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January 14, 2002

This Perfect Day

The road to hell is paved with good intentions

By Joe Celko

Ira Levin, the author of Rosemary's Baby (Random House, 1967) and The Stepford Wives (Random House, 1972), wrote his third novel entitled This Perfect Day in 1970 (Random House). Although many of his books were made into movies, this one wasn't; however, with the recent focus on national security, now would be a good time to cash in on it.

The novel is about a near-future dystopia in which everyone has an identification bracelet that they must constantly pass through scanners. The computers behind the scanners identify the individuals and administer drugs to them through their bracelets. To control population, the leaders determine lifespan and adjust the drug mixes the individuals receive accordingly — a compulsory national health plan.

SMART CARD SURVEILLANCE

Although not to such a spooky extreme, national identification may soon become a reality as many experts are endorsing it since the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks. Security is the main justification for a national identification card. Oracle's Larry Ellison and Sun Microsystems' Scott McNealy have volunteered to help set up the databases behind a smart card system such as the one the U.S. Army is installing for soldiers. A smart card can have enough storage on it to hold biometrics, such as fingerprints, retina prints, and other very hard to counterfeit physical identification data.

Before making a decision, someone in Congress should read IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black (Crown Publishers, 2001), a book that accuses IBM's German operation of making it possible to track Nazi "undesirables" with punch cards. The current smart cards are much, much better than the punch cards the Nazis had.

Smart cards can be read at a distance, without any physical contact. So, the government can regulate interstate commerce by putting scanners on highways and in airports, public buildings, and train and bus terminals. They're much more subtle than those cartoon secret police in trench coats asking, "Papers, citizen?" in the old movies.

To support the national identitification card, the government will need a network that's up all the time and available everywhere, so the authorities can verify your identity. They'll also need laws to put the cards and network in place. As usual, the hardware is behind the paperwork. Attorney General John Ashcroft pushed a 140-page bill through Congress on October 12 so fast that I can't believe any congress member had time to read it, much less understand it. I also wonder how they wrote a bill this complex in such a short time. Maybe it was already written and waiting?

The bill extends Ashcroft's power to fight terrorism in terms so broad that any political group can be targeted — remember the witch hunts for child molesters in the 1980s? McCarthy's Communist hunts in the 1950s? The new witches are terrorists.

FAKE IDS

Putting aside the moral and civil liberties issues, would a national identification card work? Seventeen of the 19 terrorists involved in the Sept. 11th attacks were in the United States on legal visas that wouldn't have been spotted by a national identification card.

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Timothy McVeigh was an American. The only way to spot him would have been to keep a profiler on the national identitification database — data mining the database in real time over all the daily movements and transactions of about 400 million citizens. This process would make the Wal-Mart data warehouse look like a PDA.

If amateurs can crack credit cards, how would a national identification card be safe from professional criminals? A national database would be a hacker's gold mine. What about foreign governments with their own research labs? What about people within our own government?

I don't wish to see future generations of children singing a version of the jump rope song in Ira Levin's novel:

Ellison, Ashcroft, and McNealy
Led us to this perfect day

Joe Celko [71062.1056@compuserve.com] is an independent consultant in Austin, Texas and the author of Joe Celko's SQL for Smarties: Advanced SQL Programming (Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 1999).