New technologies such as national ID cards, e-mail wiretapping, and facial recognition cameras have been hailed as tools to defeat terrorists. These technologies, however, are not only potentially harmful to our civil liberties, but are also unproven and unnecessary. More practical technologies offer a better solution.

With a national ID card, honest citizens could be easily tracked, while terrorists armed with money from rich supporters could forge the cards or bribe an official to get a fake ID. California reportedly issues 100,000 false IDs per year through the Department of Motor Vehicles. There’s a similar problem with the FBI’s Carnivore email snooping device.

Carnivore causes government agents to waste resources looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack. When the FBI uses Carnivore to scan people’s email messages, it can easily read the non-scrambled messages most innocent people send, but it has trouble reading the ones most criminals send because the code used to scramble the message cannot be broken.

As a result, law enforcement is left with heaps of data it can’t process in a timely fashion, along with some potentially embarrassing, but harmless messages, to and from friends and family. Another technology misfire is facial recognition technology—cameras that attempt to find criminals by matching pictures of known offenders with everyone in a crowd.

Recent reports show that Florida officers who had access to the software were plagued by misidentifications and even stopped using the software. This did not come as a surprise to experts who say the programs have notorious failure rates.

The 2001 economic bust should caution Americans against a belief in technology as a panacea. This does not mean that technology can’t help, but it does mean that simply throwing a blanket of surveillance over a crowd is not going to magically solve our security problems. Fortunately, there is another way.

First, the federal government must examine the real reasons it failed to safeguard America. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) was told more than a decade ago that it not only needed to keep track of when people entered the country, but also when they left, which they still don’t do. If we want to make good use of our technology in fighting terrorists, we can start by making sure we know which foreigners are in the country and which have left, as well as comparing those names to lists of known terrorists.

Any good database program by Oracle, Microsoft, or IBM can handle this task, and any good security company such as Counterpane or TruSecure can help the INS fend off would-be hackers. Another way technology can help guard our safety is for the INS and state department to have clearer communications with the CIA and the FBI.

If an agency puts someone on a list of wanted terrorists, it is imperative that the message is digested and acted upon. For example, if the INS and state department had been informed that Mohamed Atta was a suspected cell leader and known by the FBI to have met with Bin Laden operatives earlier in the year, perhaps a visa would not have been so readily issued to him.

And if the FBI or CIA has a problem sharing databases, why not set up a system where the FBI or CIA systems simply update the INS database with information concerning certain individuals. Ordinary business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce technology allows systems to talk to each other on a limited basis, and this would seem to solve the problems of database envy.

It’s time for America to get smart and practical when it comes to using technology in the fight against terrorism. Fancy profiling systems with high failure rates, email scanning systems that waste time, and proposals to put ordinary citizens under greater surveillance are more symbolic than effective. Americans deserve better solutions and the technology exists to deliver them.

Sonia Arrison is director of the Center for Technology Studies at the California-based Pacific Research Institute. She can be reached at sarrison@pacificresearch.org.