Individual rights being stolen down under...

Go ahead, read the article.

Yes, the blokes down there are going to make people carry around a national ID card. It stores your personal information, and can be accessed by "government officials" only. Right...

Anyone who knows anything about technology is that no matter how good the security experts get, there's always people on the other side who are a few steps ahead. Imagine that a person could walk down the street in Syndey, with some sort of RFID system, and read all the information on those cards. The article said that people could store additional information on the cards, if they wanted to. So, if someone has their SSN (AU equivalent), credit card numbers, address, etc on that card, this person walking down the block has it all, and you wouldn't know until you'd been hit. This is besides the fact that the central government is now requiring people to carry these. Could a police officer driving down the road have a scanner set up that warns him when a person driving next to them has a spotty driving record, automatically? Would that person then be scrutinized more than the other people on the road? I think so...

Peter Hendy, in the article, states that the card will help to crack down on welfare fraud. Sorry buddy, but the only way to crack down on welfare fraud is to get rid of welfare. Period. People will always find a way to get free money. Hell, imagine when someone does figure out how to access the card and change the data...could they continuously change the name and identity on the card, allowing them to access other people's social security, pension, or welfare payments?

I can just imagine the Democrats in this country calling for a national ID system...how terrible would that be? I'm all for improving identification technology, and making it harder to forge. The newer New Jersey driver's licenses are pretty damn cool. NJ used to just have paper licenses that were laminated, with no seals or official imprints. The new cards are plastic and much harder to forge. I didn't know it until last week, but they actually have a blacklight refective hologram on the upper right corner. That is the kind of stuff the governments should be doing to stop fraud (besides the aforementioned abolition of welfare and government payouts), not requiring national ID cards. But, I digress...