FC: Privacy villain of the week: Sen. Dick Durbin, nat'l ID, and AAMVA

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

Background on AAMVA proposal, from Politech archives:
http://www.politechbot.com/cgi-bin/politech.cgi?name=aamva

-Declan

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Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2002 17:48:47 -0400
From: James Plummer <jplummer () consumeralert org>
Subject: NCP: Privacy Villain of the Week: Sen. Durbin

Privacy Villain of the Week:
Sen. Durbin

Sen. Dick Durbin (D - Ill.) held hearings this week 
<http://www.politechbot.com/p-03408.html> on his bill to standardize state 
drivers' licenses, a bill which would enable the fifty states, and, no 
doubt the federal government to swap, compare, and aggregate personal 
identification information into one large national ID database.  Durbin 
opened the hearings by insisting this was "not a national ID."

The Senate, as those earnest fellows on C-Span2 with beards and doctorates 
often tell us, is the greatest deliberative body in the world, a chamber of 
cooler heads who often function to quell the excess passions of the lower 
house.    Perhaps that is why this space failed to cover a similar bill by 
Rep. James Moran, a bit of a hothead himself 
<http://www.jrnl.net/news/00/May/jrn7150500.html>,  a couple months 
back.  Or perhaps there's just so much privacy villainy afoot and only so 
many weeks a year.

Regardless, the presence of such a bill in the Senate only a few months 
after the unveiling of the prototype by the "trade association" of state 
Motor Vehicle departments, the AAMVA 
<http://nccprivacy.org/handv/011206villain.htm>, is indeed 
troubling.  Durbin's protestations notwithstanding, as the Free Congress 
Foundation's Brad Jansen pointed out 
<http://www.freecongress.org/centers/technology/ccl/020416Statement.htm> 
later in the hearings, "it looks like a national ID, walks like a national 
ID and quacks like a national ID."

Centralizing such sensitive data makes it easier not only for governments 
and crooked government officials to keep track of citizens, but also sets 
up one single database that, once breached (or sold) would prove a virtual 
gold mine for direct marketers, identity fraudsters and every other bane of 
the consumer in between.

And, of course, there is the canard that such an Orwellian scheme would 
"fight terrorism."  An identity card is only as good as the information 
that goes into it  and potential foreign terrorists with fingerprints not 
in any database and a bogus affidavit or utility bill could still get into 
the system.  Or perhaps they could visit a local college campus where 
whizkids who want to hit the bars will undoubtedly have broken any 
"safeguards" within a few months.  It would, as usual, be the law-abiding 
who suffer the greatest loss to privacy.

It is too early to tell if Durbin (who not-so-coincidentally is quite keen 
on federal databases of firearm consumers 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34513-2002Apr11.html> as 
well) will get his ID scheme through the Senate.  But it is not too early 
to say his support of the effort to put even more personal information at 
the disposal of federal databases and DMV workers makes him the Privacy 
Villain of the Week.


The Privacy Villain of the Week and Privacy Hero of the Month are projects 
of the National Consumer Coalition's Privacy Group. For more information on 
the NCC Privacy Group, see www.nccprivacy.org or contact James Plummer at 
202-467-5809 or jplummer () consumeralert org . To access this release 
directly, go to http://nccprivacy.org/handv/020425villain.htm 




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