A prominent Harper spoke out this week against the plan to require passports or passport-‘lite’ ID cards for crossing the U.S.-Canada border. That’s Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. 

He is no relation to the Cato Institute’s director of information policy studies, Jim Harper, who spoke out about the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative’s PASS card system two weeks ago. 

The Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI) sounds like a wonderful thing. It’s hard to be against travel. But WHTI is actually about shrinking commerce and travel among the friendly countries in our region.

In the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, Congress pushed the Department of Homeland Security to create an “automated biometric entry and exit data system” for people crossing the borders. A prominent proposal is the PASS card, which stands for People Access Security Service. It is envisioned as a card containing an RFID chip that is to be given to passport holders. The chip would alert the DHS when a person arrives at a border crossing. 

“Pre-positioning” data by sending an electronic signal from 30 or more feet sounds like it would make border crossings go faster. But moving identification data is not what takes time at border crossings — it’s checking to see if the person and the identity information match up. 

An RFID-chipped PASS card would mean that lots more information about American citizens’ movements would be collected. It’s a system not just verifying that travelers are citizens or legal aliens — it’s a system for collecting information about our comings and goings, yet another dimension of our lives revealed to the government to do with as it will.

Congress seems held in thrall by national ID systems. Last week, the House passed a bill to require showing identification cards for voting. And, of course, we already have the REAL ID Act, which by May 2008 will have states issuing drivers’ licenses and ID cards to national standards (sharing driver information nationwide, too) — if states comply. Harper of the Cato Institute testified to a New Mexico legislative committee about that issue last week. The National Conference of State Legislatures reports that compliance with the REAL ID Act will cost $11 billion dollars nationwide.

Identification seems to offer an easy technological quick-fix for ailments like illegal immigration and terrorism. But what most of these schemes would do is further regiment and control law-abiding people while merely inconveninencing criminals, terrorists, and any other threat with a modicum of sophistication and motivation.

My book Identity Crisis has more on this and all other facets of identification.