God Save America

U.S. Officials hope to start issuing the PASS (for People Access Security Service) cards by the end of 2006, to Americans who re-enter the United States from Canada and Mexico. Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff states the PASS ID in not a National ID which many fear will come to happen.

The plan also requires Canadian and Mexican citizens to have passports in order to enter the U.S. Canada and Mexico are protesting this move. Currently only a drivers license or birth certificate is required to prove citizenship.

Critics of the plan fear privacy issues and identity theft. Fox News reports:

A PASS card, which officials estimated will cost half the price of a $97 passport, will include a digital photo of its owner. But the Homeland Security Department anticipates it will hold other biometric information, such as fingerprints or even DNA data, in the future.

Privacy rights experts are keeping a close watch on the plan for fear that personal information could be vulnerable.

"Just like a Social Security number can get copied today, a fingerprint could get copied tomorrow," said Peter Swire, a law professor at Ohio State University and former Clinton administration privacy official. "And it’s real hard to get a new fingerprint."

Addressing concerns about privacy rights, Chertoff said the new cards would do a better job of preventing identity theft than current drivers’ licenses.

"Anybody who thinks that the existing driver’s license is a robust privacy-protected form of ID is delusional," Chertoff said. "It is not. You go back to 9/11 to see that, you can look at your own driver’s licenses. We ought to be moving to something that is more secure."

If our borders were properly secured from day one, that being an ongoing priority, the PASS would not be needed. No one can not help but fear they are the beginning of the feared national ID system that officials wanted to initiate following 9/11.

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