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Dems spark alarm with call for national ID card
A plan by Senate Democratic leaders to reform the nation’s immigrations laws ran into strong opposition from civil liberties defenders before lawmakers even unveiled it Thursday.

Democratic leaders have proposed requiring every worker in the nation to carry a national identification card with biometric information, such as a fingerprint, within the next six years, according to a draft of the measure.

The proposal is one of the biggest differences between the newest immigration reform proposal and legislation crafted by late-Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

The national ID program would be titled the BELIEVE System, [Biometric Enrollment, Locally-stored Information, and Electronic Verification of Employment].

It would require all workers across the nation to carry a card with a digital encryption key that would have to match work authorization databases.

“The cardholder’s identity will be verified by matching the biometric identifier stored within the micro-processing chip on the card to the identifier provided by the cardholder that shall be read by the scanner used by the employer,” states the Democratic legislative proposal....