We often take the small pieces of paper in our life for granted. We simply accept lists and documents as a disposable—perhaps recyclable—facets of our everyday life. Media studies scholars, however, have begun taking these vernacular genres more seriously, asking what they can tell us about how information is structured and about how people understand their relationship to one another and to the state. While digital technologies have promised us a paperless future, statistics show that we now produce and consume more paper than ever. The weight of paperwork is particular profound in Lebanon, where bureaucratic processes demand that everything be on paper. Governmental institutions like the General Security Directorate (al-Amn al-‘am) are filled with mountains of paper, and employees shuffles these stacks of paper between rooms and buildings in large suitcases. In this presentation, I ask that we take the reality of documents in Lebanon seriously and begin developing a language for discussing the historical experience of documents across the Middle East. The development of documents as a legible genre in Lebanon resulted from technologies that allowed for rapid reproduction, like typewriters and Xerox machines, but also built on a tradition of paperwork that dates back to the Ottoman Empire. This presentation focuses on the case of the national identity card in Lebanon, which has been a contentious document since its inception. These ID cards were the basis for assassinations during the Civil War (1975-1990), when competing militias murdered people according to the sectarian identity indicated on the card. ID cards in Lebanon no longer reveal religious identity, but through roadblocks and check points, they are still used as a way of communicating belonging, especially in light of the two million Syrian refugees who currently live in the country. As a way of understanding how these ID cards have materialized identity, I study a series of “ID card scandals” that occurred during the Civil War. These scandals involved forging documents or acquiring legal ID cards through illegal means. Drawing on a wide-range of newspaper articles from the early years of the Civil War and a corpus of oral history interviews, I show how these scandals—which broke the bureaucratic process in place to regulate documents in the country—reveal a great deal about the stakes of the material world and about how power operated at a time of tremendous uncertainty.