Date: Thu, 15 Apr 93 16:33:01 EDT
From: "W. K. (Bill) Gorman" <
[email protected]>
Subject: File 2--Clinton Proposes National ID Card
Here is a data pointer you might find of interest.
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[email protected]
Subject--A national ID card - coming soon from the Clinton
administration?
Date--7 Apr 93 18:52:13 GMT
This is a brief synopsis of an article in Section B, page 7, in the
Wednesday, April 7, 1993 San Jose Mercury News. Excerpted without
permission. All typos are mine.
Headline: Big Brother's little sibling: the smart card
Author: Martin Anderson
The article discusses work ongoing in the Clinton administration to
give everyone a "smart card" for personal medical information, to
cut
down on waste, fraud, and abuse in health care.
"But now the smart card idea may have taken an ugly turn.
Recently, Ira Magaziner, a Uria Heepish bureaucrat in charge
of coordinating the development of health care policy for the
Clinton Administration, asserted they want "to create an
integrated system with a card that everyone will get at
birth."
another paragraph:
"The smart card is an open, engraved invitation to a national
identity card. In the early 1980s when I worked in the West
Wing of the White House as President Reagan's domestic policy
adviser I was surprised by the ardent desire of government
bureaucrats, many of them Reagan appointees, for a national
identity card."
Apparently it almost happened.
"The idea of a national identity card, with a new name, has
risen once again from the graveyard of bad policy ideas, more
powerful and virulent than ever. Unless it is stopped quickly
we may live to see the end of privacy in the United States,
all of us tagged like so many fish."
The best part of this article is that it gives phone numbers to
call
to express your opinion, as Clinton has invited the public to do.
I
urge everyone to call, and to spread the word.
(202) 456 - 1414 White House switch board
(202) 456 - 6406 Ira Magaziner's direct line (the person
working
for Clinton on the smart card)
about the author:
"Martin Anderson, a senior adviser on the President's
Economic
Policy Advisory Board during the Reagan administration, is
now
a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. He
wrote this article fore the Scripps Howard News Service."
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