| March 26, 2007 Real ID, Real Crap by Deirdre Helfferich, Ester Republic The Real ID Act has been one of those examples of totalitarian stupidity that I've been meaning to get around to blasting in my editorial column ever since I first heard about it. For those of you who don't know, Real ID is a national identification card system that would federalize and standardize state driver's licenses (down to the color and fonts permissible). The card would include information like name, birth date, residence address, sex, a photograph, and an ID number. Homeland Security could later add more requirements, like a fingerprint or a retinal scan. The card also has to have "physical security features designed to prevent tampering, counterfeiting, or duplication of the document for fraudulent purposes." It would be a de facto mandatory national ID card. While national ID cards or papers are not uncommon in the world, there's been strong resistance to them in this country, mostly, I think, because we have an ingrained distrust of government in general. And these days, we've got good reason to be distrustful. As American Civil Liberties Union Legislative Counsel Timothy Sparapani said, "The Real ID Act is the marriage from hell ... these regulations marry the efficiency of those who ran the Katrina recovery with the people who brought you long lines at the DMV." But the government has tested this system out already: biometric identification is being used in Fallujah to control the lives of the population there. Biometric technologies render the body as ID, and, according to John Measor and Benjamin Muller in their paper, "Securitizing the Global Norm of Identity: Biometric Technologies in Domestic and Foreign Policy," "biometric technologies serve to narrow the field of politics, wherein the citizen is increasingly rendered a suspect." This concern with the attitude of the state toward the citizen (or noncitizen) has been echoed in other studies. The Centre for Science, Society and Citizenship formed a special project in 2005 to study the ethical, legal, and social aspects of biometric technologies in 2005: BITE, or the Biometric Indentification Technology Ethics project (www.biteproject.org). Their Rand Report outlines key concerns with biometric identification technology use: informational privacy (function or mission creep, wherein the original purpose for obtaining the info gradually expands to other uses, such as has happened with the Social Security number; tracking; misuse of data), physical privacy (stigmatization), and religious objections. Before we go charging ahead with a national ID plan of dubious value that could give the government a hugely invasive handle on our personal lives, we had better be damn sure we understand its ramifications-and I, for one, don't particularly want the government, this government in particular, being able to track me by my eyeballs or screw up my records on a national basis. It won't be cheap, either, although only $40 million in federal funds was set aside for it when the act was passed in 2005. The cost is now up to an estimated $23 billion, with the cost to the states around $10.7 to $14.6 billion and the cost to individuals (not counting federal income taxes) about $7.8 billion-that's beyond what we pay now. Certain problems, like how to share all that database info, how to protect it from identity theft, how to verify information, etc., are dumped on the states by the Department of Homeland Security. According to the regulations being shoved down our throats, "DHS believes that it would be outside its authority to address this issue within this rulemaking." Well, isn't that special. |
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