Big Brother is Watching You: America's Real ID
By Don Monkerud
Get ready for the new America.
Within three years, you will have to round up your personal ID,
Social Security card, birth certificate, photo ID and a document
verifying your home address, and present them to the DMV to obtain a
new tamper-resistant driver's license, which will carry your
machine-readable, encoded personal information.
After the DMV verifies your documents against a federal database,
any new information - the Department of Homeland Security may add
new information in the future - everything will be stored on federal
databases. Failure to comply will result in cancellation of your
driver's license and prevent you from boarding a plane or entering a
federally protected building.
This is not a science fiction scenario, but the result of President
Bush signing the Real ID Act on May 11. To avoid congressional
debate, the GOP slipped the provision into an $82 billion military
spending bill to pay for continuing the military occupation of Iraq
and Afghanistan. Said to be necessary because most of the 19
hijackers responsible for 9/11 had some form of identification, the
bill supposedly will make us safer from a similar attack in the
future.
Passing Federal bills without debate is a dangerous practice because
the full ramifications can't be assessed by those passing the bills
or by voters. Groups such as the National Governors Association, the
Council of State Governments, and the American Association of Motor
Vehicle Administrators object to unnecessary bureaucracy and
retraining of staff and the National Council of State Legislatures
estimates an administrative cost of $500 to $700 million. The ACLU
raises issues relating to the use of personal information.
The law affects the status of immigrants and represents a major
rewriting of immigration law. How, for example, will a DMV clerk
verify the birth certificate of someone from a village in Mexico,
China, Africa or India? Without a database that contains every
suspected terrorist in the world, how will the government verify
that other information is legitimate?
The law will lead to undocumented immigrants driving without
licenses, training or information about the law, and will make it
impossible for them to obtain automobile insurance. What will happen
in Tennessee and Utah, and 11 other states that issue driver's
licenses to undocumented immigrants?
Meanwhile, laws protecting our personal information remain very
weak.
A national database with information that can be scanned like a
barcode will give businesses a new revenue stream from data
collection and sale to information brokers such as ChoicePoint and
LexisNexis. Currently some businesses obtain personal information
but the practice is not widespread; the Real ID Act will augment
this practice.
Identity theft will become easier as a host of digital documents are
input and stored by tens of thousands state employees, federal
agents and police. Information will be encoded, but the system can
be hacked or subverted. In 2004 a study discovered ten states with
licenses-for-bribes schemes and one creative thief in North Las
Vegas rammed his car through a DMV window and stole a computer with
information on 8,738 drivers.
We are led to believe that national IDs will make us safer just as
invading Iraq and searching grandmothers at airports have made us
safer. In the past, Americans were distrustful of a centralized
all-powerful state; that's what made us different from the USSR, but
today a campaign of fear is leading us to embrace surveillance and a
false sense of security.
The National ID law represents another tool for the government to
track its citizens. With the misnamed Patriot Act, the government
can legally monitor our mail, search our houses, check our reading
habits, and make us disappear without a trace for only a "suspicion"
of terrorism. And terrorism is being more widely defined to include
pro-environment activity. Not only is this a dangerous law, but in
the future such information could easily be used to punish
law-abiding dissenters and curtail legal political activity.
Copyright 2005
Don Monkerud Aptos, CA monkerud@cruzio.com
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