Did WaPo's editorial board just get served... again?

BTC -- The Washington Post, another battered news organization, finally allowed a little mic time to the anti-National ID narrative from Cato fellow and Real ID Flogger, Jim Harper.  He did what we could not.  More recent "gloss" here.

The dangers of a national ID card

The Feb. 3 editorial calling for a national ID card “with effective safeguards for privacy and against government prying” fails to address the most important question. One only has to look at the history of the Social Security number to know that there is no effective safeguard against government identification protocols being put to an ever-growing array of uses. 

To find concerns with a national identification system “hollow,” the editorial board ignored important lessons of history. The uses made of the Rwandan ID card, apartheid South Africa’s internal passport, the Soviet propiska and other national ID systems in the past century are not hollow examples. Indeed, they are more flesh-and-blood than many people would like to consider. 

Our recent history doesn’t suggest that national ID cards would be put to the worst of uses, but the future is uncertain. An important part of maintaining our essential freedom in this nation is declining to build the technical and social systems that could be freedom’s undoing. Even if federal background checks controlling immigration could be perfected, seeing such a system expanded to monitor and control U.S. citizens is not a price worth paying. 

Jim Harper, Washington

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CEI's, David Bier's follow up OpEd, National ID Proponents Bad Arguments, treats the Washington Post's editorial crews to one last trip to the woodshed.

This is followed by Singularity Fellow, Tarun Wadwha, who is just the nicest guy ever who would want to assimilate us into a global transhumanist ideal.  

Some of the largest inefficiencies in our systems occur because information stored in different government databases is not being shared properly.  With the plummeting cost of storing and transmitting data, sharing information has become much more practical.  Biometric identification is also helping counties to automatically weed through the fake, duplicate, and fraudulent entries with a speed and precision not before possible.  US-VISIT, the Department of Homeland Security’s biometric entry program, has also shown how this technology can scale and be effective in every day usage.

We got "called out" by Forbes mods for posting a rational argument against Tarun's Singularity school proposals, based on India's recent rejection of a National Counter Terrorism Center,  posted here. 

US-VIST failed in Texas and only recently passed their study and reserach inspections.  However, DHS has already given a sneak preview of what's to come. In transport mandate-for-work, TWIC, one can only really expect more incompetent indifference towards consumer use of these programs. If CIR's biometric proposals are allowed to run their course in E-Verify, there is no track record to aquit them except a wave of unemployed able workers mired in a bureaucratic morass.