Welcome, I'm Anastasia Glova bringing you the Cato Daily Podcast.

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After the attacks on September 11, there has been much talk about a national ID card

and better identification measures to protect against future attacks.

But do such measures constitute an invasion of privacy and civil liberties?

In his new book, identity crisis, Jim Harper argues against the push for stricter

identification techniques.

Jim, could you explain how a better identification system is meant to protect Americans?

A lot of people believe that checking identification makes them more safe,

and I think it's true in general that knowing who people are makes them less of a security risk to you.

If you know the person that you buy a car from and the car breaks down, you can go back to them and ask for your money back.

Anybody who you know you can enforce the law against.

But this isn't always the case and in fact terrorists who can't be held to account

after they've killed themselves,

won't respond to the kind of pressure

that identification usually has on people.

Another theory behind identification checking

is that we can check people entering specific areas like airport

concourses against watch lists so that the practice of creating watch lists and then creating

checkpoints is arguably a security method.

However, the practice is so imperfect and so easy to defeat that the margin of security provides is probably very small.

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