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This is NOT radical right-wing paranoia. Most of the elements of the new
proposed national ID system are already in place NOW. The next step is for
all information to be coordinated and completely accessible to any and all
bureaucrats for their arbitrary and capricious abuse.
The national ID card itself (which you will be required to carry) will have
a magnetic strip (or chip) which is imbedded in it. That means YOU (when you
have your mandated national ID card on your person) could be tracked
wherever you go. Privacy will be an anachronism.
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Other cards that have magnetic strips: credit cards, ATM cards, hotel keys,
appt keys, et al. The magnetic strips can't be used to somehow follow your
movements. But the author of the article seems more interested in propogating
a juvenile kind of paranoia than paying much attention to the benefits of such
a system or to the fact that the system really doesn't add any new powers to
the government but only makes the government more efficient. In any immensely
large and complex society such as ours a standardized identification system
makes perfect sense. And the presence of it simply has nothing to do with
government encroachment of anyone's rights. It DOES have to do with making
the government more efficient. The place to protect rights, however, is in
the courts and the legislatures, and NOT upon the assumption of governmental
inefficiency in enforcing its laws.
Andrew