But the canary was already dead
The Evil Party has just passed through congress a bill that, along with the usual wad of government charity to well-connected friends of the B*sh junta, has an appealing little appendix called the "Real ID" act. The "Real ID" act is a nasty little bit of law that converts drivers licenses into an official state ID, which you must present if you want to do things like fly on airplanes, ride on Amtrak, get into government buildings, and the like. It basically knocks out one of the traditional foundation blocks of the United States; the one that says that people have the right to be left alone by the government if they aren't breaking the law.
The sad thing is that that foundation block was already condemned, by order of the US Supreme Court (home of the judicial activism that overthrew the United States government in favor of the B*sh junta), when they said that it was perfectly legal to arrest people for not showing ID. Once that bit of judicial activism was put into place, it became only a matter of waiting to see what color the frosting was going to be on the shitcake that the Coward in Chief was going to serve up. And, to make the cake even tastier, states (in the now-traditional way the Evil Party has of passing terrible laws, but not funding them because that would get in the way of giving government money to friends of the junta) have to pay for implementing it.
The hackers must be high-fiving each other now; the new (snicker) secure government databases that will cover everything about people who live in cities will make looting the credit card companies seem like childs play. You know that the "Real ID" contracts will be rewarded to friends of the B*sh junta, so doing an actual secure implementation will take third place to the more important design requirements of (a) bloating up upper management's bank accounts with untaxable money, and (b) paying bribes to the kingpins of the Evil Party. So three years from now the new computerised ID cards will be rolled out, and approximately three years and two days from now the first counterfeit cards will be presented for sale, and then the suicide bombers of 2008 will be able to stroll through customs without any investigation, because, gosh, the computer thinks all of their ID is in order, and the computer could never be wrong!
It will be just like the current arrangement with computerised "voting" machines, except that more skyscrapers will fall down.
(some links via Arthur Silber, who you should be reading anyway,
even though he's a libertarian)