The Public Policy: The Hi-Tech ID Menace
Sutherland, Daniel W.
THE PUBLIC POLICY by Daniel W. Sutherland The Hi-Tech ID Menace T he weary businessman shuffled down the long hallway at JFK Airport. His eight-hour flight from Frankfurt had just touched down,...
...He then picks up a telephone and speaks to the computer...
...and has convened a "privacy summit" with high-tech businessmen and civil libertarians...
...onerous as it is...
...And of course, when every American has been assigned a UHI, a "health security card" cannot be far behind...
...For example, the explicit goal of the worker registry project is to require that every company clear every hiring decision through the registry...
...When the government accumulates this extraordinary amount of influence over the daily activities of all Americans, abuses are sure to follow...
...As he rounded the corner, he saw that there were already several dozen people waiting in front of the immigration desk...
...However, the Clinton-Gore record on databanks of biometric information and national ID cards is surely more alarming than nuisance calls from telemarketers...
...They will affect him when he requests a passport, since only people on the government's approved lists will be allowed to travel internationally...
...His eight-hour flight from Frankfurt had just touched down, and he was anxious to get home to his family...
...An equally important if less understood reason for the shift in Social Security's political landscape is that more Americans than ever are comparing their Social Security taxes and promised benefits to what they could be getting if those taxes were invested privately...
...Clinton-Gore appointees at the Social Security Administration and the INS have worked for the past two years to create a worker registry by integrating and updating scattered and unconnected computer systems...
...POLITICS by Grover G. Norquist Cashiering Social Security T he politics of Social Security has shifted so dramatically that reforming this "third rail" of American politics is now viewed inside the Beltway as mainstream and inevitable...
...60 February 1999 • The American Spectator to find two left-handed plumbers under the age of 4o in a town of 50,000, you can...
...Through 1949 the maximum annual tax anyone paid was $6o — half paid directly by workers and half paid through his employer...
...To the businessman, it seemed that all he had done was speed past a long line...
...Conventional wisdom is that Clinton and the Republicans are circling each other warily and will end up with a fix to let younger Americans set aside a 3-perGROVER G. NORQUIST is president of Americans for Tax Reform...
...cent portion of the 12.4-percent payroll tax into personal retirement accounts...
...If the government had just hired enough new employees to make the immigration lines move more smoothly, there would have been no need to create new databanks of biographic and biometric information...
...For the last six years, the administration has poured tens of millions of dollars into studying the best methods for collecting personal information on every American, centralizing that information into accessible databases, and issuing national ID cards based on the information collected...
...The first has been the health care "crisis...
...Vice President Gore quickly arranged a White House ceremony to announce that the administration would delay the program until further regulations could be developed...
...The new database will constitute the country's first universal, comprehensive list of every legal resident...
...They will affect a citizen when he gets his first job or when he changes jobs: If he is not listed in the government's computer, he will not be allowed to work...
...DANIEL W. SUTHERLAND is a legal scholar with the Center for Equal Opportunity and the co-author of Religion in the Workplace, published in November by the American Bar Association...
...In 1965, only ten percent of Americans owned stocks directly...
...Once the program came to light last summer, conservatives introduced legislation to ban the development of a UHI...
...The businessman is one of over 70,000 people who have signed up to receive an ID card under INSPASS, a program pushed by Clinton appointees at the Immigration and Naturalization Service...
...Within a few seconds, the machine had analyzed the hand print on the scanner, compared it to the hand print encoded onto the plastic card, checked both against a computer file, and concluded that the "hand geometry" was identical...
...If Gore's rivals in the next presidential election explore the administration's hypocrisy on privacy protections, they will discover a potent political issue...
...The computer compares the voice pattern on the ID card with the driver's voice...
...For example, the UHI that can help government and industry officials "find two left-handed plumbers under the age of 40 in a town of 50,000" can also identify all 25-40 year-old people with Capitol Hill zip codes who have been treated for sexually transmitted diseases, or have received a prescription for Prozac...
...They will also discover the urgent need to arrest the development of programs jeopardizing our most basic civil liberties...
...In Scandinavian countries," he said enthusiastically, "if you want If Al Gore has his way, Big Brother will be carding you...
...By 2013, the Social Security system will spend more than it brings in, which will require the federal government to retire $2.5 trillion in federal bonds financed by higher taxes on Americans...
...Interested residents have received a plastic card with a recording of the person's voice encoded into the stripe on the back...
...The INS then took an image of his hand geometry (a type of "biometric" data—physical characteristics that are unique to each person, such as a person's voice or retina pattern) and electronically recorded it onto a plastic card...
...In 1986 Republicans lost eight Senate and five House seats after Democrats claimed that Republican efforts to address the system's yawning unfunded liabilities would "destroy" Social Security...
...if the two speech codes match, the border gate opens...
...The vice president, a reputed expert on technology and cyberspace, has often spoken in recent months about how the new "information age" threatens personal privacy...
...Technology is not always an enemy to be feared...
...The problems started the day FDR signed Social Security into law in 1935...
...62 February 1999 • The American Spectator...
...in 1980, 20 percent...
...Because federal, state, and local computer databases are not linked together, residents of this country enjoy what some refer to as "security through obscurity...
...Once the government has in place a national ID program, these new laws will affect nearly every aspect of American life...
...This investor class has a growing sophistication about the market...
...But Democrats have talked themselves into a corner...
...A number of other projects are testing INSPASS-like cards...
...Mandatory ID cards will soon follow...
...The administration is working with other countries to ensure that their technology is able to read our encoded passports, and vice versa...
...Democratic Rep...
...A simple keystroke error—intentional or not—could eliminate a person from the national ID databank, causing him to lose his job or his eligibility for a student loan...
...Thanks to a new ID card, residents of Scobey, Montana, can now return from trips to Canada after the local border station has closed for the night...
...Afterward, anyone not on the official list of approved workers will not be allowed to work in the U.S...
...The businessman provided the INS with biographical data —home address, date of birth, office address, position within his company, and number of international trips he anticipates taking—so that the agency could verify that he is authorized by the government to travel...
...Although INSPASS is currently a voluntary program, it is designed to demonstrate the feasibility of including machine-readable biographical and biometric data on U.S...
...But where will they all lead...
...Jim McDermott summarized the administration's position: A centralized database of medical records will be a useful tool, once some modest privacy regulations are on the books...
...For example, the government could have hired dozens of new inspectors for the cost of developing and deploying the INSPASS scanners and computers...
...The worker registry cannot operate without a national ID card because otherwise an impostor could easily forge a birth certificate or Social Security card and claim to be a person registered in the databank...
...The 1996 immigration law called on Congress to vote on creating a mandatory nationwide worker registry in 2001...
...When a town resident drives up to the border gate, he swipes his card through a scanner and types in a password, just as if he were using a drive-up ATM machine...
...It set up a "pay as you go" Ponzi scheme in which taxes immediately flow out to retirees...
...The 3 percent is a compromise between the 2 percent proposed by Democrats Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Bob Kerrey and the 5 percent suggested by Republican Phil Gramm...
...Slowly and incrementally, ID projects will move from voluntary and limited pilots to mandatory nationwide programs...
...Several administration initiatives have been hampered because the government's various computer systems are not linked and cannot communicate with one another...
...Alan Simpson, said that the new law would hasten the day when "we have a more counterfeit-resistant type of verification system —whatever that may be, whether it would eventually be a Social Security card, a slide-through card like you use with a Visa when you make a purchase, perhaps some type of driver's license photograph, retina examination like they have done in California...
...That law did not establish individual retirement accounts or even one big pension fund...
...It is, as the New York Times put it, a high-tech version of "open sesame...
...Due largely to the administration's lobbying, Congress then passed a bill requiring large-scale tests of the commission's recommendations...
...citizens and resident aliens who fly internationally on a regular basis...
...INSPASS is not an isolated case...
...Peter Ferrara, the chief economist for Americans for Tax Reform, wrote Social Security: The Inherent Contradiction for the Cato Institute back in 1978...
...has called for an "electronic bill of rights...
...If it is necessary for the state to collect and store information, it should not be allowed to centralize that information in accessible computer systems...
...It lobbied successfully for more moderate health care legislation in 1996 and since then has been developing a plan to assign every American a "unique health identifier" (UHI): a computer code assigned to each person that would enable the government to organize all medical records into a central database...
...Congress rejected that proposal, but the administration persisted...
...Such a computerized library of medical files could work only if each American were assigned a UHI code, which would make it possible to track every time he came into contact with the health care industry...
...Given the Clinton-Gore administration's willingness to conveniently bypass the naturalization laws in order to qualify hundreds of thousands of new voters in time for the 1996 elections, it is not hard to imagine an overzealous political operative devising a method to temporarily delete the names of unfriendly voters from the national registry...
...However, the White House will not repeal the UHI project entirely...
...would carry cards with fingerprints, hand geometry, and other information encoded onto the visa) and "video-imaging" (a camera takes a picture of a person approaching a border station, and then compares the image with photographs stored in a central database...
...There never was any "trust fund" or "savings" or "investment...
...Democratic demagoguery continued last year, as Bill Clinton stymied every GOP effort to cut taxes by demanding that we "save" Social Security first...
...Reaching into his wallet he pulled out a plastic card, placed it in the machine, and then laid his hand on a scanner attached to it...
...The political implications of these embryonic national ID systems could be as fascinating as the new technology...
...Theadministration has therefore used two supposed crises to justify new efforts to collect and centralize information on American citizens...
...In 1994, a relatively obscure commission found that the country could prevent illegal immigrants from getting jobs if the federal government developed a database of all eligible workers, and then required companies to get clearance from the "worker registry" before hiring anyone...
...But instead of muttering profanities under his breath he cut around the long line and stepped up to a machine...
...passports...
...The administration has also cited the immigration "crisis" to justify a national identification system...
...Gore has proposed letting consumers take their names off telemarketing lists, announced a White House directive requiring every federal agency to name an official in charge of compliance with privacy laws, and urged states not to sell information people provide when they apply for driving licenses...
...As late as 1961, the total maximum annual tax for a worker was $287...
...today 46 percent of Americans (51 percent of voters) own stock...
...Right now the government's information-gathering systems are, as they should be, highly balkaThe American Spectator • February 1999 61 nized...
...But he was also doing something much more important: He was illustrating the Clinton administration's fascination with high-tech projects that constitute some of the most serious assaults on privacy imaginable...
...The recommendation was dead on arrival at a conservative Congress, but Clinton breathed new life into it by endorsing it in his State of the Union address in January 1995...
...But the government should carefully study whether new technology is even the most efficient option...
...Now Social Security spends over $400 billion annually, consuming 24 percent of the federal budget and 5 percent of the entire U.S...
...In 1993, President Clinton proposed that every American be made to carry "health security cards," which he described as "'smart cards' coded with his or her personal medical information...
...Any time he wants to fill a prescription or see his dentist, his identity will be verifiedthrough centralized computers...
...or a Justice Depai tment litigator involved in a nasty, scorched-earth antitrust case combing the government's biographical, medical, and biometric databanks to find information that would help undercut the credibility of an uncooperative witness (suspicious travel habits, unsteady employment history, or records of psychiatric counseling might come in useful during cross-examination...
...In a Senate speech just after the 1996 immigration law passed, its sponsor, Sen...
...T hese high-tech efforts seem so attractive: quicker travel through airports, easier billing for doctors' services, more effective enforcement against illegal immigrants...
...The system wasn't intended to be as...
...A consortium of nations will thus share physical and personal information on their citizens so that international travel can move more smoothly...
...It is not difficult to imagine an unscrupulous White House political operative examining the medical file databank to see if any House Judiciary Committee staffers have ever had an abortion...
...Among other ID projects being tested are a "laser visa" (Mexicans who frequently cross the border into the U.S...
...In 1950, the entire Social Security program cost only $1 billion, or 2.5 percent of the federal budget...
...The SSA and INS are also developing programs to discourage companies from hiring anybody not on the list...
...By 2030 what's left of the fabled Social Security "surplus" will be spent and the system will be bankrupt by any measure...
...He will have to wait in line at the voting booth until his ID card is verified...
...Fear of cutting taxes before fixing Social Security kept the Senate from even voting on the modest $8o-billion tax cut passed by the House...
...Administration officials reason that if the federal government could establish a "national health care data network," this would make billing more efficient and allow medical researchers to study large samples of health records...
...The first reason for this sea change is Social Security's current $9.5 trillion in unfunded liabilities...
...The goal is to require anyone holding a passport to submit these types of data to the government...
...economy...
...The agency also stored the biographical and biometric data in a central computer...
...An INSPASS is available to U.S...
...He was the first to point out that Social Security provides younger workers with lower rates of Now that it's politically safe, privatization is inevitable...
...They will affect him when he interacts with any government agency—to get a driver's license or apply for a student loan—because he will be checked against the national registry...
...That is what will come...
...The traveler was on his way...
...He has said that privacy is "a basic Americanvalue" that must be updated for the computer era...
Vol. 32 • February 1999 • No. 2
