preview

Essay National ID Card

Better Essays

National ID Card

There has been much discussion over the issue of a national ID card. Can it guarantee national security? Can it even improve the current state of security in the US? Is implementation feasible? Is it an invasion of privacy? These are just a few of the questions that surround the issue of a national ID. The scene that the NID evokes in me is from the movies of the forties and fifties. The security officials from some eastern European country move from passenger to passenger in a train demanding “Papers please.” The US citizenry have never been subject to that kind of open scrutiny before and it is disturbing to contemplate the implementation of such a draconian system.

Consideration of a …show more content…

The lab that tested the city water supply detected radioactive contaminants. After two weeks without running water of any kind the city found out that a lab technician hadn’t properly washed the glassware before testing the drinking water sample. The tech. was careless, but what if the error was intentional? The same tech. could “miss read” the bacteria count in the sample and allow contaminated water to be pumped into homes. Under the current system the work to create an identity that would put a terrorist in place to be the careless tech. is not imposable but it takes considerable resources and time. Some of the 9-11 terrorists spent years building just such covers. With the NID system one card is all that is necessary. Corrupt a single card and your testing water in Golden CO.. A single peace of plastic puts you behind the wheel of a tanker hauling sulfuric acid.

The question of whether a card could be corrupted falls into the implementation category, which leads us back to travelers swiping their cards at airport security. For the comparison (between the biometric data collected onsite and the records of the individual) to carry any weight the infrastructure that supports it must be sound. If the biometric data resides on the card itself even with the highest degree of encryption it is as vulnerable as your little brothers piggy bank. The one time tablet encryption is one of the most secure

Get Access