There has been a lot of talk pro and con to the government’s desire to have a Real ID system.

If passed, this would make it mandatory for everyone to have one identification card. Your driver’s license would be the card of choice. Big Brother could find your entire background history via this one form of ID. This idea was approved by Homeland Security after ruling out George W’s idea of branding all children at birth, and after ruling out Vice President Cheney’s idea of a bar code being stamped in the nostrils or rear ends of all Americans. As clever as the Real ID is, it has flaws. The biggest of which included identity theft or counterfeiting of the card.

So what is really the best way for our government to track us?

How can the CIA, FBI and all the other covert agencies make sure it’s really my 92-year-old aunt getting on a train or bus or plane, and not some geriatric terrorist with a bomb hidden in their catheter? I believe we should turn to science. It’s a proven fact that no two human beings in the world smell the same when passing gas.

I suggest that starting in the summer of 2008, all Americans whose last name begins with the letters A-L be rounded up in their homes, at work or out in the community and be forced to consume chili dogs until an adequate amount of ID gas is expelled. At this point government testers could trap a sample and send it to a secret military base in the desert. All samples could be sealed and kept until such time as someone needs to be identified. Once this process is completed, all Americans whose last names begin with letters M-Z can be rounded up and put through the same process.

When Americans asks for a plane ticket, a bus pass or any form of permission to use mass transit, they would only have to pass gas onto a special computer chip. The chip could then be screened by a scratch-and-sniff software disk and signals from the disk could be transmitted to the main base for identification.

This entire concept of human identification could fall under one single branch of our government. It could be called: Federal Agency Recognizing Terrorists. Or simply, FART for short.

Jack Freitas

Standish