Your Papers, Please

A brief, non-comprehensive history of Nat'l ID cards, the U. K. having decided to make non-subject residents carry them.

National ID cards are widely used for identification purposes in many European countries, although they are not used in the Nordic countries. Many people are able to cross Europe's inner borders without passports, if they have valid national ID cards. There have been few problems associated with card use, although there were protests in Greece after European Union officials forced Greeks to drop the religious classification that was part of the ID card system. The situation is very different from that in Latin America, where people have become accustomed to carrying identification papers with them and are less worried about privacy issues. Brazil's card includes a photo, fingerprint, bar-code, both parents' full names, nationality, country of birth and date of birth. These cards are necessary to for almost any economic transaction — Brazil's stores ask for it when consumers make purchases, even when they pay cash.

Yikes, it's the Mark of the Beast: "Ye can neither buy nor sell w/o it!!"

Britain's two prior experiences with national cards have not ended well. Cards were used in World War I in large part to establish the number of young men available for military service, but they were not well liked and were dropped in 1918, said Jon Agar, a science and technology professor at University College London. They were reintroduced in World War II and kept in place until 1952, when a court challenge spurred harsh judicial criticism of the use of the cards in peacetime.

That led Prime Minister Winston Churchill's government to scrap the system. The court challenge stemmed from a routine traffic stop in which a policeman asked the motorist to produce his ID card, Agar said. "That was not the intent of the card," he said. "It was originally for national security and food rationing, not for police using it as a routine form of identification." He predicted Britons will generally accept the new cards until their use becomes compulsory for everyone. That will spur resentment, he said.

But they'll doubtless submit, grumbling all the way.