Update 2021 : failed in both countries thank goodness, but the Papers, Please! The Identity Project website is still going which is good as these issues remain relevant.
“There are good people with bad papers; and bad people with good papers.”
– Bertolt Brecht
I’m horrified that the USA could be getting compulsory ID cards too. The perpetrators of 9/11 all had valid ID’s .
When I was younger I used to travel to Europe and I hated the way the gendarmes would demand ‘Papiers, papiers!’ to intimidate and hassle foreigners. In a manner only one step removed from the Geheime Staatspolizei.
It’s incredible that the present US Administration wants to make the USA resemble France.
Incidentally, these old stumbleupon pages are often in the interesting links category which you may like to check out
From the site:
What’s Wrong With Showing ID?
What does an ID, any ID, do for security? The honest answer is ‘not much’. If anything, relying on ID for security purposes actually makes things worse: a false sense of security fosters complacency.
Showing ID only affects honest people. If you’re dishonest, you can obtain false documents or steal the identity of an honest person.
If a 19 year-old college student can get a fake ID to drink, why couldn’t a bad person get one, too? And no matter how sophisticated the security embedded into the ID, wouldn’t a well-financed terrorist be able to falsify that, too? The answer to both questions is obviously ‘yes’.