If the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks taught us anything, it's that there are cameras everywhere. When terrorist Mohamed Atta used an ATM, walked through Wal-Mart or moved through airport security, cameras were there, taking pictures.
But the terrorist attacks changed the rules in our increasingly monitored society. It's no longer enough to piece together the crime after the fact. Now, government officials and security experts are looking at additional ways to track people's movements all the time.
This has led to the public debate about whether Americans should carry national identification or "smart" cards a measure that would help authorities identify us at any time.
A California Republican, Rep. Stephen Horn, introduced a bill that seeks to study what the federal government can do to protect U.S. security, including implementing a national identification system. The United Nations has started debating the merits of a system in which everyone in the world would be fingerprinted and registered under a universal identification system.
Even Harvard University professor Alan Dershowitz, one of the country's most vocal liberal voices, has written newspaper editorials and taken to the talk-show circuit in support of a national ID proposal.
Others are not convinced.
"It's the old Soviet Union model," says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center. "If you wanted to travel from Moscow to Minsk, you had to get a bureaucrat in Moscow to approve your travel papers.
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"It's a very interesting thing about privacy. People don't realize just how vital it is until it is taken away. And it will be, quite quickly, if a national ID card were adopted."
Plastic gets personal
Smart cards currently are available for consumers from banking giants such as American Express and Visa. Some hospitals and other health care organizations use them to store patients' medical data.
In the last year, retailers such as Target and Gap also have started handing out versions of smart cards that can keep customer preferences as well as an account that has a certain amount of money.
And a number of government agencies as well as corporations have started using smart cards to verify that employees are who they say they are by using "biometrics" digitally reproduced fingerprints, handprints, voice prints, even retina scans. If the person is a fraud, the card will erase itself.
What makes a card smart, and differentiates it from a typical credit or identification card, is that all the important data are stored on a tiny chip under a fingernail-sized contact plate, inside that piece of plastic.
One day, could we see a card that knows everything about a person a card that could replace all the other cards in a person's wallet, even if the government doesn't mandate it?
"It's feasible to think you could have one card that would have all the personal information you need to carry in your wallet on it," says Michael P. Weekes, who does business development in Global Smart Card Solutions for IBM, which designs operating systems and software for the management of smart cards. He works out of Research Triangle Park in Raleigh, N.C.
"That's technically possible," Weekes says. "But in reality, (industry) is not going to allow it. If I'm a Visa bank, I'm not going to allow you to put your American Express on that."
Sagging support
Last year, 30 million smart cards were sold to providers in the United States, a 30 percent increase from the year before. That puts the total number of smart cards in use in the United States at 50 million to 65 million.
The industry predicts a year-to-year growth rate of 40 percent not including the boon it would experience if the government ends up asking for some kind of national ID program. That deployment would be worth $3 billion to the industry.
But it's unclear whether that will ever happen.
"There are a lot of people talking about ID cards. I don't believe that we are going to see a nationally mandated ID card, nor do I think it would be a good idea," says Donna Farmer, president of the Smart Card Alliance. "The programs that are going to proliferate and be the best accepted are going to be of a voluntary nature."
Polls taken in the first weeks after the White House and Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft started floating the idea of a national ID card suggested that 70 percent of Americans agreed with the idea.
But that number started to drop swiftly as the terrorist attacks faded a bit and privacy advocates mobilized to frame the notion as a Draconian measure of a police state. A similar proposal that ID cards only be imposed on noncitizens generated the same criticisms.
"What people don't quite get about national ID cards is that a national ID card increases the opportunity for someone else to force you to prove who you are," says Rotenberg of the privacy information center. "If you think about it as a general matter, there aren't really many situations where we expect to allow someone to do that to us.
"When you buy something, the merchant wants you to pay for it. Now that's reasonable. We have driver's licenses. We have health-club memberships and video store rental cards," he says. "But we don't have (cards with) sort of an open-ended purpose to be defined later."
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