Monday, November 26, 2001 NEW YORK If you have been encountering long lines at U.S. airports, then you may appreciate the recent proposal by the airline industry for a trusted traveler card. It would be a bit like Monopoly's Get Out of Jail Free card. The card would be issued by the federal government to passengers willing to undergo intensive background checks and to allow a biometric marker - like fingerprints or a retinal scan - to be stored on the card. You could use it to go to a special checkpoint with less time-consuming scrutiny, because the authorities would quickly verify your identity and make sure you were not in their database of suspects. They could concentrate on passengers deemed more likely to be terrorists.

The potential benefits for air passengers appeal even to some civil libertarians like the lawyer Alan Dershowitz. He endorsed an optional national identity card with biometric capabilities, comparing it to the E-ZPass system: You get to skip the line at the toll booth if you voluntarily sacrifice some privacy by signing up in advance and allowing your travel to be monitored.

But the White House declined to endorse the airlines' proposal. Consumers Union, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Cato Institute have warned that such a system would endanger Americans' privacy.

To many civil libertarians, the specter of Big Brother will always be there as long as the federal government is issuing identification cards and maintaining the accompanying databases. But there is no reason that the federal government must run the system or that it must be a public monopoly like E-ZPass. It could be less like Big Brother and more like the Hertz (NU)1 Club or the Visa Gold Card. Car-rental and credit-card companies already give privileges to customers with good records and the willingness to share confidential information. If you sign up for Hertz's express service, you can avoid all lines and drive away in a $30,000 car in less time than it takes to get a driver's license. To judge from the ease with which driver's licenses were obtained illegally by the Sept. 11 hijackers, there is probably less fraud at Hertz than at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Credit-card companies could issue travel-identity cards imprinted with fingerprints or retinal scans. The companies would have to follow strict standards overseen by federal aviation-security officials.

The federal government could even issue its own trusted-traveler card, too, and provide it free to people unable or unwilling to get a credit card. Or there could be government subsidies for low-income people who wanted the cards from private companies. The point would be to make the cards available to everyone and assuage civil libertarians by giving people an alternative to Big Brother.

We would have no problem with ID cards issued by private companies, said Adam Thierer, director of telecommunications studies at the Cato Institute. In fact, a number of companies already utilize such private identifiers. What makes a government-mandated or issued ID card so objectionable is the coercive element behind it and the threat of potential abuses by government officials once massive volumes of personal data are in federal databases.