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Politics : Right Wing Extremist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (20047)	11/15/2001 1:57:43 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 59480

The only way a national ID would make sense would be if there was a foolproof way of cross-checking to make sure that each person in the database was unique Absolutely, there is no point otherwise. Same thing with fingerprints. It takes a long time to get them cross-checked, even by computer. When we're looking at the feasibility of a new system, we need to differentiate the system in operational mode from the start-up and population of the data base, which is a one-time problem, not an ongoing one. With a national ID, the start-up would be much more difficult than the operation. It would require enormous resources. Operationally, the system seems quite feasible. We need to deal with both, of course, but the operational feasibility is more important because the start up is a one-time event. Operationally, we would need to create a record on the event of a person becoming a citizen. That happens two ways. Either they're born a citizen or they're naturalized. There's paperwork associated with each event already. The ID card would be a natural part of that process. Citizens by birth would have to go through the process in more than one phase. I don't imagine that fingerprints or retinal scans of infants would be of lifetime value. Born citizens would need to show up to add those features at some later point in life to finalize their IDs much like teenagers used to have to get draft cards. That could probably be scheduled by the schools. So if it takes a while to cross-check a fingerprint, I don't think it matters. We don't need to produce IDs in real time. 4 to 8 weeks for processing would not be unreasonable. Naturalized citizens would start the process in advance of citizenship and babies, well, it will be a more than a few weeks before they have a pocket big enough to hold the ID card, anyway. <g> Karen