Ani MollerOne o'clock, two o'clock, three o'clock rock

This week US Congress passed a bill for standardised federal IDs – the Real ID bill. The proposed Real ID will not be a replacement for a driver’s licence, state ID, or passport, but will instead be required to do absolutely anything with that involves dealing with a government department – applying for a driver’s licence, collecting social security, etc. They will also be required to board planes, but get this – states can opt out of this programme, but their residents will have to find alternative methods of identification to fly domestically. What percentage of Americans do you know with passports, and how many will be able to get them without a Real ID card in the future?

While in theory this is not a bad idea (why have various forms of ID when you could just have a standardised one), THIS IS A VERY, VERY BAD IDEA. There will be far too much information on these cards which I have no doubt will be used in ways that people will not appreciate.

The information that will be contained on the cards at a minimum will be:

• Name
• Address
• Social Security number
• Birthdate
• Sex
• ID number
• Digital photograph
• Digital signature

No problem with that, right? That’s not much more than the current driver’s licences. However, there are talks of adding fingerprints and retinal scans (!!!). The cards will also have some form of machine-readable technology, which could be a chip but has been discussed as the possibility of RFID. What this means is that one day you could be walking down the street, walk past a lamp post with an RFID reader in it which would beam your location back to whoever wants that information. You might think that is a bit far fetched, but would be nothing stopping the government from doing that. If RFID is introduced into the ID cards, anything could happen from a distance without your knowledge. If they have to be placed into a machine to be read, well that is something different.

I don’t think there is much wrong with having a standardised card, but the reasons for this being passed into law are wrong. Spending millions of dollars “consolidating” databases might seem like a good idea, but this is happening because of so-called terrorism. Bear in mind that the 9/11 suspects all had INS issued visas, if I recall correctly. This is not going to do anything to stop terrorism. This is just going to make Americans lives difficult, and start the reality that is 1984.

So, how did this get passed into law? It was attached to an $82 billion military spending bill. What god-fearing patriot is going to vote against that?

Also note-worthy, at the time of posting this issue is not even anywhere on CNN.com, aside from a brief mention of the military bill being passed, but it mentions nothing about the federal ID cards. There is something wrong with American media.

More information:
No Real Debate for Real ID
How Real ID will affect you
Analysts: ‘Real ID’ Act Could Help ID Thieves

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 12th, 2005 at 12:18 pm and is filed under Current Events. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site. Log in to make commenting easier!