The smart card is over 25 years old, but despite the maturity of a technology that lets you store your identity on a little piece of plastic, national ID registries remain public anathema. No democracy has successfully made the plunge into building an integrated digital identity. The legacy of failed attempts in Australia and Korea to implement comprehensive national ID programs has left U.S. legislators worried that stateside programs are equally doomed to failure.

A disastrous attempt to implement a national ID system shook the Australian government in 1987, culminating that September with 30,000 protesters surrounding the Parliament buildings. The attempt to introduce the Australia Card—branded by the Australian Privacy Foundation as a harbinger of a totalitarianism in which employment, housing, and financial transactions would be impossible without the card—had initially been widely accepted as a convenience. Roger Clarke, member of the APF and an international privacy expert, confirms, "It took nearly two years to get people to realize the implications of the Australia Card and its potential uses." Faced with an overwhelming 90 percent opposition to the card following the demonstration, the government ditched the program.

Ten years later, history repeated itself when the Korean NGO Task Force rose up to oppose a similar measure. The Korean Electronic National Identification Card, passed into law by the country's legislature in November 1997, would have required all Koreans over 18 to carry an ID card with an embedded chip. The $413 million project would have allowed for comprehensive citizen monitoring. But in early 1998 newly elected president Kim Dae Jung abandoned the effort.

In the United States no recent government has been foolish enough to support a national ID registry publicly; they've chosen instead to fund private research that would achieve the same goal. A driver's license recognition system for point-of-sale identification came under withering scrutiny in February 1999 after public documents indicated Image Data had received $1.46 million from the Secret Service to develop its expanding identity database.

Image Data's TrueID system, based on driver's license records, allowed merchants to prevent identity fraud by comparing a customer's license with a central store of authenticated licenses. Previously praised as a guardian of consumer trust, Image Data suffered from its association with the Secret Service, resulting in a public execution.

How bad was the fallout? "Quite frankly, people are surprised to hear our company is still around," says Lorna Christie, the firm's vice president of public affairs and communications. "But we've turned our strategy around. Participation is voluntary and initial response has been very positive. . . . We've learned our lesson."

With over 1.5 billion credit cards issued worldwide by Visa and MasterCard alone, national ID may ultimately come through smart credit cards. Though both companies steadfastly claim to maintain cardholder confidentiality, the Image Data fiasco raises questions about the true limits of government involvement in public identification.

The recent media outing of the Echelon surveillance network demonstrates the extremes the U.S. government will go to in its effort to keep track of the rest of the world. Makes you wonder what it's up to at home.