Get an IDea
...cement should still be able to track them down, eventually. Now in the case of a terrorist penetrating the security of a highly populated area such as an airport, as long as they look like this person on their card, the security guard should reasonably assume this person is who they say they are. So now the terrorist is in, he’s gotten past our system’s last practical line of defense. He can now finish his mission. Unlike the bank theft, there is no more defense to the crime. You can retrieve the funds from the thief, but you can’t take back the lives the terrorist has ended. A foolproof identification system could have stopped both acts before they happened. The 9/11 Commission reports, “For terrorists, travel documents are as important as weapons. They must travel clandestinely to meet, train, plan, case targets, and gain access to attack.” The terrorists who took down the four planes on September 11th were rampant travelers before the attack. They flew to Afghanistan to meet with Osama Bin Laden, Pakistan, where they were trained by 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and Malaysia for meetings, yet we still didn’t find any suspicion. If we required biometric passports (ID that includes some sort of biological tie to the person such as a digital retinal scan or fingerprint) for their travel in our country, our intelligence could have kept a better track on these people. Many civil liberties advocates argue that national ID cards would infringe our rights and eventually get out of control by monitoring our every habit. That could be true, but only if it is required to have such a card period and databases are established to monitor such records. What would stop laws from regulating the use of such information? Certainly not our democratic process. Medical records are kept by our health care facilities, but strict laws prevent those records from being seen by anyone not authorized to see them. Even if the use of the national ID were to spread to other areas besides airports and were to bring upon databases of our habits, it would be ridiculous to think that this information would be available to anyone. An essayist by the name of William Sa...