12/10/05 Notes

National ID Card Being Considered? This week, attendees at an Infosecurity conference in New York debated the merits of a national ID card system. Mr. Tom Ridge, the former head of the Homeland Security Department, called them 'inevitable'. He said national security requirements would bring the cards into being.
...Along those lines, did you know that President Bush issued an executive order back in 2004 directing the Homeland Security Department to come up with an identification system that would establish government-wide standards to identify Government employees and contractors, and that once the standard was in place, that the use of the identification would be required to gain physical access to Federal facilities and logical access to Federally controlled information systems.
...Not much to argue with there. We need security, no doubt about it. But we are going further down a road that may take us to a place we didn't want to go and end up at a point of no return. Here's a prediction. The day is coming when no one will be able to access a computer system anywhere without providing identification. Computer terrorism, hacking, viruses, identify theft, online fraud, thievery,etc. all will bring about support for this initiative. All financial transactions will be handled electronically, without the need for people to carry cash or credit cards. This will help reduce crime further, I suppose we will be told, because it should reduce muggings and strongarm robberies since no one will be carrying cash. Incidentally, as you may have guessed, here's the source of that prediction: "And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: and that no man might buy or sell, save he had that mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of is name." Revelation 13: 16,17.
...The apostle John was recording what he saw in a vision. He had no understanding of machinery or computers or the world in which we live. I have read fanciful predictions of how we will all will be wearing some kind of tattoo. People who say that indicate it will somehow be considered by everybody in the world to be a beauty mark. The mainstream opinion from the end times writers I have read is that it will be some sort of chip implanted under the skin so that scanning devices can read it.
...On the other hand, I wonder if what the apostle John saw was people putting their hands into biometric scanners, or holding their heads in front of optical recognition retinal scanners, and he assumed that there was a physical mark, not realizing that there would someday be machines sophisticated enough to positively identify a person by their unique God-given physical attributes. It seems to me that the biometric scanning would be more secure than a chip that could be taken out of one person and put into another.
...Here's a section of the President's above-mentioned Executive Order that details the requirements of the ordered identification system:
"Secure and reliable forms of identification" for purposes of this directive means identification that (a) is issued based on sound criteria for verifying an individual employee's identity; (b) is strongly resistant to identity fraud, tampering, counterfeiting, and terrorist exploitation; (c) can be rapidly authenticated electronically, and (d) is issued only by providers whose reliability has been established by an official accreditation process.
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...Looks to me like that system, once in place could easily be expanded to positively identify everyone else, too?
...If you are interested, here's another link that links to a lot of other sites (and countries) regarding this issue. Apparently it is being debated all around the world.