Posted June 20, 2013
WASHINGTON – A recent column published on CNN.com raises the possibility of a major privacy infringement buried in the many pages of the Senate bipartisan immigration reform bill: Requirements that digitized passport or driver’s license photos be on file with Citizenship and Immigration Services for anyone wanting to work, including U.S. citizens, and be matched against a government-issued photo ID card, using a government-mandated facial recognition device.
Immigrant workers would likely have to get biometric worker identification cards.
Richard Sobel, a privacy and civil liberties expert who is a visiting scholar at Northwestern University’s Buffett Center, wrote in the CNN column that the proposal would “remove the right of citizens to take employment and ‘give’ it back as a privilege only when proper proof is presented and the government agrees. Such systems are inimical to a free society and are costly to the economy and treasury.”
The Supreme Court has ruled that the right to “follow any of the common occupations of life” is an inalienable right. Clearly, the court has said, it is “a large ingredient in the civil liberties of each citizen.”
Sobel explained that that problem with any photo identification program is that it turns the idea of the government operating with the consent of the governed, which imbues the Declaration of Independence, into the government taking the power of consent by its power to confirm or deny people’s identities.
The proposal is reminiscent of the REAL ID Act, which Congress passed in 2005, setting standards for state-issued driver’s licenses and photo ID cards. Most states have refused to participate. The Senate proposal would recreate national photo IDs, and make them mandatory for anyone desiring to get a job.
The measure basically ignores the rejection by most states of a national ID card and uses immigration reform to create a national ID system, lumping together EVerify and REAL ID.
“The idea that the Department of Homeland Security should keep track of people’s photos for any purpose if the people haven’t done anything wrong” is a violation of Americans’ rights, Sobel said in an interview.
“The Fourth Amendment says you are left alone unless there is some probable cause to believe you’re (violating the law),” he said.
The digital photos that would be stored in databases would be available to the Department of Homeland Security to match against databases around the world.
Recent news about IRS and National Security Agency data surveillance show the government’s current reach in compiling and using information about citizens.
The immigration reform proposal’s national ID seems to be a dangerous step along the same path.
RELATED from the Washington Post: State photo-ID databases become trove for police.
Ellen Shearer is co-director of the National Security Journalism Initiative, as well as the William F. Thomas Professor of the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University. She teaches in the school’s Washington Program. Before joining the Medill faculty, she was a senior editor at New York Newsday, a consulting editor at Newhouse News Service, marketing executive at Reuters, and held positions as senior executive, bureau chief and reporter at United Press International.
