National I. D. Cards

The concept of national I.D. cards and whether the U.S. should have them or not is debated. This issue is discussed in “Should the U.S. Have a National ID Card?” that was in The New York Times Upfront magazine by Bill Keller and Jim Harper. Both authors give their argument on their side, but Bill Keller has a stronger structured argument than Jim Harper. Jim Harper defends that the U.S. should not have national ID card protecting citizens’ privacy. He says that people might have to use the cards to scan for public transportation, to enter a school, an office building or even to go online. By scanning the card for all these different reasons governments and corporations would be able to collect more and more information about everyone. Harper …show more content…
He concludes that to stay a free country no matter what the U.S. needs to avoid having a national ID card for as long possible. Harper is the author of Identity Crisis: How Identity is Overused and Misunderstood and he works for the Cato Institute. He is also one founding member of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory committee (CatoInstitute). His previous work with the security of everyone’s privacy gives him and ethical appeal. In the first paragraph when he uses the phrase “effectively killing it” he shows his position that he agrees with what happened and was glad that the law did not go through and that the states refused it. Showing the word choice impacts the reader on the negativity of the phrase how he could have said it did not go through but he chooses to say they killed it to show that it was the right thing. He does not state a counter claim besides the first sentence where he says advocates made headway to only be shut down by the states then goes on through the rest of the piece to describe the reasons the national ID card should be avoided. He did not accuracy depict why the states did not believe that …show more content…
should have a national ID card. He says that it is time for the citizens of the United States to master their anxieties about a national ID card. The ID card would be a reliable way for employers to check the legal status of perspective. With the card, just by scanning the card they can tell their eligibility and match them to the card to make sure it is the correct person. The information on the card would also be safe by including information that only the owner has or knows. There could be a chip in the card that has the person’s finger print so that it would be useless to a thief. The information would also not need to be in a database because it is on the person’s card. Keller concludes that Americans need to get a national ID