Roger.Hicks@spaceship-earth.de
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SIR - Philip Johnston has convinced me that ID-cards, which may have made sense 50 years ago, are not the way to combat 21st century terrorism [The case for and against identity cards, 25 September 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 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.
The next time I get on a plane, I want to be sure that no madman, protected by his right to remain anonymous, is getting on with me.
