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05/25/2005 Archived Entry: "Brown's ID essay"

Many thanks to David M. Brown of Laissez-Faire Books for making his essay on national IDs available for free. Click on more for information on how to receive it.

A few years ago I wrote a paper, "Your Papers, Please," about the national identification regime that we're still being pushed toward. Because of a difference of editorial opinion with the think tank that commissioned it, I ended up not publishing the paper with them, although parts have been published elsewhere. I'm now making it freely available to anyone who requests it. It's a 296K pdf file. If you're interested, just send an email to me at LFBEditor [at] Yahoo.com with the message "send NID paper" and I'll zap it over to you. Remember to convert the [at] to an @.

Here is the table of contents:

Introduction...1
A New Balance?...2
Through the Back Door...6
--Trusted Traveler Card...6
--Trusted Driver Card...9
What Is a National ID Card?...12
--A Slippery Slope?...15
Social Insecurity Number...16
--Tagging Persons...17
--Tagging Transactions...18
--Privacy Concerns...19
Data Use, Data Abuse...21
--Private Abuse of Private Data...22
--Public Abuse of Private Data...23
--Public-Private Cooperation...26
--Brave New World...27
Freedom and Authorization...28
--Social Control...29
--Authorizing Movement...30
--Domestic Disturbance...31
National ID Versus National Security...35
Fighting Terrorism...37
--Investigation...37
--National Defense...38
--Self-Defense...38
--Cultural Defense...39
Conclusion...39
Notes...40

I stand by the main judgments of the paper, but obviously a few years of news developments and my own further thinking would require some revision to make the discussion current.