Call for "smart" US ID cards

More effective identity cards are necessary to defend the US against terrorists, former US presidential advisor Richard Clarke said on Monday, during a speech at a conference focused on smart-card technology - but he stopped short of advocating a national ID card.

At a gathering sponsored by the Smart Card Alliance, a multi-industry booster group for smart card adoption, Clarke said that at the very least, driver's licences must be made less susceptible to counterfeiting and that incentives for adopting technology such as smart cards should be proposed.

"We need to convince people that they should use smart cards because they are more convenient," he said. "We are not going to have national ID cards, because there is a large group of American people - a minority, but a large minority - that oppose the idea."

Clark, who has worked in counterterrorism and security roles in the US government for the past 30 years and whose book, Against All Enemies, criticised President Bush's handling of terrorism, said better securing US citizens' data should be a major initiative for the administration.

The Bush government has already taken some steps toward adopting secure ID cards. At the end of August it issued Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12, which mandates that a secure identification card standard be created and that all federal employees use cards created under the standard.

Clarke said more effective ID cards, in conjunction with better procedures for confirming identity, could have helped stop the terrorists involved in the World Trade Centre and Pentagon attacks, many of whom had valid state driver's licences.

"Driver's licences give a false sense of security," he said, adding that "of all the implementation costs of smart cards, the largest portion should be spent on proving that you are you."

Clarke took the Bush Administration to task for not making the US, and the world, safer from terrorists since the WTC attacks. He pointed to data indicating that there were more terrorist actions worldwide in the three years since the attacks than in the three years prior. He also claimed that terrorist recruitment and funding had increased.

However, according to "Patterns of Global Terrorism," an annual US State Department report on such attacks, the number of incidents has dropped by more than half, from 426 terrorist acts in 2000 to about 200 each for 2002 and 2003.

Clarke also criticised the lack of progress made by the administration in implementing the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace. The policy document, released by the Bush administration in February 2003, outlines broad steps the nation should take to protect communications infrastructure and the internet.

"Almost nothing has been done to implement it," he said. Pointing to the proliferation of online, but not necessarily terrorist, threats, he added, that "the state of cyberspace is a state of chaos".

Robert Lemos writes for CNET News.com