A National ID Non-Sequitur

by on February 14, 2007 · 2 comments

TLF contributor Jim Harper squares off with a national ID advocate on MSNBC:

http://www.youtube.com/v/M_cebLq-QSA

I find Joan Messner’s argument baffling. “If the terrorists had not had drivers licenses, there probably would not have been an attack on 9/11,” she says. True enough. But what does that have to do with anything?

The point is that at the point when the 9/11 terrorist applied for drivers licenses, they hadn’t done anything illegal. They got their drivers licenses the same way the rest of us do: they went to the DMV and signed up for them. It’s not obvious on what basis we could or should have denied them licenses.

So Messner’s argument just seems like a non sequitur. I don’t see any way that a more secure drivers license would prevent another 9/11. Can anyone explain how this argument is supposed to work?

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Tim Lee / Timothy B. Lee (Contributor, 2004-2009) is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. He is currently a PhD student and a member of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. He contributes regularly to a variety of online publications, including Ars Technica, Techdirt, Cato @ Liberty, and The Angry Blog. He has been a Mac bigot since 1984, a Unix, vi, and Perl bigot since 1998, and a sworn enemy of HTML-formatted email for as long as certain companies have thought that was a good idea. You can reach him by email at leex1008@umn.edu.

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