Philip Johnston has convinced me that ID-cards, which may have made sense 50 years ago, are not the way to combat 21^st Century terrorism (The case for and against identity cards, 25/09/2001).

What is required is a completely reliable method of identifying anyone on the spot, for example when they wish to board a plane.

State of the art technology, using finger or eye scans and matching them with an ID-file in a government databank, provides the solution.

This means doing away with “a citizen's right to remain anonymous,” but it is a small price to pay for reducing to a minimum the risk of terrorist attack like the ones America suffered on the 11 September, or possibly even worse!

I do not understand why anonymity is so important to some people or why they equate it with civil liberty. It is not as if an individual's ID-file will be freely available on the internet, or to anybody at all other than a democratically controlled security service with very secure procedures to prevent misuse.