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Democrats Call For 'Permission To Work' National ID Card On Top Of Real ID National Card
A plan by Senate Democratic leaders to reform the nation's immigration laws ran into strong opposition from civil liberties defenders before lawmakers even unveiled it Thursday.Democratic leaders have proposed requiring every worker in the nation to carry a national identification card with biometric information, such as a fingerprint, within the next six years, according to a draft of the measure. The proposal is one of the biggest differences between the newest immigration reform proposal and legislation crafted by late Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). The national ID program would be titled the Believe System, an acronym for Biometric Enrollment, Locally stored Information and Electronic Verification of Employment. It would require all workers across the nation to carry a card with a digital encryption key that would have to match work authorization databases. "The cardholder's identity will be verified by matching the biometric identifier stored within the microprocessing chip on the card to the identifier provided by the cardholder that shall be read by the scanner used by the employer," states the Democratic legislative proposal. The American Civil Liberties Union, a civil liberties defender often aligned with the Democratic Party, wasted no time in blasting the plan. "Creating a biometric national ID will not only be astronomically expensive, it will usher government into the very center of our lives. Every worker in America will need a government permission slip in order to work. And all of this will come with a new federal bureaucracy -- one that combines the worst elements of the DMV and the TSA," said Christopher Calabrese, ACLU legislative counsel. FYI, not a single State was able to implement REAL ID by its deadline, so the deadline has been extended to 2017. 19 States has resolved that they will never participate in REAL ID, and estimated costs of the program already exceed 10 times their original estimates. Thanks to John McCain I find myself agreeing with the ACLU. Gag ... Posted by: Anonymoose 2010-04-30 |
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