Take eyes off Floridians in national ID debate

We clearly are past the point of no return when Dave Kearns, a Silicon Valley consultant, wonders online in Network World which identity management conference he should attend. If it's November in New York, it must be Digital ID World, which bills itself as "the premier identity technology conference." The first European Personal Digital Identity Summit takes place in London the following week, as Costa Rica University hosts the first Annual Digital Identity and Human Rights Symposium with virtualrights.org, "a project toward a set of human rights anticipating a Global Information Society."

We hope those meetings help stem the potential loss of privacy inherent in proposals such as the "digital birth certificate." As The Post reported, in the latest twist on the national ID debate, defense contractor Northrop Grumman is proposing that Florida combine biometric identifiers such as fingerprint and iris scan with a person's name, birthplace and date, and assign the virtual IDs from birth. In theory, law enforcement could verify identities, while private information would remain confidential unless a person authorizes otherwise. The focus is identity rather than anti-terrorism security, the problems as inevitable as the march of technology.

In their pitch Friday to a technology board in hope of winning a state contract, Grumman and others hope to get ahead of the Real ID Act. The law President Bush recently signed established a national standard under which driver licenses will become virtual national ID cards linked to a state and federal database. Those inevitably will be linked with other databases, so what other personal info will get bound up in the data? That's why Congress was wrong to pass what amounted to a backdoor national ID without any debate on the real issue. In addition to the privacy issues, how can 50 state IDs amount to something that will work nationally?

Beyond the policy questions is that Grumman provided no estimate for a program that could become a costly boondoggle. Despite all the security promises, there are huge technical concerns. The claim that in a single step identity theft will become impossible serves only the contractor, and is just a theory until the next cracking of a code by a hacker, or some human lapse or computer malfunction. Given all the confusion, the board should recommend against experimenting on 16 million Floridians. First identify as many bugs as possible with a few smaller trials.