Phil Brennan, NewsMax.com
Friday, Sept. 28, 2001

The most recent attempt to create a national ID system was contained in the 1996 Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which mandated that the states incorporate information on driver's licenses that would allow them to serve as national ID cards.

Fortunately, this section of the act was invalidated by the Shelby Amendment to the appropriations bill, which in effect strangled the program in its crib.

Any revival of the system would of necessity employ the state driver's license method as the only practical means of implementing a national ID card program. And therein lies the rub – it probably wouldn't work.

Writing in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal, William M. Bulkeley noted the problems with issuing national ID cards using state driver's licenses as the identification credentials.

Here are some of the obstacles to putting such an idea into practice he listed in his article "Hijackers' Passports Highlight Issue of Rampant Fake IDs in U.S."

• Driver's licenses are easy to forge. New technologies, such as color laser printers, have made forging driver's licenses child's play.

• There is no standardization between the 242 different types of state driver's licenses – including old and new designs, special licenses for young drivers, etc.

• Since most airport reservation agents are unfamiliar with out-of-state licenses, forgeries are seldom recognized.

• To work as national IDs, driver's licenses would have to contain either a photo or fingerprints, or both. Going to such a system in a nation of 280 million people would be a bureaucratic and technological nightmare to put into practice, requiring the states to spend two and a half years to replace the driver's licenses of just half their people.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Privacy
War on Terrorism