An effective national ID system would produce substantial cost savings in immigration enforcement, tracking down criminals and missing persons, and preventing crime. There is no violation of privacy rights because identification is only required for public acts, not private acts. There is no requirement to carry an ID card.

Doesn’t this smack of Big Brother watching you? It does have that feel. Nonetheless, I think we are forced into it by the close-knit nature of modern society. Nearly all of us acknowledge the need for birth certificates, driver’s licenses, credit cards, and passports. There is no choice of avoiding a system of identification. The choice is between identification systems that do not work well and a system that does work well.

A biometric identification system is a system that provides identification of a person based upon their physical characteristics. The current methods of biometric identification include written description (height, weight, sex, eye color, race), a photograph (face recognition), fingerprints, retinal scans, and DNA typing. There are other methods and new technology may provide additional biometric identification methods.

The proposed biometric identification system would be established and maintained by the government and used only for purposes established by law. The biometric identifying characteristics would include at minimum a physical description, a photograph and fingerprints. Other biometric data could be included as provided by law to increase the security and reliability of the system.

A person would be required to register under the system and to have their identity verified by the system to (a) enter or leave the United States, (b) obtain a new job with a business or any branch of Government, ( c) obtain a marriage license or divorce, (e) obtain a business license, (f) be a subject of any court proceeding, (g) purchase or rent property, (h) attend school, (i) to travel on an airline, or (g) to receive most government benefits. This excludes, for example, persons who are currently not changing jobs, are self-employed, are retired, or have not started school. Existing Social Security and Medicare recipients would also be exempt. In addition, all those ever convicted of a felony and those who volunteer would be registered.

Registration would only be done by government offices, such as the Post Office and the Passport Office. Use of the system would only be through government offices, with military-style encryption used for database transactions. For example, a person wanting a job would present himself at a Post Office, the government would verify identity and send verification to the employer. The verification would include a photograph.

The system would be used to track down those sought for criminal or civil proceedings, to prevent fraud, to control access to military secrets, and to verify legal status for immigration.

There is no Constitutional guarantee to a right of anonymity. Rights of privacy only extends to acts done in private. It there were a right to remain anonymous in public, then it would be unconstitutional for a witness to a crime to testify against a defendant in court. The defendant’s supposed right to remain anonymous would preclude that. The Supreme court has upheld various cases requiring disclosures of campaign donations. All states have laws requiring the disclosure of corporate ownership. Anonymity is not allowed for any number of licenses and other public purposes, like attending school, getting a visa or passport, or receiving government benefits.

As society becomes more integrated and complex, the advantages of a biometric ID system strongly outweigh the disadvantages. It would effectively solve most problems of illegal immigration and illegal employment, fraud in receiving multiple government benefits, and tracking down deadbeat dads. It would substantially aid in locating criminals. The cost savings would be enormous, and the social benefits in terms of enforcing responsibility for illegal behavior would greatly improve society.

Note that the system does not impose any substantial new requirements for identification. Identification is now required for nearly all the activities listed as uses of the system. You cannot enter the country, fly on an airline, or sign legal documents without some form of identification. What the system does is make identification more efficient and more reliable. Even libertarians agree that the government has a proper function in protecting the country, catching criminals, and enforcing contracts. A libertarian might claim that there should be no government benefits beyond that, but given that there are such benefits, preventing fraud in their use is entirely reasonable.

Biometric identification is superior to ID card systems because ID cards can be faked, and because with biometric identification there is no responsibility to carry around a card. No one need worry about getting into trouble if they forget their card. To reduce the computer burden, the search could be narrowed using the person’s name. However, if a person could or would not give his name, the system would still function by identification using biometrics alone.

I have appended, below, a rough cost estimate for the system. The point of the calculations is not to provide precise numbers, but to show that the system is in the ballpark of feasibility. Its in the $10 billion range. If it were $50 billion it would still be worthwhile. The current Federal Budget is $3.93 trillion. The cost of local law enforcement (police and sheriffs) is over $1 trillion. There would be large offsets from lower costs of fraud, immigration enforcement, and improved efficiency in catching criminals. The net cost to taxpayers of illegal aliens is about $250 billion per year.

Because the benefits outweigh the costs, virtually every advanced country except the US has an identification system. A biometric system is superior to a system depending upon identification cards.

Appendix: Cost Estimate

The US has about 38,000 post offices. There are about 300,000,000 people in the US. Let’s suppose that one identification terminal can be used to serve about 5000 residents. That means that about 60,000 terminals would be needed, about two per post office. Each terminal would need a PC, a fingerprint scanner, and a digital camera, say $3K. That’s $180M. Each post office needs an encryption box, about $10K. That’s $380M. Also, suppose that two employees are trained to run each terminal, with training costing $2K each. That’s $240M. The total for the terminal system is therefore about $800M. There has to be a central database system that holds the records and does fingerprint analysis. Let’s suppose that this costs twice as much as the terminals, $1.6B. This is all a government system, so it will cost three times as much as it ought to. So the total cost will be around $8 billion. The setup costs are not therefore not significant.

Operating costs would include staff operating the terminals of about 60,000 at, say, $75K per year including benefits. That is about $4.5 B per year. Figure roughly 5000 people to run the database operations, so the total recurring cost would be around $5 B per year.

If it takes, say, 15 minutes to enter a person into the system (name, description, photo, fingerprints), that would take the staff of 60,000 about six or eight months to get all the data into the system. The exemptions allow many of the people to postpone or avoid registration. Figure a year or two to get it started.