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By Jon Christian Ryter
Copyright 2002 - All Rights Reserved
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NOTE: When I wrote Whatever Happened To America? I included a chapter in that book dealing with the planned creation of an Internal Passport in the United States by the Clinton White House. The deep research for that book began in July,1996. On January 17, 1997 I interviewed Allen Kay, the press secretary for Congressman Lamar Smith [R-TX] by telephone to rebut or confirm the substance found in a White House protocol dated November 11, 1993 that was in my possession. In that telephone interview Kay admitted that there were efforts, on three occasions during the floor debate on H.R. 220 to initiate what Smith’s office referred to as “national identity card dialogue.” Kay said that Smith, who drafted the legislation that would become known as Public Law 104-298, saw no need for such extreme measures and successfully thwarted efforts to introduce what amounted to an internal passport into the Immigration Reform Act of 1996. In reality, not only did Lamar Smith not fight to “thwart” efforts on the part of the “Democrats” to introduce an internal passport into the Immigration Reform Act of 1996, Smith actually led the covert effort to insert it after the American people discovered that Congress was attempting to create a law that would force Americans to carry a biometric National ID Card that was being implemented all over the world to control a population which President Bill Clinton said was “...too highly mobile.” If you have not read Whatever Happened To America? you must read it before the midterm election this year. Several Republican members of Congress joined with key House and Senate Democrats to secretly insert a national identity card into the House Omnibus Budget Bill of 1996 after a coalition that included the American Civil Liberties Union, Free Congress Foundation, the CATO Institute and Christian Coalition discovered an internal passport had been included in both the House and Senate versions of that bill. The Senate had hurriedly passed their version—with the internal passport attached. When the public learned that there was an internal passport, disguised as a national drivers’ license, included in the House version, public indignation rapidly escalated and, due to the efforts of the advocacy groups mentioned, the House was forced to discard the internal passport from their own version of the Immigration Reform Act. When the Immigration Reform Act went into Joint Conference, the national drivers’ license—which had only been passed by the Senate—remained in the bill that was sent to the White House. Bill Clinton signed “half-a-driver’s license” into law. The House version followed, hidden in the voluminous text of the Omnibus Budget Bill of 1996 which was sent to the White House a month later. The third element needed for the new biometric internal passport was the 24-digit personal identifier which was buried in the Healthcare Portability Act of 1997. The personal identifier is an internal identification number. Every person in the world will have their own unique personal identifier. Unlike the Social Security Card which has does not have an infinite supply of numbers and is now recycling numbers that had formerly been assigned to people who are now deceased, the personal identifiers are infinite. And, where government officials were banned from using the Social Security Card as an “identification card” by the Social Security Act of 1934 itself, the national ID card (or national drivers’ license, or more precisely, the internal passport that every person in the world will be forced, by law, to carry) not only is an identification card, it is an identification card that will include your personal life history—including all of your personality “warts” for any law enforcement agency, or anyone else with the authority to access that portion of the database, too see.

     As the United States begins the task of implementing what the federal government is now calling a “State-initiated” program to upgrade drivers’ licenses with SmartCard™ technology that contains an information database on each license-holder, the media is very adroitly concealing the fact that the effort to use SmartCard™ technology did not originate as a solution to September 11 as the American people are now being led to believe. The effort to create a biometric internal passport (first disguised as a national healthcare card and later as a national drivers’ license) was first discussed in the Clinton White House on November 11, 1993 when Bill and Hillary Clinton realized that Hillary’s socialized healthcare plan, which would have nationalized 1/7th of the American economy, could not be enacted even by a very liberal Democratically-controlled Congress. When the Clinton’s realized that nothing was going to save Hillary’s healthcare plan that contained a very complex system designed not to provide healthcare for Americans, but to spy on them through a very complex system that utilized both GPS and ground monitoring systems.
     Each license will contain a biometric computer chip that will include not only your “driving history” but your credit and medical history—and whether or not you have ever been arrested, or even if you are a suspected extremist. The industrialized nations in the European Union and in England are doing the same. The European Union which, like the United States has been trying to figure out how to force their citizens to accept what amounts to an Internal Passport that will allow government to both monitor and control the activities of their citizens, have opted to use the tragedies of 9.11 as the reason these invasive smart cards are being mandated.
     It should be noted that when news surfaced that the States were now obligated to implement the biometric national drivers’ license that the Clinton National Highway Transportation Safety Administration [NHTSA] tried to implement through regulatory means in 1998, the media immediately begin to take shots at the nationalist conservatists who had originally alerted America to the fact that the national drivers’ license will contain a computer chip that can track any cardholder in the world, poophahing the notion that the nationalized drivers’ license would contain a tracking chip by asserting that such technology was not yet feasible.
     In 1998 the Clinton Department of Health and Human Services [DHHS] initiated a “healthcare program test” in five western States that was not authorized by Congress nor funded by the federal government (since Congress has to approve funding—which means the general public would learn the details about what was being funded with their tax dollars). The “funding” for this “special project” came from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Low income women with dependent children in the test area were provided with a biometric “Health Passport Card” (the actual card is pictured above). The entire medical history of the benefits recipients was stored in a 1 megabyte chip that was embedded in the card. In addition, recorded on the card was the vaccine history of each benefits recipient. Based on the assumption that low income people are far more transient than stable, middle income households, one other element was added to the Health Passport card: a GPs tracking chip that contained the personal identifiers of the benefits recipient was included. Starting in 1997 with the passage of the Healthcare Portability Act of 1997, every American has been assigned a 24-digit personal identifier. (When you filed your census report in 2000, the 24-digit “tracking code” on your 2000 Census form was your unique personal identifier. In all of the public relations hyperbole that accompanied the 2000 census suggested that Americans had complete anonymity in filing, noting that neither the respondent’s name or Social Security was required on submission. In point of fact, the “tracking code” on the form was that taxpayer or head-of-household’s personal identifier. Big Brother knew the identity of every person in America who submitted the form they received in the mail.)
     In the summer of 1999 the Department of Health and Human Services held a follow-up conference in Denver, Colorado to report on the progress of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funded “test.” It was a huge success. As the mid- and senior-level Clinton Administration healthcare executives watched the big screen TVs that were conveniently positioned around the room, they were shocked and amazed to see a “thousand points of light” appear on the screens. Each speck of light, they were told, represents one benefits recipient. Each “speck,” they were told, was being tracked by GPs The televisions zoomed in from the five state map first to one state, then one county, one community, and then one region within that community. The DHHS, the attendees were told, had the ability to track each recipient wherever they moved—to make certain that their children were receiving whatever vaccinations they required whenever needed.
     George Orwell’s Big Brother had finally arrived in the form of another grand gratuity. He was a quarter century late. America’s politicians learned long ago that if you gift wrap it in glittery red, white and blue foil and package it in a large enough box, Americans will gleefully accept any abrogation of their rights in exchange for a handout at the taxpayer’s expense—never realizing that they are the taxpayers who are footing the bill.
     The creation of the proposed internal passport was discussed extensively in a White House strategy meeting on November 11, 1993 when it appeared that the Clinton Health Security Act was not going to be enacted by the Democratically-controlled Congress which was worried about getting reelected a year later. (The entire protocol is recorded, word-by-word, in my book, Whatever Happened To America?) The Clinton Administration discussed concealing their internal passport in a bill ostensibly designed to keep illegal immigrants from stealing jobs from hardworking Americans—who were already being targeted for “job removal” by NAPHTHA. That bill, of course, was the Immigration Reform Act of 1996.
     While nobody in either the House of Representatives or the Senate questioned how you can constitutionally declare a piece of legislation passed that does not lawfully survive Joint Conference, and is not legally signed into law, the Clinton NHTSA attempted to force the States to implement it by decree in July, 1998. Then to avoid the tedious and very likely impossible task of securing money from Congress to implement the national drivers’ license, the Clinton Administration decided to “lowball” the estimated cost of the program so that, under the terms of the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act of 1996, Bill Clinton could force the States to foot the bill for the program’s implementation.
     Under the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act the States could not be forced to pay for legislation enacted by Congress if the national cost exceeded $100 million. In order to “lowball” the cost estimate, the NHTSA build their cost projections based on the projected implementation costs of 5 sparsely populated States: Delaware, Iowa, Montana, Utah and Wisconsin—which was supposed to represent a heavily populated industrial State. Florida’s estimated its cost to implement NHTSA-98-3945 at slightly over $31 million. The cost borne by California, New York, Michigan and Illinois alone would almost double the $100 million ceiling.
     When Congressman Bob Barr [R-GA], Dr. Ron Paul [R-TX] and Mac Collins [R-GA] initiated legislation to abolish the provisions of law that would grant the NHTSA the authority to create a national drivers’ license, they knew they didn’t have the votes to even get it out of committee. What they expected to do was keep the issue fresh in the public’s eye and force Congress to readdress in the public arena where it would be soundly defeated. However what Barr and Paul were attempting to do was tantamount to trying to rewrite a movie script after the movie had already aired in the movie theaters. The barn door was open and the cows had already gone to pasture.
     With the public aroused in July, 1998 just a little over two months from the midterm elections Barr, Paul and Collins launched a two-prong attack against the national ID card. First, they introduced an amendment to a pending transportation bill to defund the NHTSA’s ability to push the program through the States. And second they demanded a public hearing to secure a one-year moratorium on implementation of the smart card ostensibly so that the House and Senate could pass legislation to kill the national drivers’ license. Barr then went to House Speaker Newt Gingrich (who was part of the Congressional and Senatorial coalition of senior level Congressmen and Senators that was responsible for burying the national ID card in the Omnibus Budget Bill of 1996) and threatened to take their allegations of his participation in the scheme to create an internal passport public on conservative talk radio if Gingrich did not back their effort to debate the national ID card in the public arena. On August 4, 1998 a meeting was held in the office of the Transportation Subcommittee chaired by Frank Wolf [R-VA]. Attending also that was Congressman Lamar Smith who originated the National Drivers’ License legislation. Smith, angered by Barr, lobbied not only Gingrich but House Majority Leader Dick Armey to put Barr and Ron Paul back in their “places.” “Push” finally gave way to “shove” and Smith had all the congressional weight on his side. As Barr pushed for his moratorium, Smith frantically pushed Transportation Subcommittee Chairman Wolf to exclude Barr’s amendment from the legislation before sending the bill to the floor. On October 6, a month from the midterm elections, Smith secured an agreement from Gingrich to exclude Barr’s amendment. As America slept that night Barr, Paul and Collins fought Smith, Wolf and Gingrich. Finally Barr pulled House Whip Tom DeLay and several other conservative House members into the fray. These House members openly questioned Gingrich why it was that Smith was so zealously pushing for something that the American people so vehemently opposed.
     Delay, whose power base had grown immensely since 1994, together with Barr, threatened take the issue to the talk shows the following day. Fearful of voter backlash against the Republicans, Gingrich caved before the morning of October 7. The National Drivers’ License was suspended in legislative limbo even though Barr’s moratorium actually only postponed the biometric drivers’ license for one year. The Clinton-Gore Administration knew that any attempt on their part to implement a biometric national ID card (regardless what it was disguised as) would be met with fierce resistance.
     Interestingly, as the American version of a national drivers’ license vanished into utopian limbo so did the Euro versions which had already been approved by most of the European parliaments.

Using 9.11 to Implement the Internal Passport
     September 11 changed more than just the sense of patriotism in America. The successful attack against the infrastructure of the United States by Osama bin Laden awoke the American people to the fact that the United States was vulnerable to attack from terrorists who could kill thousands of Americans in one incident.
     A Nixon Administration Social Security task force explored the notion of expanding the Social Security number into a personal identifier in 1971 under its own rule-making provisions. In 1973 Nixon’s Health, Education and Welfare Secretary’s Advisory Committee concluded that the American people would soundly reject the expansion of the Social Security card into a national identity card. Nixon backed off. In 1976, outgoing President Gerald Ford revisited the internal passport concept. The Federal Advisory Committee on False Identification now insisted that changing the social security card into a national identification card was necessary because of the ease in which Americans could “change” their identity to escape debt obligations or to evade law enforcement officers.
     To prove their case, the Social Security Administration began to publicize the most “abused” Social Security number in American history—074-05-1120—the number assigned to Hilda Whitcher. Whitcher was the secretary of F.W. Woolworth Vice President and Treasurer Douglas Patterson. In 1938 F.W. Woolworth signed a contract with E. H. Ferree, a billfold manufacturer to provide Woolworth’s with billfolds. Ferree decided to include a mockup of a social security card in the wallet to show how the card would look in the wallet. Patterson thought it would be clever to use the actual social security number of his secretary on the card—which was half the size of an actual card, was printed entirely in red ink, and contained the word “specimen” across the card.
     In the peak year of 1943 alone, 5,755 people were using Hilda Whitcher’s social security number. In all, over 40,000 people have used Whitcher’s social security number since it was issued in 1936. In 1943 the Social Security Administration voided the number and placed a “flag” on its use. Whitcher was issued a new number that year. When the abuse of her social security number became rampant, the FBI showed up at her door to grill her on how her number was being used by so many people. Whitcher told the FBI that after the “specimen” appeared in the Woolworth wallet, people just started “...using the number. They thought it was their own. I can’t understand how people can be so stupid. I can’t understand that.” In reality, the 40,000 people who used Hilda Whitcher’s social security number did not think F.W. Woolworth had issued them a new social security card. They were realists who viewed America’s grand largess in the same light as Germany’s Social Security program—the “benefit” card issued by the Weimar Republic became the internal passport of the Third Reich. The Nazis initially used the internal passport to control the movement of its population, and then used it to round up its “undesirables:” the Jews, the gypsies, the homosexuals and its political dissidents. Germany was the first nation in the world to provide “retirement insurance” for its elderly. And, Germany was the first nation to abuse the benefits card that was issued to every German citizen. There was no reason for the American people to believe that, somewhere down the road to Utopia, that their own government would not abuse the database they had created on its own population. Shocking as it may seem, even after the Social Security Administration voided 078-05-1120, and “flagged” the number, 12 people were found to be using the number as late as 1977.
     Had Gerald Ford been elected to the office he was holding by appointment in 1976 it is likely that Congress would have modified the Social Security numbering system at that time, creating a national identification card In 1977 newly elected President Jimmy Carter told Congress in the most emphatic terms that the Social Security number would not become a personal identifier. Ronald Reagan’s CFR advisors tried in 1981. Reagan told his advisors—and Congress—that he was “explicitly opposed” to the creation of a national ID card.
     On November 11, 1993, with the Clinton Health Security Act dying in the Congress, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Ira Magaziner, Thomas “Mack” McLarty, Roy Neel, Gene Sperling, and Richard Herget sat and discussed how to insert a national ID card into an immigration bill, concocting the “spin” that an internal passport was necessary to keep illegal aliens from stealing jobs from Americans. As the structure of world government was formalized in Brussels, and the foundation of that structure was built, the need for a universal, global identifier became more and more imperative.
     The Clinton’s were “assigned” the task of making it happen. The leadership of Congress in both parties did their job and surreptitiously—although illegally—created the platform, a national drivers’ license. Then, hawking the right of Americans to “take their healthcare insurance with them when they moved from job to job,” Congress passed the Healthcare Portability Act of 1997 and created the personal identifier. Finally, after 26 years of trying, the utopians had their internal passport.
     After letting the “bi-polar” National Drivers’ License lie dormant for two years, the Clinton’s moved on June 16, 1998 through the Department of Transportation. Through its rule-making provisions, the DOT implemented a rule mandating that all States issue new smart card drivers’ licenses that would utilize the new personal identifiers and would contain a computer chip with a 2 megabyte storage capacity. Disputed is whether or not the uniform drivers’ licenses would also contact a GPs tracking chip.
     It was this effort that Bob Barr, Ron Paul, Mac Collins and Tom Delay (with the help of several other conservative Congressmen) shut down. It was suddenly a hot potato that Clinton did not want to touch again. Although the Clintons got closer than any president before them, the Hillary Clinton internal passport died on the vine.

September 11 changed that for all time.
     The security “spin” began long before the dust settled over the collapsed twin towers of the World Trade Center, and before the flames were extinguished at the Pentagon. America was vulnerable. And, for the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis, America was afraid. And, as Congress well knows, fear is the most powerful catalyst for change that exists.
     Frightened people will more quickly surrender liberty for security than people who feel secure. The issue in the media was one of identification. The American people were being told by the media that had the government been able to “identify” the terrorists who took over two American Airlines and two United Airlines flights they could have stopped them.
     Further, claiming that it was “racial profiling” to single out Islamics (the only cultural and racial distinction that can be used to identify the terrorists who have attacked America—and, the simplest means to catch and stop them) the government has proposed very complex high tech solutions to a simple problem that can all but be stopped with simple visual means since all of the terrorist activity has thus far been perpetuated solely by Middle Eastern Islamics who have racial characteristics that make them “visible” even if they shave their beards and don western garb.
     But, that is not the solution the utopians seek since the purpose of the GPs-readable biometric identity cards has nothing to do with identifying Islamic terrorists and everything to do with identifying and monitoring law-abiding citizens not only in the United States but around the world.
     On November 19, 2001 President George W. Bush—the fifth president to try to create a national identity card—signed the Aviation and Transportation Security Act into law. Like Roosevelt, Nixon, Ford and Clinton, Bush—the most admired and trusted President since Reagan—was now taking a shot at creating a “user-friendly” internal passport.
     Authorized to do so in the aviation security bill, the Department of Transportation is rapidly moving forward with plans to establish a biometric national transportation-workers identity card that will utilize either iris scans or digital fingerprints to identify airport workers. The Bush Administration believes that there will be less resistance to a biometric identity card in the general population if one is being used without adverse affects in the business world. Plans are underway at this time to create a biometric “Trusted Traveler™” card that can be used by frequent flyer airline passengers to bypass the lengthening crowds and long waits at airports. Trusted Traveler™ cards would allow those carrying them to circumvent the extensive screening at airport checkpoints. Contained on the smart card that would be issued to frequent flyers who had passed a rigorous FBI background check, would be a database on the cardholder that would contain far more information than that person’s travel habits. Included would be any criminal history—including misdemeanor traffic violations—and the cardholder’s medical history (ostensibly so that if a medical emergency arose in midflight that the attendants would know what pre-existing medical conditions existed and could offer first aid to the passenger).
     The card would contain a digital image of the cardholder, including an iris scan and fingerprint. The encoded biometric description would ensure that the person carrying the card was the same person identified on the card. Eventually, according to the Department of Transportation, biometric “travel cards” will be used on all domestic and international flights.
     When the Department of Transportation announced that they were considering a biometric “trusted traveler” card, Barry Steinhardt, the Associate Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (which has worked closely with the Free Congress Foundation and the CATO Institute to kill anything that even smelled like an internal passport) insisted that “...this is a backdoor national ID. This so-called trusted passenger card will become essentially mandatory for everyone to use not only on airlines but also buses, trains and perhaps cars that drive over bridges and tunnels. The consequences of not having a trusted passenger card is that you will be immediately suspect.” Steinhardt insisted that the biometric card posed additional privacy risks from identity theft, inaccurate information being encoded on the cards, and foreign governments receiving data on political refugees as the United Nations becomes the caretaker of the identity database worldwide.
     The DOT “draft,” developed by the Credentialing Direct Agency Group predicts a much more universal application of the cards beyond the initial Trusted Traveler™ concept. Initially, the biometric identity card “...would apply to any person who has unescorted access to a transportation facility or who has access to control of a transportation conveyance.” The CDAG is a quasi-official task force of the National Infrastructure Security Committee that was put together by Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta within weeks of the September 11 attack.
     Today, all of the players from the Clinton-era attempt to create a biometric internal passport are once again hawking the merits of a biometric identification system that, by using digital images, iris scans and digital fingerprints, will help identity potential terrorists and stop them before they are able to launch another attack against the infrastructure of the United States. And the stalwart conservatives who so diligently fought Clinton’s attempt to create an internal passport are surprisingly silent.
     Their argument now seems to be that what is happening now is not, nor will it lead to, a national ID card. Their argument is weak at best, suspect at worst. Acting on instructions from Congress—this time in the light of day—the Bush Transportation Department is initiating Clinton’s failed biometric identity card. But now, under the threat of more terrorist acts in the United States, the American people are too afraid to protest. Once again, the onus is on the States to create a uniform electronic smart card drivers’ license that can be checked instantly through a national database that will contain digital images of each license holder as well as iris scans and digital fingerprints—each of which will become mandatory in every State within the next 24 months. Standardized drivers licenses would mean that every State trooper, county sheriff or local police officer would find the same data in the same place on every drivers license they look at—and scan in the portable scanner that will be in every police cruiser in the nation. According to the liberal media, for terrorists on the run (and other criminals, too), the biometric ID cards will catch those who steal someone else’s ID and try to pose as law-abiding American citizens. It would if they were using them. But I suspect that in a biometric world, terrorists and criminals in general will travel as they do now—very covertly. There are 58,000 illegal Islamic fundamentalists in the United States at this moment. Most of them are holding down jobs of some type. They travel to and from those jobs; and they apparently travel freely throughout the United States without State-issued identification. They will continue to do so—perhaps with more difficulty, but they will continue to do so nevertheless.
Any identification systems, biometric or otherwise, are not designed to catch criminals or terrorists since criminals will not register. And, because they have not registered, they will avoid those forms of travel that would catch them. That is why 58,000 illegal Islamics have succeeded in remaining completely invisible in a society which views them as highly visible.
     The liberals insist that the use of a biometric identity card is no longer a “1984-issue.” To them, it is an issue of security—and security only. The fight against the use of a national ID card continues, but the fight is much more low key than it was in 1998. Its almost like the conservative zealots have lost their drive to defend liberty. Since November several nations have passed laws mandating that their citizens carry a national identity card—and making it a crime to be caught without it.
     But as the liberals insist that the proposed biometric card will never become an internal passport, they argue that it may be necessary to expand its use beyond the transportation industry. It could be necessary, they argue, for a watchful society to implement a more stringent use of the card in order to catch potential terrorists who still need to eat (thus using the swipe card in supermarkets and restaurants), or have a place to sleep at night (thus forcing hotels, motels and apartment leasing companies to verify identifies).
     Clearly when world government is formed and a universal cyber-currency is implemented, the use of a biometric ATM debit/credit card will become mandatory. At that time, no person in the world would be allowed to buy or sell anything without having a biometric identity card that verified who they were.

Jon Christian Ryter's shocking expose:
Whatever Happened To America?

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