REAL ID

What would cause groups like NGA, the National Rifle Association, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and numerous religious and privacy organizations to unite against a cause? It is called the REAL ID Act, and, yet, many people have no idea what it is. My assertion is "if you know what it is and how it will affect you" then you WILL have an opinion and you WILL want something done about it.

REAL ID is a federal law passed in 2005 (and now being implemented) that imposes national standards for state-issued driver licenses in order to be accepted by the federal government for "official purposes." What official purposes, you might ask? In order to travel on an airplane, open a bank account, collect Social Security payments, or take advantage of nearly any government service you will need a federally approved ID card. . . in essence, a national ID card. The Department of Homeland Security is the governing power which has the power to set standards and determine whether state drivers' licenses pass muster. Only those IDs approved by the Department of Homeland Security can be accepted for official purposes by the feds. Many would argue that this new law doesn’t constitute a national id because the law only sets forth national standards and leaves the issuance of the cards and the maintenance of the database in state’s hands. However, these are uniform national standards with linked databases and these cards are MANDATORY if you wish to travel outside the US. We already have an ID that is mandatory for traveling outside of the US and it is called a PASSPORT.

The REAL ID (http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?c109:3:./temp/~c109teRrdV:e47420:) was a piece of legislation that was hurried through the legislative process with little debate and no hearings. It garnered passage and executive approval because it was appended to a bill providing tsunami relief and military appropriations. Now that state-wide implementation is being required, several congressional leaders have come out against the Real ID regulations, arguing that the provisions pass the cost on to taxpayers, do not improve national security, and do not protect the privacy of Americans. From a statement issued by Senator Leahy (D-VT): “The Bush administration's Real ID program will not only lead to long lines at every DMV across the country, it will impose a massive unfunded mandate on state governments while offering absolutely no federal privacy protections to our citizens."

Identity theft is a real problem in this country. According to identitytheft.info, it is the fastest growing crime in the United States with over 15 million people victimized per year. That is approximately 7% of all adults having their identities stolen with about $3500 loss per victim. , “Close to 100 million additional adults have their personal identifying information placed at risk of identity theft each year when records maintained in government and corporate databases are lost or stolen. The sophistication level of professional identity thieves involved in organized crime continues to grow along with the methods they develop. From individually tailored phishing and vishing scams, to increasingly successful hacks of corporate and government databases, to elaborate networks of botnets designed to hijack millions of computers without any trace, there is an ever-increasing threat to all Americans.” REAL ID mandates that every state's database - containing Social Security cards, copies of birth certificates, etc. - be linked and accessible to tens of thousands of DMV employees. By making our personal information accessible to countless individuals across the country, Real ID exposes it to misuse and identity theft. And these databases will prove to be tantalizing. If you still aren’t concerned, google “dmv employees arrested.” There are more than 2.3 million results for that query . The DMV is the point of entry for your scanned birth certificate/passport/social security card. From there, your scanned documents go to the IT shop which stores the data; Database Administrators, Server Administrators, and even help desk staff. All it takes is the right question with the right amount of money to any person with access to the database. To see how secure this database was, I spoke to IT Department heads of various State Agencies. One of them said, “Your data is as secure as the person most likely to take a bribe at the institution you are interacting with.”

Real ID won't just cost you your privacy. Once the IDs and database are in place, their uses will inevitably expand to facilitate a wide range of surveillance activities. Remember, the Social Security number started innocently enough, but it is now required for a host of government services. Private companies now have access to social security information to create massive databases of personal information. A national ID poses similar dangers; for example, because "common machine-readable technology" will be required on every ID, the government and businesses will be able to easily read your private information off the cards in myriad contexts, allowing the government to track and monitor law-abiding citizen's every move in their daily lives like we are criminals on parole.

The sad thing is that the U.S. Constitution was written to prohibit the federal government from taking such drastic steps. The long-forgotten Tenth Amendment says that powers not explicitly delegated to the Feds "are reserved to the states" or to the people. Former Republican U.S. Representative Bob Barr said, "A person not possessing a Real ID Act-compliant identification card could not enter any federal building, or an office of his or her congressman or senator or the U.S. Capitol. This effectively denies that person their fundamental rights to assembly and to petition the government as guaranteed in the First Amendment."

To date, 24 states have enacted resolutions or binding legislation prohibiting participation in Real ID with another 8 states having pending legislation. The State of Utah passed a resolution that states that REAL ID is,“ in opposition to the Jeffersonian principles of individual liberty, free markets, and limited government." It further states that "the use of identification-based security cannot be justified as part of a 'layered' security system if the costs of the identification 'layer'--in dollars, lost privacy, and lost liberty--are greater than the security identification provides" and "the "common machine-readable technology" required by the REAL ID Act would convert state-issued driver licenses and identification cards into tracking devices, allowing computers to note and record people's whereabouts each time they are identified.” The resolution also holds, “ the requirement that states maintain databases of information about their citizens and residents and then share this personal information with all other states will expose every state to the information security weaknesses of every other state and threaten the privacy of every American" and "the REAL ID Act wrongly coerces states into doing the federal government's bidding by threatening to refuse non-complying states' citizens the privileges and immunities enjoyed by other states' citizens." To reiterate, 24 STATES are protesting REAL ID. http://www.realnightmare.org/news/105/

Real ID suffers from serious flaws that will affect the rights of every American. Any way you look at it, this national ID scheme is a bad law that needs to be scrapped. It is enormously expensive, offers little to no benefits, and places our personal information at risk for use in identify theft. It's not too late to fight back—state legislators can still resist implementing the Real ID Act and force Congress' hand. Call your state legislators NOW.