Word: cards
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...wouldn't be a national ID card - not really. The Department of Transportation, acting on instructions from Congress, has begun work with states to develop electronically smarter drivers' licenses that can be checked for validity across the country, and that have more than just than that always-awful picture - like a fingerprint or retinal-scan imprint - to match the card to its holder...
...more of a national ID system, a linking of Departments of Motor Vehicles - and the records they keep on you - across state lines, with some extra on-card security measures thrown in. For terrorists on the run (and other criminals, too, but nobody worries about them any more) the plan means that a state trooper in California would be able to pull the records of a driver from Georgia - and be certain that those records were the driver's, and not an innocent lookalike he stole the card from...
...plan, Congress hopes, will be cheaper and easier to implement, and less likely to incur the talk-show ire of civil libertarians and states' rights purists (the same type who squawked in 1908 when the FBI was born). But the approach is mere stealth - 50 different state ID cards all linked together is pretty much the same as one national ID card, just as all those new quarters are still worth 25 cents each, no matter which state is on the back...
...some, the real problem with smarter, more centralized ID cards is that they give bureaucrats a better chance to screw up more of your life when you accidentally get put into the Big Computer as, say, a serial flasher. For others, it's that the federal government can punch a few keys and trace your steps. But they can do that already. (Remember when Ken Starr subpoenaed the list of books Monica Lewinsky bought at a D.C. bookstore with an ordinary credit card?) With a nationalized driver's license/ID card - whether it says "New York State" or "United States...
...course, that could make life easier for you too. What if your state/national ID card was your passport as well as your drivers' license? What if you could do your taxes at an ATM - and then withdraw your refund? Or what if your national ID card was your ATM card, and your credit card, and your HMO card and your work ID and the passkey to your maximum-security apartment, all at once? There's the freedom to continue to come and go as you please, in (relative) anonymity, and there's the freedom to carry a dozen different cards...