In April 1994, at the CardTech/SecureTech Conference in Crystal City, Virginia, federal agencies—including the United States Postal Service and the Internal Revenue Service—proposed various approaches to providing a national identity card. Presumably, every American citizen would be required to present the identity card in order to interact with any federal government agency.
The Postal Service proposed a “general-purpose U.S. services smart card” that individuals and corporations would use for identity authentication when sending and receiving email, transferring funds, and interacting with government agencies. The Postal Service card would be automatically connected with the Department of Health and Human Services, the United States Treasury, the Internal Revenue Service, the banking system, and a central database of digital signatures for use in authenticating email and electronic transactions. The Postal Service revealed that it could produce more than 100 million of the cards within months of approval.
The identity card would allow transactions to occur that depend upon authentication and would allow veterans, retirees, college students, and welfare recipients to check their federal benefits. The card would also allow instant access to medical records and health insurance information.
At the same time, President Clinton was considering signing two executive orders that would have allowed the interconnection of individual bank accounts and federal records to a government-issued identification card like the one proposed by the Postal Service.
This sort of action would result in a totalitarian government with a panopticon view of the entire citizenry and would provide the government with a better surveillance mechanism than anyone could possibly imagine.
In early 1997, the United Parcel Service (UPS) launched a new advertising campaign touting its ability to put digitized representations of handwritten signatures online. Customers could login to a service and use the shipping number to view the signature of the person who signed for the package. It would be a relatively trivial task for a low-level hacker to use the UPS software to capture any number of signatures within minutes. The system was quietly, but quickly, phased out.
