Larry Ellison on digital IDs & terrorism"Do we need one national ID card? No. But the IDs that the government issues -- such as Social Security cards -- should use modern credit card technology. Do we need more databases? No, just the opposite. The biggest problem today is that we have too many. The single thing we could do to make life tougher for terrorists would be to ensure that all the information in myriad government databases was integrated into a single national file."

I'm struggling with whether to applaud Larry or beat him with a clue-bat. Today's "security by obscurity" (which results from exactly the chaos Larry advocates eliminating) is a double-edged sword. Its complexity makes identity theft slightly more difficult than if everything were in a "single national file" which, if successfully hacked, would reveal all necessary information to enable such theft.

It's quite similar to the "single sign-on" debate raging on the web (M$ Passport vs. the Liberty Alliance), and as unlikely to become reality in the near-term (although anything is possible, especially when your the 2nd richest man in the world...).