On ID cards

Robert Love blogs about some regulation that the US government is working on, which would standardize state-issued identification documents such as drivers' licenses. He's mainly concerned with the cards' "lack of real security accompanied by a false belief that it brings us some sort of protection from terrorists and its affront on state's rights and small government."

As I'm living in Belgium, where everyone from the age of 12 has an ID card, and everyone from the age of 15 is required to carry it with them at all times, I find these remarks quite funny. So now your airliner will see a standardized ID card rather than something which may differ from state to state. Oh gosh!.

Compare to changes that are happening over here: the government is migrating away from 'paper' ID cards (plastified ones, really) to digital ones (smartcards). Whereas with the first ones, you have some control over who writes down your ID information, it is impossible to say with a smartcard who simply reads your information from the card, vs who will store the information on their hard disk. To add to the problems, the electronic ID cards don't even carry your home address on them anymore. I find that a much greater problem than the standardization of the layout of documents which, in essense, are in effective use already, today.

Oh well.