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Howard Dean's 'smart ID' plan

Declan McCullagh | January 26, 2004 1:18 PM PST

Summary

Howard Dean called for state driver's licenses to become a standardized ID card for Americans. The card could even be used as a key to unlock a PC.

Topics

Declan McCullagh, Technology News
COMMENTARY--After Howard Dean's unexpected defeat last week in Iowa, public attentionhas focused on his temper, his character, and that gutturalTyrannosaurus bellow of his not-quite-a-concession speech.But Dean's views on Americans' privacy rights may be a superior test ofhis fitness to be president.

Dean's current stand on privacy appears to leave little wiggleroom: His campaign platform pledges unwavering support for "theconstitutional principles of equality, liberty and privacy."

Fifteen months before Dean said he would seek the presidency, however, the former Vermont governor spoke at a conference in Pittsburgh co-sponsored bysmart-card firm WaveSystems where he called for state drivers' licenses to betransformed into a kind of standardized nationalID card for Americans. Embedding smart cards into uniform IDswas necessary to thwart "cyberterrorism" and identity theft, Deanclaimed. "We must move to smarter license cards that carry securedigital information that can be universally read at vital checkpoints,"Dean said in March 2002, according to a copy of his prepared remarks."Issuing such a card would have little effect on the privacy ofAmericans."

Dean also suggested that computer makers such as Apple Computer, Dell, Gateway and Sony should be required to include an ID card reader in PCs--and Americans would have to insert their uniform IDs into the reader before they could log on. "One state's smart-card driver's license must be identifiable by another state's card reader," Dean said. "It must also be easily commercialized by the private sector and included in all PCs over time--making the Internet safer and more secure."

The presidential hopeful offered few details about his radical proposal.
The presidential hopeful offered few details about his radical proposal."On the Internet, this card will confirm all the information required togain access to a state (government) network--while also barring anyonewho isn't legal age from entering an adult chat room, making theInternet safer for our children, or prevent adults from entering achildren's chat room and preying on our kids...Many new computersystems are being created with card reader technology. Older computerscan add this feature for very little money," Dean said.

There's probably a good reason why Dean spoke so vaguely: It's unclearhow such a system would work in practice. Must Internet cafes includeuniform ID card readers on public computers? Would existing computershave to be retrofitted? Would tourists be prohibited from bringinglaptops unless they sported uniform ID readers? What about Unix shellaccounts? How did a politician who is said to be Internet-savvy concoct this scheme?

Perhaps most importantly, does Dean still want to forcibly implant allof our computers with uniform ID readers?

Unfortunately, Dean's presidential campaign won't answer any of thosequestions. I've tried six times since Jan. 16 to get a response, and allthe press office will say is they've "forwarded it on to our policyfolks." And the policy shop isn't talking.

Then there are the privacy questions. To curry favor among theprogressive types who form the backbone of his campaign, Dean haspositioned himself as a left-of-center civil libertarian. He'sguest-blogged for progressive doyen Larry Lessig, embraced the Brady Billand affirmative action, told audiences on the campaign trail that theBush administration has "compromisedour freedoms in the name of fighting terrorism," and pledged to repealparts of the USA Patriot Act.

It's difficult to reconcile Dean's current statements with his recentsupport--less than two years ago--for what amounts to a national ID cardand a likely reduction in Americans' privacy. "Privacy is the new urbanmyth," Dean said in that March 2002 speech.

I know of no other Democratic candidate who has this view on nationalID.
Chris Hoofnagle,
Electronic Privacy InformationCenter
"I know of no other Democratic candidate who has this view on nationalID," said Chris Hoofnagle, associate director of the Electronic Privacy InformationCenter. "I hope that he'd reconsider his policy on nationalID because it has significant affects on individuals' right to privacyand does not make the country more secure. If you think about it, theimplication is that children would have to be issued cards as well. Arewe talking about ID cards from birth?"

Dean's March 2002 speech to a workshop at Carnegie Mellon University--given just six months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks--wasdesigned to throw his support behind a standard ID proposal backed by the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA). Atthe time, Dean was chairman of the National Governors Association, a keyally for the AAMVA as it lobbied to transform the humble state driver'slicense into a uniform national ID card.

"I'm not surprised," said BarrySteinhardt, director of the technology and liberty programat the American Civil LibertiesUnion and a former Vermont resident. "It's a backdoornational ID. It won't even work to protect against terrorism because weknow that some of the 9-11 terrorists had phony driver's licenses thatthey were able to buy on the black market."

It's true that most American adults already carry around driver'slicenses. But the AAMVA proposal would have mandated biometricidentifiers such as digitized fingerprints or retinal scans. Dependingon how the system was implemented, your license could be equipped with asmart card (which Dean suggested) that could store information about yourmovements whenever it was swiped in a reader. It could also be tied to aback-end database so all verifications would be logged with the time,date and location.

The idea never gained traction in Congress because of privacy concerns and opposition not only from conservativeactivists, but from Democratic-leaning groups including People for theAmerican Way, National Consumers League, and National Council of LaRaza.

One prominent group that did support a standardized ID at the time isthe New Democrats' public policy wing, which has suggested that microchip-implantedsmart cards could hold not only retinal scans or fingerprints but also"food stamps, voter registration, library cards, hunting and fishinglicenses" and a wealth of corporate data like E-Z-Pass, gas stationautomatic billing, and banking information. In one of history's ironicflourishes, Dean lashed out at the New Democrats last month in Exeter,N.H., dubbing them "the Republican wing of the Democratic Party."

It's possible that Dean has a good explanation for his uniform ID cardviews, and can account for how his principles apparently changed soradically over the course of just two years. Perhaps he can't. But arefusal to answer difficult questions is not an attractive quality ina man who would be president.

biography
Declan McCullagh is CNET News.com's Washington, D.C., correspondent. He chronicles the busy intersection between technology and politics. Before that, he worked for several years as Washington bureau chief for Wired News. He has also worked as a reporter for The Netly News, Time magazine and HotWired.

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