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Thursday, October 24, 2002
EDITORIAL: Why the national ID system won't work
THE Arroyo administration is at it again.
Last week, as series of bombings rocked several cities in the country, security advisers of President Arroyo again pushed for the immediate passage of a bill establishing the national identification (ID) system.
They claimed this would be a strong deterrent to terrorist attacks.
Proponents of the national ID system said major Western countries have their respective national identification system and nobody is raising a howl over it.
These advisers are half-correct, probably.
Only, they failed to cite that most of these Western countries are actually welfare states.
Anybody who does not have a job receives welfare coupons from these governments by just showing his ID and proving he does not have a job.
Here in the Philippines, where probably over one-tenth of the population does not have birth certificates and where unemployment could run to double digits, the system is simply inappropriate.
In a country where deficit could run as high as 20 per cent of the national budget, spending for the IDs and additional personnel - notwithstanding the bureaucracy attendant to the system - is courting financial disaster.
Are the advisers of the Arroyo administration now admitting that the intelligence community is so inept, it has to pry open the wallets and bags of every Filipino citizen just to prove they are no terrorists?
Is the Arroyo administration now so isolated from the Filipino people that she could not trust anybody?
What will they do with people who do not have IDs? Fine them? Imprison them? Banish them to the asylum?
Mercy!
Local officials, who felt their political domain are threatened with these attacks, may have found an ally in the president.
But they should not lose sight and bearing to the fact that no amount of police state idiosyncrasy and paranoia will deter terrorists from attacking anywhere they wanted.
For as long as government officials touch ground with their constituents and have faith in the police, they will not have to worry about these terrorists.
The last thing we wanted is a knee-jerk reaction from government officials who will make use of the ID system to insulate themselves from their ineptitude. |
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