In Britain, we know a few things about the ill thought out mania certain politicians have for identity cards.
Both the Labour government and its Tory predecessor tried at various stages to introduce them, co-opting the issue of the day into their arguments in favour of an ID card scheme. John Major thought the cards could help fight crime, while successive home secretaries in the Blair government have insisted they are necessary to prevent misuse of the NHS and curtail international terrorism.
The lack of a coherent and convincing case means the arguments usually turn into a kind of ID-cards-stop-bad-people mush. If the latest British scheme gets off the ground, the proposed 2012 introduction date would give al-Qaida a seven-year window in which to attack. The anti-terrorism argument is either not believed by the people drawing up the legislation, or it's nonsense.
Things look a little less complicated in Washington, where supporters of national ID cards have solved the problems posed by debate, arguments and a case by packaging up the legislation with a bill on an entirely different matter. Today, senators get to vote on a bill both providing more funds for US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq and establishing a de facto national identity scheme.
The purpose of the bill is to apply a series of nationally based criteria to state-issued driving licences. At present, a state can issue licences to non-citizens for the same reason it issues them to citizens – as proof that the named person has met its required standard of safe driving. The so-called Real ID bill wants the states to also check whether that person is in the US legally. Citizens of states that do not do this will find that their licences no longer have the status of ID for federal buildings and aeroplanes.
The issues are very different to those in Britain - where licences are not used as ID and there is no equivalent of the unusual outrage felt by some on the left at the federal government laying down rules for the states - but some of the same issues of data handling and security emerge.
While some have fretted over the wisdom and usefulness of a British database run by an organisation with the Home Office's undesirable reputation for big IT projects, the US bill asks state motor departments to become the holders and verifiers of larger amounts of personal data with no additional funding.
It is, of course, for the Americans and their representatives to decide, but the attempt to keep driving licences out of the hands of terrorists looks to be as badly thought out as some of the ID proposals in Britain. A worthwhile scheme in either country would need to balance necessity, privacy, civil liberties and proportionality. Legislators should ask what the point is, and whether the likely outcome will match their expectations.
Non-threatening illegal immigrants will suffer most under the bill, the New York Times reports – this may be the point, but it is far removed from providing more funds for US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The paper focuses its coverage on the case of Jorge Medina-González, who came to the US from Guatemala in 1991 to escape poverty and political violence.
Medina, 42, was close to home when two Nutley police officers stopped his Jeep Cherokee because of a broken taillight. They asked for his license and registration, then his social security number. In the few minutes it took them to search a national database in a curbside version of the kind of checks that Congress is about to require nationwide, the American life Medina had built over 13 years began to crumble …
He stood before the police as a taxpaying Nutley homeowner with no criminal record, the father of two US citizens, and a cook at a New York catering company that was sponsoring him for a green card. But the computer search came back with a single message: Immigration authorities, at one point, had ordered him deported. His driver's license became a one-way ticket to immigration jail, where he remains.
