What’s Behind the REAL ID Act?
This blog supplements Chapter 2 of America in Peril
16 January 2008
Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff rated a nationally syndicated article January 16th to plug the REAL ID Act which Bush signed into law on 11 May 2005. The Act mandates standardized state driver’s licenses as the official piece of identification effective 31 December 2009. After that date, non-compliant licenses, or identification cards for non-drivers, will not be valid ID for boarding commercial aircraft, admission to nuclear power plants, or for entry into any other federal or federally-regulated facility. To obtain one of these licenses a person must present proof of identity, verification of Social Security status, proof of residency, and proof of citizenship or legal-alien status. The license or ID card must contain at least four pieces of biometric identification that are machine-readable by all states and the federal government.
Chertoff uses a form of propaganda called “implied truths” in his article. He asks three rhetorical questions: “Should banks cash checks from people who cannot prove who they are? Should parents hire babysitters they know nothing about? Should airlines let passengers on board without validating their identity?”
Of course we all know the answer to those questions but Chertoff doesn’t say the present documents aren’t adequate. Instead he implies inadequacy with another rhetorical question – “But are [the present] documents necessarily reliable?” – and then asks us to consider several facts:
- Fact: All except one of the 9/11 hijackers carried government ID that helped them board planes and remain in the country illegally. Anyone who has seriously studied the events leading up to 9/11 knows it was the officials who are supposed to examine the IDs that goofed – all the way from a traffic cop issuing a citation to the lack of communication between the CIA and FBI.
- Fact: Last year immigration and customs officials charged hundreds of illegal workers with identification document fraud. Sounds like they are doing what they are supposed to do. Nevertheless, Chertoff doesn’t show how the REAL ID Act will prevent document fraud except for a requirement to make licenses harder to counterfeit. Such efforts haven’t prevented counterfeiting of US currency.
- Fact: In 2005, “identity theft cost American households $64 billion, and 28 percent of those incidents likely required a driver’s license to perpetrate.” (emphasis added) Millions of drivers’ licenses are stolen annually and the REAL ID Act will help identity theft by consolidating all the pertinent information. There is nothing in the Act requiring encryption, and that has never proved effective anyway.
The REAL ID Act is actually an end run around Congress. Following 9/11, the Bush administration tried to create a National ID Card. Congress wouldn’t go for that because of privacy concerns and the implications of a police state. The Homeland Security Act of 2002, which created the Department of Homeland Security, contained a rider prohibiting such a card. To get around that prohibition, the Bush administration proposed legislation requiring the states to standardize their primary identification document. Although each state will have its own database, those databases will be interactive among all states and the federal government. With today’s computer technology, the entire lot can be accessed with a single query.
All of this came together as the REAL ID Act. It was slipped through Congress without debate as an attachment to war-funding authorizations for Afghanistan and Iraq. By the end of 2009 we will, in effect, have a National ID Card for the USA.
Bob Aldridge
My book America in Peril may be ordered from Hope Publishing House, P.O. Box 60008, Pasadena, CA 91116. (360 pages, $16.95 plus $3 shipping)