Tony and George talking

[Craig.]

Or at least this time i think they have.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050510/ap_ ... licenses_4
Not quite sure how allowed this is, but i find it amazing how quick this could get through, when you consider our government is struggling to even get the idea approved. Would it be possible in our system to push it through in a simmilar way?

[Hagar]

I'm not convinced that national ID cards would be any use, especially if they're compulsory & we have to pay for them ourselves. If this goes through I'm wondering just how it will affect visitors & tourists. Will they be expected to have ID cards too? It seems to me that the only people likely to be affected by this are the ordinary decent law-abiding citizens.

I don't know how many people realise that the only drivers to be fined for speeding when caught by a Gatso camera are those whose cars are registered. Anyone driving an untaxed or stolen car cannot possibly be traced so they are above the law. I'm afraid this is the problem with the way these people think.

[C]

I have an ID card already with my job, and I agree with Hagar entirely - they could produce gazillions of them for every law abiding citizen in this country but it will do nothing as the people they are trying to target will either get fake cards and leave there genuine ones at home, or just not even bother in the first place.

The only way you could do this reliably would be to insert some electronic "chip" in to every person in or entering this country, which could store accurate details and, without surgery, not be removed. Impractical? Yep...

[TacitBlue]

Thats a scarey thought, Charlie. They would have to kill me to insert any kind of chip like that.

[commoner]

Thats a scarey thought, Charlie. They would have to kill me to insert any kind of chip like that.

....lol...maybe they will give you that choice Tac......."have this chip OR be killed off"........commoner

[ozzy72]

Hmm well over here I have to carry an ID card, and a residency permit at all times. Personally having had to do this for 6 years I'm actually pro-ID card now. If anything should happen to me e.g. hit by a bus they can instantly identify me, inform the Embassy and they have access to my medical data so I can be treated quicker. These are funny plastic coated, holographed things and I quite like them.
Oh and if the police stop me for driving like a maniac (as usual) they can establish that I'm really a foreigner (this means I do the "I no speak Hungarian" routine) and I get away with it

[Hagar]

I never had any objection to the principle of carrying an official ID card. Like most people I have enough information packed in my wallet to enable anyone to find out almost anything they wish to know about me. I'm sure that plenty of people already know far more about me than I do & I'm quite sure that not all of them are entitled to that knowledge.

What I do object to is the idea of me & all law-abiding people being forced to carry one of these things when criminals & illegal immigrants* will obviously find ways round this. As these are the very people most likely to pose a terrorist threat I don't see how going to this vast expense could do the slightest good. Also, when was the last time you heard of a government-funded computer programme costing way over budget actually working?** As usual they're fooling themselves or being fooled by the people most likely to profit from it.

*PS. Depending on whose figures you believe there are 500,000 illegal immigrants in this country. There are another 250,000 failed asylum seekers who should have been sent back to where they came from but have simply disappeared. The government denies these statistics but refuses to publish its own. The truth is that nobody knows how many there are or where they might be. I'm not trying to say that they are all terrorists but it's quite possible that some are. If these people can live here illegally & claim benefit without any problems, how on earth is anyone going to force them to carry a genuine ID card? They will obviously use stolen or forged documents which makes the whole idea completely ridiculous. I sometimes wonder if the geniuses who dream up these schemes live on the same planet as the rest of us.

**PPS. This makes sobering reading. The problem is that they never learn. http://www.smithsrisca.demon.co.uk/HE1itdis.html

[C]

....lol...maybe they will give you that choice Tac......."have this chip OR be killed off"........commoner

Sounds a fair choice to me...

[Hyperion2]

I admittedly didn't click the link, so I could be way off on the concept of the story.

That said, the principle behind non-counterfeiting Social Security cards in the US is that they'd only contain information that the government already has about you.  It would have a magnetic strip on the back.

Sure, only law abiding citizens would have them.  But the flip side to that is if you can't provide it, you're obviously not a law abiding citizen.

SOMETHING needs to be done about the borders.  Los Angeles county hospitalalone spent $740 million in 2004 treating the uninsured, a large majority of which were illegals.  ONE COUNTY!

[Hagar]

I admittedly didn't click the link, so I could be way off on the concept of the story.

I think there are two issues here. The US legislation mentioned in Craig's link is concerned with new drivers licence regulations.

The rules are aimed at stopping illegal immigrants from getting driver's licenses to prevent them from boarding planes or entering protected federal buildings. States will have three years to meet the new standards that include verifying applicants are American citizens or legal residents.

The UK Government is approaching this in a different way & promoting separate ID cards as the answer to terrorism. ID cards are all very well providing unathorised people cannot access confidential information they're not entitled to. As we all know, anything computerised is far from secure & there are ways round all this that the people it's intended to protect us from are very well aware of. This leads to just more inconvenience & invasion of privacy of the ordinary law-abiding individual while the criminals & terrorists stick two fingers up at the law, as they always have done.

[Anti-Societys Snake]

Thats a scarey thought, Charlie. They would have to kill me to insert any kind of chip like that.

well, I see were you are coming from. survalience for servalience's sake is a bad thing. But most people think this type of thing is the "mark of the beast". But do they relize that so many people thought that about social security? I mean, it's just like a serial number.

[TacitBlue]

I know, and for a long time I refused to memorize my SSN because of that. Im not a number. But then I found that your SSN is used for so maney things that I ended up memorizing it anyway. Thats way different than having an RFID chip implanted in your body, people could get your info without you having to tell them, and there is no way you could stop them. Heres a good artical on how it works, and what it could be used for. http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/smart-label.htm. This artical mentions tagging products with it, so you dont have to go through a check out line, and your home computer could communicate with them to let you know when your running out of milk. Also it could be used to track how many people buy this or that and when they throw it away. So if they could do that, potetially they could watch where you go. Thats where it gets scarey.

[Anti-Societys Snake]

that is scary, but it is very possible that isn 50 years that we all look at it the same way as Social Security. This seemed the same way when they first introduced SSN. don't get me worng though, I'm not saying the computer chip isn't bad. aand it's not if we get the chip, it's when.

[TacitBlue]

This is something Ill take a stand on. Ive read to many Orwellian negative-utopia type books to blindly allow something like this to happen. They can deport me or kill me if they want, but Im not getting a chip.

[denishc]

 Do they need an interpretor?