[russotto]

Originally posted by tw

The government has everything it needs to track your movements. Your phone bills. You credit cards. You tax deductions and your checks to your preferred poltical party official. The same government can only track you when you use your ID to prove who you are at a given location.

My credit cards show what I want them to show -- I can pay cash for that which I don't want to show.

If I refrain from deducting an expense I don't want the govt to know about (which probably isn't deductable anyway), that's not an issue.

I don't write checks to politicians; I pay them with sacks labeled with a "$", like any sensible person.

And even if I use my ID to prove who I am, they can't track it, because there currently isn't a system in place to do so. The bouncer at Delilah's Den doesn't have to -- and therefore doesn't -- enter my name into the system.

I see no liabilities here. Access to information in all those other databases (including IRS) requires a court order. This is a limitation that rightly should be applied to an NID database. But if you fear government will violate that database without a search warrant, then we better burn down the Treasury, the IRS, the Social Security Administration, and the Veteran's Administration (as was attempted in St Louis) to protect everyone's liberties. They all would be a greater threat to liberties.

The government can and will examine those databases at its leisure, legally (under some anti-drug or anti-terrorism excuse) or clandestinely.

The fear of infrigment of liberty is reasonable IFF one can demonstrate how an NID would infrige on liberty. If you fear that the government will track your movements, then keep that license plate off your car, etc.

That's a good idea, except that not having the license plate makes me more conspicuous than having one. Which is the problem with National ID -- you can't just not have one or not use one, that'll set off flags from here to Washington, D.C.

IOW this fear is really a strawman. For if a NID threatened such a liberty, welll then, that liberty was long gone many decades ago. IOW that fear is not justified.

Or that liberty has already been infringed upon, though not yet totally destroyed.