Its so we can catch the terrorist and criminals.. dont worry

[Cail]

The right to privacy is a construct, it was absolutely not the intent of the framers of the Constitution as it was not specifically protected, as the rights to speech, assembly, and religion were.

[Rawedge Rim]

how is anyone anonymous anymore? you need id for everything.

You still have some measure of anonymousness (is that a word?). I can not bring my licence with me and for the most part I would be able to move and do business within society with little problem. With Biometrics and a database you could, and in the future probably would, be identified everywhere you go. You enter any door and it reads your palmprint. You walk under a biometric scanner somewhere and it records that you were there. You go to a protest of some sort and they put up scanners to record that you were there. It wont surprise me if one day they want to RFID everyone at birth. This destroys the very basis of having any right to privacy.

While I agree with you that the traditional idea of privacy is going the way of the 8track, I don't see much of a solution for it.

Many want the government to safeguard them, and to keep their existance risk free, and if the government does not come through, they reserve the right to sue the crap out of government for failing to do so. The Government is also asked to take care of people medically and financially, all without any fraud, or mistakes. And if the Government fails, again it gets the crap sued out of it. (same with business)

So what does the goverment do, it puts in safeguards to protect itself, and one of those is ID's, and Imformation. The more information the Government has, the better able (in theory) it is to perform the somewhat impossible functions of making sure that it's citizens have a stress free life.

Put it another way, the government it doing this, because a sufficient amount of people are demanding it of them.

You can remain anymous, but you can't remain so and still demand that the government meet your every whim.

[The Laughing Man]

The U. S. Constitution contains no express right to privacy. The Bill of Rights, however, reflects the concern of James Madison and other framers for protecting specific aspects of privacy, such as the privacy of beliefs (1st Amendment), privacy of the home against demands that it be used to house soldiers (3rd Amendment), privacy of the person and possessions as against unreasonable searches (4th Amendment), and the 5th Amendment's privilege against self-incrimination, which provides protection for the privacy of personal information. In addition, the Ninth Amendment states that the "enumeration of certain rights" in the Bill of Rights "shall not be construed to deny or disparage other rights retained by the people." The meaning of the Ninth Amendment is elusive, but some persons (including Justice Goldberg in his Griswold concurrence) have interpreted the Ninth Amendment as justification for broadly reading the Bill of Rights to protect privacy in ways not specifically provided in the first eight amendments.


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