I try to let people know that sometimes the only difference between a conspiracy theory and and the truth is the source of where it is coming from. All you have to do is take a sample of the superstitions and cultural myths that people believe, and then you realize that 9 out of 10 people believe much more controversial stuff than me. I just voice facts aloud that few people know about which makes me a "conspiracy theorist". However before I re-write Daniel J. Wakins article on National ID's, everybody should know he is a well respected NY Times Journalist and this was reported in the NY times already.

Identity cards are a fact of life in some places like Brazil and the Gaza Strip among Palestinians. IMAGINE you were moving to a new state and the government required you to register at the local police precinct. Or that before the hospital let Mom leave with her newborn, Dad had to register the newly arrived citizen at a central office. Sound like George Orwell's 1984 yet? Or that the police could stop you and demand to see your papers while you stepped out for a quart of milk. This is life in Europe. Most Europeans live with these rules, though in Italy the chasm between theory and practice can be huge. Whatever the practice, though, scores of governments have the potential to wield strong monitoring powers over their citizens. Chief among their tools is the national identity card. In the post-Sept. 11 world, the idea of universal I.D. cards is being raised in this country, setting off a debate that touches on what it means to be American, and how to balance freedom with the need for security.

Polls in the weeks after the attacks show that Americans favor such identity cards. About 70 percent of those interviewed by the Pew Research Center from Sept. 13 to 17 said they approved of the requirement that all citizens carried one, to be produced on request by police (I fail to see how this will stop terrorist and I know this system will be used differently in urban communities). The following week, in a New York Times/CBS News poll, 56 percent said they would accept MANDATORY national electronic identification cards.

Helping fuel the debate was a widely published suggestion by Larry Ellison, the chief executive of the software maker Oracle, that the United States should establish a national I.D. system, embedding people's fingerprints on cards and creating a database so airport guards could check identities. Mr. Ellison offered to donate the software (Of course he did, if this goes through he moves past Bill Gates as the richest man on the planet). Similar ideas were floated in editorial and letters pages, with proponents saying the I.D.'s could protect airline travelers at check-in and guard against identity theft. With the plethora of personal information already gathered by private industry, some argued, any threats to privacy would not matter that much anyway. But given the nation's strong tradition of privacy protection, its innate resistance to government intrusion and a growing protest against the use of personal data by marketers, the I.D. idea still seems far off. The Bush administration has rejected the idea for now and the terrorism legislation now under consideration in Congress does not call for national I.D.'s. Nevertheless, at least one company that makes scanners has reportedly said several federal agencies had been in touch about using the devices in connection with I.D. cards. And some in Congress say the time could be ripe for a serious debate (Now you wonder why people are always whispering about a New World Order and one world government).

Other governments agree. Officials in Britain, Australia, the Netherlands and the Philippines have also raised the idea. Privacy International, a watchdog group in London, estimates that about 100 countries - many of them developing nations - have compulsory national I.D.'s. Some, like Denmark, issue I.D. numbers at birth around which a lifetime of personal information accretes. They are generally accepted among the citizenry of European countries, like France, with a tradition of centralized government and with extensive social welfare systems. “In reality, the card is just the visible part of a vast information spectrum”, said Simon Davies, the director of Privacy International. “To some it's a security icon; it represents the potential for a safer society. To others it represents a more efficient government. To others, it represents cracking down on illegal immigrants. But ultimately, the card is worthless without some sort of integrated computer system behind it”. And that, he says, presents a danger to privacy, particularly in the developed world.

During the Apartheid era, South Africa produced the most nefarious sort of I.D.'s, pass books that specified what areas blacks were allowed to circulate in and work (Don't think we are beyond that sort of implementation here, as a Puerto Rican I can speak to differences in race and class with some personal examples). The South African laws allowed the police to arrest blacks without cards - a common form of harassment. In the United States, resistance to a national I.D. dwells firmly in the deep-seated tradition of privacy protection, something that spans the ideological spectrum. “It is a traditional human rights notion that we see infusing many different constitutional doctrines in this country”, said Nadine Strossen, president of the American Civil Liberties Union. “You do have a right to be left alone in the most literal sense”.

A national I.D. could also become a powerful tool for ethnic profiling, Ms. Strossen argued, suggesting that the authorities would be more likely to stop Arab-Americans for an I.D. check. The Time/CNN poll found that half of those surveyed favored requiring Arab-Americans as a group to carry federal I.D. cards. (This poll speaks volumes about where we are as a society and why the average uninformed American is dangerous).

Other opponents argue that a national I.D. and the information behind it would only strengthen the power of bureaucracies. And they say it will offer little protection because forgers will inevitably catch up to the technology. Right now, the United States has embarked on what could be considered a national I.D. pilot project - for Mexicans. The Immigration and Naturalization Service has approved four million cards under a new program for short-term, short-range border crossings. The new cards have fingerprint and personal information on an optically etched strip.

Actually, the best hope for proponents of national I.D.'s may be sitting in our wallets. It is the driver's license. The American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators has recommended to Congress that the nation adopt a standard proof of identity for the issuing of licenses. Such a program would cost up $35 million to develop, and up to $20 million a year to operate, the association says. At the same time, it is looking at national standards for drivers' licenses, including some sort of biometric data, like fingerprints and face recognition. (Welfare recipients will have this forced on them and then you will realize that its in the cards for all of us). Right now, 36 states and here in Washington, D.C., have or are planning drivers' licenses with two- dimensional bar codes that can contain 2,000 bytes of information, enough for a driving record, photograph and fingerprint data, said Nathan Root, who directs the association's standards program (So now imagine this: A police officer stops you in your car, scans your license, matches your fingerprint with a central database and has immediate access to a plethora of information, including whether you are on a terrorist watch list. Yo dawg if you think that law enforcement is abusive now, well you ain't seen nothing yet. Power corrupts but absolute power corrupts absolutely. You think it's a conspiracy theory I challenge you to prove me wrong....Yippie Kai Yai).

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