“Big Brother is watching you.”
George Orwell (“1984”)
Health care reform and illegal immigration have become high-visibility social issues during the past two years. Moreover, even beltway pols have realized these issues are not going to be solved through the types of simplistic programs so frequently enacted but so rarely effective.
Yet, buried in their complex maze of solutions are a series of seemingly benign proposals which, if enacted, threaten to further undermine the rights to privacy to which all Americans should be entitled.
First, let’s travel back almost sixty years, to 1935. In that year, legislation creating the federal social security system was enacted. To administer the system, a nine-digit number was established for each covered worker.
With one eye on the their constitutional liberties and another on the clouds of repression descending over Nazi Germany, civil libertarians agitated vociferously against mandating American citizens be issued any form of national identity number or card. To appease these “troublemakers” and to quiet any fears their campaign may have awakened, the legislation prohibited the use of an individual’s social security number for any purposes other than administering the program.
However, today one’s social security number is affixed to an ever widening array of otherwise discrete aspects of their personal lives. Tax returns, military I.D.s, employment records, bank accounts, stock purchases, real estate transactions, and (unless one openly fights the system) driver’s licenses, medical histories, credit card files, blood donation records, credit reports and even some library cards are coded with an individual’s social security number.
During the past several decades, advances in data processing and tele-communications have enabled governmental entities, businesses and even private citizens to access, assemble and store massive amounts of personal data from widely disparate sources on the private lives of Americans, with ever increasing ease. Yet, the validity of the assembled data, subjective conclusions drawn from its cumulative nature and unauthorized redistribution remain beyond the control of the persons who are affected.
Calls to restrict such activities continue to fall on deaf ears. When questioned about this threat, government and business apologists are quick offer something akin to, “Trust me!”
Now, our increasingly paternalistic government has decided to take the concept of individual identity numbers and cards to new plateaus of intrusion … with potentially frightening consequences.
Leading the pack is Bill Clinton as he hawks his proposal to issue every American a national health card, complete with their social security number. In his brave new world, these “smart” cards would carry an individual’s entire medical history which could be updated as people visit their government-approved providers.
Meanwhile, the Commission on Immigration Reform has proposed all U.S. citizens and legal immigrants be issued the equivalent of a national I.D. card, complete with photo and social security number. Commission director Susan Martin’s assurance, “workers would not have to carry them at all times”, provides little comfort.
The day isn’t far off when some clever government bureaucrat is apt to come up with the bright idea … why carry two or more I.D. cards when one will do.
At that point, each citizen’s entire life will be reduced onto a single, fingernail-sized computer chip; the contents of which will potentially become an open book each time such a card is presented and run through some scanner.
Abuses will be inevitable and with them the terrifying prospect an individual’s life history, medical and other records, and personal assets can be electronically altered or even deleted. Potentially, a hacker with access could prove you don’t exist!
Our government has slowly but consciously desensitized its citizens from resisting its erosions of their individual privacy rights. Its bureaucratic minions have honed their justifications for these actions under the guise of improving administrative efficiencies, assisting those tasked with maintaining law and order, permitting it to take better care of its people and saving money.
In the process, most Americans have lost will to fight the inexorable governmental intrusion into the rights of individuals to build and maintain an inviolate wall of privacy around themselves. Rather, they have become lemmings following a pied piper toward a goal of requiring every man, woman and child in America to carry an identity/information card.
Time has become short for Americans to call a halt to this unnecessary and dangerous intrusion into their private lives. If they fail to actively resist now … we will ultimately find ourselves held hostage by the information bureaucrats of the 21st century; not to mention the thieves who will eventually steal such information.
