What is "Real ID" and what will it do real bad to you if and when it's put into place a few years from now?
posted 01.05.06
REAL ID = NATIONAL ID = REAL TROUBLE
On Tuesday, May 10th, 2005, the U.S. Senate voted on the implementation of a national ID card system without ever debating the issue. The Real ID Act is nothing less than a Real National ID Act. The only thing left to the individual states is which pretty picture they will choose to put on the card: everything else will be controlled by Washington DC bureaucrats.
What does this mean for America?
1. Dead cops
The Real ID Act requires that you give your permanent home address: no PO boxes; no exceptions. What about judges, police, and undercover cops? Oops. Hey Senators, let's endanger our police and judges!
2. Stolen identities
Our new IDs will have to make their data available through a "common machine-readable technology." That will make it easy for anybody in private industry to snap up the data on these IDs. Bars swiping licenses to collect personal data on customers will be just the tip of the iceberg as every convenience store learns to grab that data and sell it to Big Data for a nickel. It won't matter whether the states and federal government protect the data—it will be harvested by the private sector, which will
keep it in a parallel database not subject even to the limited privacy rules in effect for the government.
3. Government spying
Real ID requires the states to link their databases together for the mutual sharing of data from these IDs. This is, in effect, a single seamless national database, available to all the states and to the federal government.
4. Papers, please
If Real ID is implemented, our nation will join the ranks of the old Soviet Union, Communist China, and Vietnam by issuing its citizens a national ID card. The Machine Readable Zone may come in the form of a 2-dimensional bar code—but the Department of Homeland Security, which will be crafting the regulations implementing Real ID, has made clear that it would prefer to see a remotely readable RFID chip. That would make private-sector access and systematic tracking even more easy and likely.
This national ID card will make observation of citizens easy but won't do much about terrorism. The fact is, identity-based security is not an effective way to stop terrorism. ID documents do not reveal anything about evil intent—and even if they did, determined terrorists will always be able to obtain fraudulent documents
5. Unsafe roads
Once upon a time, a driver's license was a license to drive a motor vehicle. Turning driver's licenses into national identity cards will actually make our roads more dangerous: by barring illegal immigrants from getting a driver's license, Real ID means more illegal immigrants will now drive without any training or certification. Your insurance company is certain to be understanding.
What's wrong with the Senate?
In order to make a single irresponsible Congressman with totalitarian leanings happy, the Senate leadership let him write the bill and then slipped it into a another bill, one that would continue to take care of our fighting men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan. Supporting our troops means making sure they come home to a free nation, not a surveillance state.
Reprinted by permission of the author from UnrealID.com. Bill Scannell is an American citizen who is opposed to unfettered government snooping in all of our lives.
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Read No Place to Hide by Robert O'Harrow, Jr.
"This is not a book about theory; O'Harrow introduces us to the real players and programs that are tracking us all."
—Richard A. Clarke, author of Against All Enemies
Read How to Be Invisible: The Essential Guide to Protecting Your Personal Privacy by J.J. Luna
Luna explains "how lack of privacy can kill you—literally...what any private investigator can find out about you, within minutes, if you fail to protect your privacy...why 'your journey to invisibility must begin with the way in which you receive your mail'...the one overriding rule you must never break 'as long as you live' if you wish to even minimally protect yourself from would-be troublemakers."
—Laissez Faire Books
Gifts Books on liberty All books—and all else, also
