LuisTeodoro.com

At least one senator, Joker Arroyo, is correct about the old proposal to create a national identity card system, which the National Security Council dusted off last Monday supposedly in aid of the anti-terrorism campaign.

Like most other suggestions from the police and the military, the proposal implies that the problem will be solved once another law is passed. We all know that that has never been the case, at least not in the Philippines, where every law and order problem we can think of persists because of our inept, and often corrupt, “law enforcement” agencies—not because of the absence of appropriate laws.

That issue aside, however, the proposal for a national ID system needs to be seriously evaluated and understood beyond security officials’ claims that such a system will make terrorism and other crimes more difficult to commit. Those officials also claim that putting such a system in place will not be overly costly. To fears that its implementation can be abused and is likely to lead to human rights violations, these same officials—and Senate President Franklin Drilon, of all people—say that such fears are “baseless.”

Although none of these officials—and certainly not President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, who has become the latest proponent of a system whose value in law enforcement is at least questionable—has laid out the specifics of the system, we can presume that it will consist of at least four components, because, for any such system to work, it should.

An actual card is the first. The second is a system of card verification. The third is an identity verification system. The fourth is a national database.

What is evident from what police and other security officials have so far said is that they place a lot of value on the card, which every citizen, under the system they propose, will have to carry on his or her person at all times. And yet the card itself is meaningless without the other three components.

It is obvious that before a citizen is issued a card, his identity will have to be verified: some means will have to be devised to determine whether he or she is indeed who he or she claims to be. This requires a system of identity verification of doubtless integrity. In a country, however, where birth, marriage and other certificates are almost routinely forged, this will require putting in place fail-safe systems to assure that Juan is indeed Juan and not his father Pedro.

Assuming this problem can be solved and that, say, the National Statistics Office can provide a means of identity verification based on authentic personal documents of all 78 million Filipinos (or at least the adults among them), the next step would be to enter into a national database the information contained in the ID card. Such a database will cost billions to put in place (and incidentally earn those in the computing business a windfall in government contracts that’s likely to be accompanied with the usual charges that the contracts are “disadvantageous to the government”).

Presumably the database will contain only basic demographic information such as birth date, as well as height, weight, address, and so on, and not the bearer’s political convictions. This means that, as a means of tracking terrorists, the database would be useless—unless our security officials are saying that the cards will contain the bearer’s dossier from the intelligence services, which no card can contain. On the other hand, to say that the card can track terrorists is to suggest that the card will identify them as such, which raises questions of due process and other issues.

If indeed the cards will contain the usual personal information, they must be “read” somehow. Reading the cards and verifying them will require another, even more expensive system that will have to be put in place in every public place that one can think of. The cards are of no value if a policeman, for example, will be limited to checking if a person who wants to get into an airport has one. He will have to have a means of verifying card authenticity as well as the information in the card—which means putting card verification technologies in airports, bus terminals, piers, etc.

Obviously there will have to be a system of checkpoints where citizens can be stopped and asked to produce their cards. Our experience shows that the country’s unprofessional, badly trained and abusive police find checkpoints particularly exhilarating as venues to exercise their fascination with power.

This is where in fact the possibilities for abuse are pronounced, not only in terms of policemen’s harassing citizens, but also in identifying whom to harass. The usual victims are of course the apparently poor and powerless, with the police likely to single out pedestrians rather than motorists, or, among motorists, those driving Toyotas rather than Mercedes Benzes or Jaguars.

Having stopped someone at a checkpoint, of course, the question is still whether the police can verify the ID cards. In the absence of the means to do so, the most they can do is to detain those without cards while letting go those who have them, but who may not necessarily be who the cards say they are.

Any card, no matter how sophisticated, can be forged, as our own Filipino passport forgers have demonstrated so well. It’s an inept terrorist and criminal who will fail to somehow obtain an ID card once the system is in place—and it is likely that once it is, an entire industry a la passport and currency forging will come into being in this country, where, despite its seeming backwardness, there is no lack of high-tech wizardry. The possibility is in fact strong that the more astute criminals among the population can obtain multiple identities through forged cards—all of which would identify them as respectable law-abiding citizens. This would have the exact opposite effect of lulling the policed and military into a false sense of security that the person they just allowed access to an airport is no terrorist.

But note that we’re talking about a national ID system for citizens. Given the international character of the terrorist networks—a fact that’s been amply demonstrated by the capture of alleged al-Qaeda operatives from other countries in the Philippines as well as by the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in the United States—how will that system address the need to identify foreign terrorists unless we require every foreigner entering the country to have a Philippine ID in addition to his passport?

That would of course be absurd, not only because it’s impossible to do so quickly and efficiently, but also because it would conflict with the country’s proclaimed drive to attract foreign tourists.

The alternative as far as foreigners is concerned is some form of racial profiling: i.e., singling out those who look Arab or Middle Eastern for questioning and identity verification. Aside from being racist, the problem with this approach, which the United States is implementing, is that the average policeman is not likely to distinguish between a turban wearing Sikh and an Arab in a coat and tie. (And it’s not only Filipinos who wouldn’t know an Arab from a Sikh. In Canada a few months ago, Philippine film director Joel Lamangan was strip-searched, apparently because some airport checker thought he looked Middle Eastern.) Of course this approach requires no ID card system at all, only a touch of xenophobia.

Which means that the national ID card system being proposed will primarily be used to identify and track Filipino citizens. Among those 78 million souls, however, there are, at the most—and this is an extremely generous estimate—probably less than one percent of one percent of one percent who qualify as “terrorists.” Identifying them from the millions of Filipinos who just want to get on with their lives will not be achieved by any ID system but by police work that goes beyond beating confessions out of suspects, and intelligence of some intelligence.

As it is, one can see right through the reasons for security officials’ enthusiastic endorsement of this proposal. It’s a way for them to get out of having to do better at their jobs, as well as a way for them to exercise the enhanced power that the Arroyo government—itself a devotee of the quick fix approach to complex problems—has endowed them with. The least it will do is stop criminals and terrorists.

(ABS-CBNNEWS.COM, October 16, 2002)

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