Going Global With National I.D.

摘要

Guy Herbert, general secretary of NO2ID, an organization opposed to Britain's proposed national ID smart card, is sure the government wants to use the card to track the activities of its citizens. With the card's chip and the fingerprints or other biometrics it stores, government agents could build a voluminous database on citizens, even track their movements. "If governments were prepared to stick to minimal requirements and not store and transmit data, there's no greater objection to this than to an ordinary passport," he says. But Herbert and other opponents of the national ID cards are on the wrong side of the global trend. The United Kingdom is expected to be one of a growing list of countries that have rolled out chip-based national ID cards or are preparing to do so. In Europe alone, Italy, Belgium, Finland and Estonia issue smart cards to citizens, and France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Spain, among others, are laying the groundwork.