Papers, please?

     Less than 60 years ago, American movie audiences would boo and hiss when the train carrying their cinematic heroes braked to a halt and was boarded by the sneering, uniformed "state police" of some totalitarian regime, demanding of each passenger in turn: "Travel papers? Identity card?"
      Americans were appalled at the prospect of any government requiring its citizens to prove their identity -- and their justification for being where they were -- to any government official who chose to ask.
      Well, it's 1997 in America. Welcome to "The Lady Vanishes."
      In New Orleans last year, Martin McCay didn't get to vote. The state of Louisiana wouldn't let him, because he refused to produce his Social Security card.
      Don Haines of the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington reports a little-known provision of a new federal law establishes a national medical data base, under which patients' lifelong medical histories will be centrally organized -- and accessible to the government -- by Social Security number.
      Sponsors insist there are exemptions for the 30 states that don't already require Social Security numbers on their drivers licenses -- this is in a little-noticed provision of the new immigration law signed by President Clinton in September that prohibits federal agencies from accepting state drivers' licenses as identification unless they display the citizen's Social Security number.
      But in the meantime, the state of Georgia has accepted federal funds for a "pilot program" under which law-abiding drivers are fingerprinted, and their fingerprints tied to their Social Security numbers in the state's data base. There is even talk of electronically linking identity-card readers from each major American employer to a central Washington clearing house, which would then instantly advise the employer whether the job applicant was "in the system" and could be legally hired.
      All this despite the fact that, when the Social Security system was set up 60 years ago, "The American people were solemnly promised the number would never be used for anything other than Social Security," recalls Roxana Hegeman of The Associated Press.
      In fact, early Social Security cards bore a warning across the bottom, instructing the bearer to neither show the card nor reveal its number to anyone but a bona fide representative of the Social Security Administration.
      "It is really scary because the Social Security number has become a de facto identification number -- the kind of thing you find in totalitarian, authoritarian societies," protests Mr. Haines of the ACLU.
      There have been sporadic attempts to slow the rush toward a "national ID number." The federal Privacy Act specifically prohibits the government or any of its agencies from denying any right, benefit or privilege to an individual who refuses to disclose his or her Social Security number. But even that law grants an exemption to agencies that demanded the number before Jan. 1, 1975.
      And the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 1993 that requiring Social Security numbers as a way to limit voter fraud was an impermissible infringement on the right to vote.
      But that didn't help Mr. McCay vote in Louisiana last year.
      Overall, the story is sadly predictable. Bureaucrats and lawmakers swear up and down that those who worry a new government scheme will steadily erode our remaining liberties, binding us ever tighter in the shackles of tyranny, are nothing but gibbering paranoids.
      Years later, when the Cassandras are proven right, does anyone apologize and agree to disassemble the whole regime? Of course not.
      At the very least the Republican Congress should pass a law making it a felony for anyone but an agent of the Social Security Administration to require a citizen to produce his or her Social Security number.