We Need A National Identity Card

Why do so many people get upset at the idea of a national I.D. program?
If you are willing to commit a felony, you can acquire a birth certificate (not your own) fill out the passport application, send it in with the birth certificate (and some money) and in a few weeks you will receive a U.S. Passport in the name of your new identity. You can do something similar for a drivers license or an state identity card.

For some reason, our governments has never passed laws requiring that birth records and death records be matched up. Just doing that would keep a lot of identity fraud from occurring. Wouldn't it be nice to know that the man who just applied for a passport died three years ago?

I suppose the government is treating this problem the same way they treated the problem of counterfeit currency. In the fake money fix, they simply hired more Secret Service Agents to track down the counterfeiters. The idea was to let people counterfeit and then try and catch them. It's cheaper to do it that way instead of redesigning the currency to make it harder too counterfeit. (Which they ended up doing anyway).

If you had the birth and death records matched, and added your social security number along with your picture and fingerprint, you would have a national I.D. card as well as proof of citizenship. Put all that in a national database, and you have a pretty good identity card.

Some critics say this would be an invasion of privacy. Privacy to do what? Privacy to be an identity thief? Privacy to be a illegal alien?