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Politics : Homeland Security -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (13)	10/25/2001 7:36:02 AM
From: Snowshoe	Respond to of 827

>>what do you do once people have the ID card?<< I have my own point of view on this, having spent considerable time over the years designing and running computer matches on people at the state and national level. The dirty little secret is that a lot of the data out there is bad. Wrong birth dates, incorrect social security numbers, misspelled names, etc. Some of it deliberate, some it by accident. Theoretically a national ID card might help solve this, if one were required to present it to open a bank account, get a driver's license, start a new job etc, buy an airline ticket, etc. Right now the de facto ID is the driver's license. The people who issue them are concerned with a person's driving ability, not their identification. I personally think we really need the national ID, but I don't think we'll get it now. I expect the support for it will increase if we have more disasters like September 11.

To: Ilaine who wrote (13)	10/25/2001 11:55:36 AM
From: MSI	Respond to of 827

>I don't know if we really have the computer power to compile the fingerprints of everyone in the country We do. I've built profile-matching systems that handle 10,000 trx per second, for small, mobile operations. The larger-scale systems designed for credit card transactions blow that away by several orders of magnitude. Chas Schwab's trading system handles something like 50 million transactions at the open on heavy days. A couple hundred million dollars would do it (which means a couple billion in government-speak) The big problems are bad data, as others have mentioned, and Big Brother fears. Immigration management would improve, since they often either forge papers or ignore them altogether, and its a bigger problem than anyone admits. I may have to pay more for ranch labor if all immigrants get real documentation, but that's life. I don't agree that cheap, illegal immigrant labor is necessary to our economy. That's flat wrong. Regardless of the cost of labor, we have always innovated towards increasing productivity. Leaving aside citizens, immigrants should have a card, regardless of the reason for their entry, whether study, work, or visit.