This space noted a couple of weeks ago that efforts to unify Canadian and U.S. drivers' licenses into one bi-national ID card had flared up again. Looking across the Atlantic, things don't seem much better. This past week has seen plans for a biometric continentwide "health ID card" unveiled, as well as one for EU-wide drivers' licenses. And the Blair government in the UK is desperately trying to push through national identification cards over domestic opposition even within his own Cabinet.

The London Telegraph reports that the EU took the "took its first step yesterday towards the creation of an EU-wide health identity card able to store a range of biometric and personal data on a microchip by 2008." The multinational bureaucrats will, for now, anyway, let each country decide how much identifying information, from photographs through biometrics, it will require its subjects to embed on the new European Health Insurance Card.

Chillingly, similar efforts have been underway in the United States since the Clinton Administration. Rep. Ron Paul has been authoring and passing in each Congress provisions in appropriations bills to keep the federal government from implementing federal medical ID numbers. As Paul has said, "Patients are not numbers to be tracked. . . They are individuals with unique concerns, who don’t want their private and sensitive health information made widely available. Medical ID numbers will be used to create a centralized database that destroys the last vestiges of patient privacy." Paul has also pointed out that "patients will be reluctant to disclose sensitive problems if they know their medical file will be placed in a federal database." Besides the detrimental effect on the privacy of Europeans that such a large database presents, the precedent set should be chilling for Americans as well. With Beltway types increasingly looking to foreign institutions as a source of legitimacy for domestic political schemes, the tide Paul is standing against with his appropriations riders could grow.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Europe, plans have been announced for a standardized EU-wide drivers' license complete with microchip. The European Commission insists, "The use of this microchip will be strictly limited to driving licences." Such standardization is akin to the drive by the AAMVA to standardize U.S. and Canadian drivers' licenses into a de facto 'national' ID card.

The EU plan is part of a larger initiative to harmonize all aspects of "road safety," including "automatic speed cameras, random breath testing, intensive campaigns to force seat belt use." Brussels bureaucrats insist that the standard microchipped drivers' license, though a part of the larger "road safety" scheme, is not part of a larger ID card scheme that would come to include more than health information.

The EU civil liberties watchdog Statewatch is not convinced, saying "Such assurances will not carry much weight given that the EU Directive on data protection is being undermined at every turn." One look at the UK -- where the government is desperately trying to steamroll a national ID system parallel to the drivers' license so much so that the cabinet secretly approved a national population computer database including name, address, date of birth, sex, and a unique personal number as the foundation for the compulsory identity card scheme -- and you can see why this cynicism is present among the watchdogs over there. "We all know where they're heading with this," the head of Statewatch told the Telegraph. "They want a single card with all our data on one chip. It'll be a passport and driver's licence rolled into one with everything from our national insurance numbers, bank accounts, to health records."

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