Nominee once argued for national ID cards

yeah, because a card you need to present to travel and eat will keep you safe. nothing to worry about here, move along.

Nominee once argued for national ID cards
[align=left]LA Times | August 22 2005[/align]
By David G. Savage and Henry Weinstein

WASHINGTON - Supreme Court nominee John Roberts made clear in his days as a Reagan administration lawyer that he did not share the traditional conservative fear of the U.S. government creating national identification cards for American citizens.

Rather, when faced with what he called "the real threat to our social fabric posed by uncontrolled immigration," Roberts urged his superiors to switch course and support national ID cards.

"I yield to no one in the area of commitment to individual liberty against the spectre of overreaching central authority, but view such concerns as largely symbolic so far as a national ID card is concerned," he wrote in a memo to White House Counsel Fred Fielding on Oct. 21, 1983.

The memo is among nearly 45,000 pages of files from the Reagan Library that were released by the National Archives last week.

They are probably the last files opened to the Senate and the public before Roberts' confirmation hearing, which starts Sept. 6.

Many of the memos reinforced the view that Roberts, at least as a young lawyer, was strongly conservative.

Others showed him to be an independent thinker who steered clear of conservative dogma and who was capable of suggesting that a prominent Christian fundamentalist to "go soak his head."

On the issue of national ID cards, he said the worries of a police state in the offing were exaggerated badly. And people who yearn for personal privacy were engaging in wishful thinking, he said.

Even if citizens were required to have such a card, it "will not suddenly mean Constitutional protections would evaporate and you could be arbitrarily stopped on the street and asked to produce it," he added.

"We already have, for all intents and purposes, a national identifier -- the Social Security number. ... And I think we can ill afford to cling to symbolism in the face of the real threat to our social fabric by uncontrolled immigration," he said.

Writing in the early 1980s, Roberts raised the issue of ID cards as a means of controlling immigration.

The Supreme Court to which Roberts has been nominated probably will deal with the issue of privacy and identification in the government's response to terrorism.

The Department of Homeland Security has been working on ways quickly to check the identity of people as they move through airports, train terminals or government buildings.

In the future, people might need to have personal identifiers on file with the government in order to fly or to enter certain buildings.

Civil libertarians probably will challenge at least some of these requirements as an infringement on personal privac.