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Oracle Keeps Pushing ID Card

WASHINGTON -- Oracle still seems to adore the idea of a national ID card.

At a congressional hearing on Friday, a company executive echoed the pro-ID arguments that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison drew fire for popularizing last month.

"By establishing a standard and secure national identifier, we could ensure that any system that chose to use it could effectively share information with other systems that use it," Oracle vice president Tim Hoechst said.

Hoechst told the House Government Reform Committee that even more important than having a national ID card, are the positive "relationships between critical information systems that a standard identifier will enable."

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who also testified, said: "I believe all foreign visitors should be scanned as they enter the country and have their biometric identity recorded on the card."

The Immigration and Naturalization Service already has a voluntary biometric ID system, INSPASS, which is intended to allow its holders to move through border checkpoints quickly. INSPASS has no central database: Fingerprints are stored on smartcards, and fingers and cards are scanned at the border and checked for a match.

But Gingrich said: "I would not institute a national ID card because you do get into civil liberties issues."

Driver's licenses have served as somewhat-standard identification documents, but a national ID card would include at least a few other features: It would likely be tied to a massive database; Americans may be required to carry it at all times; it probably would include biometric information such as fingerprints, DNA data or retinal scans.

After the hearing, the Electronic Privacy Information Center organized a "shred-in" outside the Capitol building where activists destroyed spoof ID cards with handheld shredders.

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Your eyeballs, please: About the only thing Sen. Dianne Feinstein likes more than biometric ID devices are hearings devoted to them.

On Wednesday, the California Democrat used her chairmanship of a key Senate subcommittee to convene a hearing on biometric systems -- but invited only government officials and biometric industry representatives to testify. No critics were permitted to speak.

Nobody has a problem with private firms using biometric identifiers such as a retinal scan or a fingerprint to, say, safeguard sensitive computer labs. But when governments start thinking about embedding biometric information into a national ID card or demanding such information from airline passengers, then it raises privacy issues.

Monte Belger, acting deputy administrator of the FAA, said during Wednesday's hearing that "25 airports are using biometrics, but we would like to extend that to all airports.... There is very little used today of these biometric systems at our nation's airports."

Feinstein has introduced the Visa Entry Reform Act to create a "SmartVisa" card for immigrants, which would include fingerprints, retinal scans or face recognition data.

"If we had biometrics, we could have potentially forestalled the Sept. 11 attacks," Feinstein said.

Michael Kirkpatrick, assistant director in charge of the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Service Division, saw things differently. "There is no sign that biometrics will be a be-all end-all," Kirkpatrick said. "Fingerprints will play a role in identifying someone and enrolling them in the system. To my knowledge, none of the Sept. 11 terrorists were in the FBI's database."