Tuesday, March 09, 2010

Oh, HELL No!

Real ID 2.0, anyone?
Lawmakers working to craft a new comprehensive immigration bill have settled on a way to prevent employers from hiring illegal immigrants: a national biometric identification card all American workers would eventually be required to obtain.
Can you think of a better way to unite large numbers of conservatives and liberals than this? I mean, Real ID has states passing laws making it illegal for state agencies to comply with parts of the RealID Act. Why?
Under the potentially controversial plan still taking shape in the Senate, all legal U.S. workers, including citizens and immigrants, would be issued an ID card with embedded information, such as fingerprints, to tie the card to the worker.
Potentially controversial? What planet were they living on when Real ID was being debated? Do they really think Americans have changed enough that quickly for this to not stir up a rain of fecal matter?

Also, unless there's a central database that the information is checked against every time the card is read, I predict it will take less than six months for criminals to crack the code on the cards and start making fakes that read with biometrics matching whoever they decide to give the card to. Less than a year to spoof it, if there is a database (unless some .gov idiot leaks the whole bloody database on a 'lost' laptop, sooner).
"It is fundamentally a massive invasion of people's privacy," said Chris Calabrese, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. "We're not only talking about fingerprinting every American, treating ordinary Americans like criminals in order to work. We're also talking about a card that would quickly spread from work to voting to travel to pretty much every aspect of American life that requires identification."
Exactly. Just like social security numbers were only supposed to be used for Social Security purposes. It will spread to everything.

(h/t A Conservative Shemale)

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