It seems that in the wake of this month's atrocities many Americans feel less safe than they did before.

Some polls have a majority of Americans favoring measures up to and including national ID cards. Of course, such polls have limited reliability, and these don't seem to have asked how people felt specifically about "smart" cards with digitized pictures or thumbprints or retinal scans or other personal information just short of a tattooed barcode and/or Mark of the Beast. And the assumption behind these polls was that such cards would curb terrorism.

And there's little reason that such an elaborate tracking system would be any more reliable than these polls, at least in things that mattered. Foreign terrorists circumvented today's complex identification matrix of green cards, passports, Social Security numbers, photos and drivers' licenses; which weigh down the law-abiding; by giving 80 bucks to a guy in a DMV parking lot right outside the nation's capital.

Sadly, in times of fear, control freaks exploit the opportunity to gain more control. One such freak this go-round is Larry Ellison, chairman of software giant Oracle Corp., who offered to "donate" his company's services to create a national identification card database. Oracle's privacy record to date includes hiring dumpster-diving, Clinton-connected private investigators last year to harass sympathizers of rival Microsoft during the latter's antitrust case.

Since floating the ID idea on a San Francisco TV station last Friday, Ellison has refused further comment and indeed, his remarks appear to have disappeared from a transcript posted on the station's website. Privacy advocates can hope this idea has disappeared, at least for the time being, with today's report that President Bush has rejected the idea. But all the time in the world won't disappear Ellison's title as September 27th's Privacy Villain of the Week.

The Privacy Villain of the Week and Privacy Hero of the Month are projects of the National Consumer Coalition's Privacy Group. For more information on the NCC Privacy Group, see www.nccprivacy.org or contact James Plummer at 202-467-5809 or jplummer@consumeralert.org . To remove yourself from this list, just respond to this message with a removal request. To access this release directly, go to http://www.nccprivacy.org/handv/010927villain.htm

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