ELLISON: Oh, I guess the fact that I’m an American citizen or a civilized person living on the planet Earth.

Two things. One is that we have a standard [for national identification] in terms of technology. Credit cards are much harder to counterfeit than a driver’s license, which is our standard government-issued ID. There’s just no comparison. Some credit cards have pictures and a place for your signature and a little magnetic strip with information. If the government wanted to, it could have even better cards by using smart-card technology. But all I’m suggesting right now is that the government should be at least as good as MasterCard.

A lot of people thought I was advocating a national ID card. I’m really not. I’m advocating a national standard for ID cards, which is significantly different. I’m for making it voluntary not mandatory. I’m not saying that police can stop you and ask you for your ID card when you’re walking your dog. I’m saying you must produce the ID when you’re going into a secure location like an airport.

You walk into the airport, you say, “I’m Larry Ellison, and my Social Security number is…” They type that into the database. All I have is a driver’s license. I put my thumbprint down [on a fingerprint-reading device] and it checks to make sure the Social Security number and my name match. My thumbprint is then stored in a database, not on the card. Now let’s say you come in and say you’re Larry Ellison and you’ve got this very nice driver’s license which you reproduce with your picture and my name. You put your thumbprint down and that will indicate you’re trying to steal my identity, or I’ve stolen your identity–one or the other.

You could do a better job on a smart card, but you really don’t need it because the database is the thing that really holds the truth. Now that’s the other problem. The credit-card companies, plus all the banks and financial institutions, have actually shared [credit] information in a single global database. But every government agency has its own database. In fact there’re more databases than you can shake a stick at. If [a terrorist] has an arrest warrant, passport control doesn’t check [the right database] because there are too many of them.

Absolutely. And more frequent checking of [criminal] watch lists. Every time the airlines sell a ticket they should send the names of their passengers and other IDs that their passengers submit, such as their credit-card numbers, to the FBI or the office of homeland defense, and then that list should be cross-checked immediately against the watch list.

I do this for a living. If you can explain to me how the system can be spoofed, I’m ready to listen.

I don’t know how it can. Maybe there’s someone smarter than I am and knows more about this than I do, but I can’t figure it out.

I think it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars. But I want to go beyond just the government doing this. I think private companies concerned about security should participate, too.

If you don’t have a passport, you can’t go to England. That’s nothing new. Passports are voluntary, driver’s licenses are voluntary. There’s really no change, other than the IDs should be based on a uniform standard.

I’m totally confused by the privacy advocates. Don’t we have these huge credit databases that are searched and sold on a daily basis without regard to Fourth Amendment protections? Privacy is an illusion. It’s a wild contradiction. The government is heavily restricted, but as private citizens we can snoop to our heart’s content.