From the Drudgereport

Friday, September 28 6:43 AM SGT

White House Will Not Support Push For National ID Card
WASHINGTON, D.C., U.S.A., 2001 SEP 27 (NB) -- By Brian Krebs, Newsbytes.
Bush administration officials say the president will not support calls in Congress for a creating a national identification card to help combat terrorism.

While some lawmakers in Congress have said they'd like to take a fresh look at the issue, White House spokesman Jimmy Orr said President Bush "is not even considering the idea."

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, a number of House and Senate lawmakers have begun dusting off the idea of instituting a national identification card, or adding a biometric identifier such as a fingerprint to all Social Security cards.

The idea is apparently popular with Americans as well. According to a telephone poll of more than 1,200 people interviewed by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, fully 70 percent of the public would favor a law requiring citizens to carry a national ID card at all times.

In a televised interview Wednesday, House Immigration Subcommittee Chairman George Gekas, R-Pa., said his office is constantly receiving inquiries from the public in support of the idea.

There have even been calls for a national ID card from the private sector. In an interview on San Francisco's KPIX-TV last Friday, Oracle Corp. Chairman and CEO Larry Ellison's offered to pony up the software needed to create a national ID system.

"We need a national ID card with our photograph and thumbprint digitized and embedded in the ID card," Ellison told the television station.

U.S. residents' identification and fingerprints would be stored in a database to check against ID cards presented at airports to tighten security in hopes of stopping terrorist attacks.

Yet the idea has met with consistent opposition from consumer and civil liberties groups, who say it would only lead to more racial profiling and would do little to deter terrorist attacks.

"The reality is that ID cards will do very little to stop this sort of stuff, but it will make it much easier to track everybody else for any number of purposes," said Privacy International's David Banisar in an interview with Newsbytes on Tuesday. "In the end, this would simply give legal justification for all kinds of profiling that we've seen so many bad examples of in the past few years."

In an interview with CNN on Wednesday, Gekas said despite the public's interest he sees little appetite in Congress to proceed with hearings on a national ID. Gekas said national identification cards are more subject to fraud than almost any other kind of documentation.

"The fraud elements and the terrorist activities can go beyond the ID card, and it would turn out to be completely useless," he said.