financial
services consulting firm Arthur Andersen, Andersen Worldwide
this year and was renamed Accenture Ltd. Accenture is based in
Bermuda, a well-known offshore tax and privacy haven.

Roger F. Gay is a professional analyst and director of the
Project for Improvement of Child Support Litigation Technology
(http://www.geocities.com/capitolhill/5910/index.html_. His
research on child support over the past ten years brought him in
touch with the national database issue. You may e-mail Roger at
picslt@mail.lawguru.com.

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