(FORTUNE Small Business) – If you're drinking with Steve Brill, have whatever you want, but he's drinking Tab. He starts right in first thing in the morning ("I don't drink coffee"), downing a six-pack in a typical workday. Not Diet Coke, not Diet Pepsi--Tab. "Because it's tougher," he says, lifting a pink, dented can to his lips in his corner office at Rockefeller Center. "It's not sweet. It's really bracing."

Brill, 53, is not a warm and fuzzy guy. He's a lawyer, after all. And a journalist. And an entrepreneur. "The preternatural big man" is how media critic Michael Wolff described him recently in New York magazine. "The consummate know-it-all." And Wolff was writing before Brill announced his latest venture, a privately issued national ID card that would certify suspicion-free citizens.

Brill grew up in Queens, N.Y. (his dad owned a liquor store), then attended Deerfield Academy on a full scholarship ("I had friends there who, when I said I lived in Queens, asked where that was. And they lived in Manhattan"), then Yale, then Yale Law School. "I could have walked into a job at any New York law firm I wanted to," he says. Instead he wrote speeches for Mayor John Lindsay, was a columnist for New York and Esquire, and wrote a big book about the Teamsters. Then he founded a national newspaper, The American Lawyer, whose lasting achievement was the discovery that there is drama and intrigue in the business of lawyering. Two years after that he turned 30.

The American Lawyer became the foundation for a multimedia empire that grew to include a stable of regional legal newspapers and Court TV, Brill's share of which reportedly was worth $20 million when he cashed out in 1997. Brill says that number's not even close.

"So tell me the right number," I say.

"No."

Okay. Whatever it was, Brill blew some portion of it--"about 5%," he allows--on Brill's Content. (Co-investor Barry Diller took a hit too.) The magazine's premise: A mass readership would love to see media types like yours truly exposed in their own spotlight, stunned and blinking. I suggest to Brill that it was a dumb idea. He disagrees. "It just didn't work," he says.

Neither did Contentville, Brill's attempt to sell the contents of books, magazines, and newspapers on the Internet. (This time George Soros was a co-investor.) Two duds equals a losing streak, which heightens interest in Brill's new company, Verified Identity Card. Brill wants to sell you a little something to flash at airport and office security guards, a card that says you're free to move about the scary world Brill describes in his latest big book, After: How America Confronted the September 12 Era. And this from a card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union.

"That gives me the creeps," I say.

Brill doesn't pause. "Would it give you the creeps to have a card that wouldn't make you wait on that line downstairs?"

"Maybe. What do I have to do to earn the card?" "You have to not be on a terrorist watch list. You have to be able to prove you are who you say you are. And you have to not have been convicted ... within the last five years of a major felony."

Sounds ambitious--much more so than another idea Brill heard about recently: a cable channel for people who like to watch gambling and don't get enough on ESPN. "It's actually a pretty good idea," Brill says, "but I wouldn't think ten seconds about it because it's just not anything I want to do. I'm really intrigued by the issues that deal with the ID card. I love the privacy issues, the civil liberties issues, the security issues.... I'll go to those meetings all day."