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IPFS News Link • National Security

REAL ID Puts Personal and National Security At Risk

• https://reason.com

Your new national ID is hacker-bait that complicates journeys but won't make you any safer.

This month marks a year since a milestone in the adoption of what are effectively internal passports in the United States—a date that went unnoticed by most Americans. Starting last January, only residents of states that signed on to the federal government's REAL ID scheme were permitted to fly or enter federal buildings using their state ID.

Because every state ultimately surrendered to federal demands and agreed to issue standardized identification (though under a façade of local design and color), the ID cards in your pocket continue to work—at least until the full program kicks in during 2020.

"Starting January 22, 2018, travelers who do not have a license from a compliant state or a state that has been granted an extension...will be asked to provide alternate acceptable identification," warned the Department of Homeland Security. "If the traveler cannot provide an acceptable form of identification, they will not be permitted through the security checkpoint."

For years, amidst arguments over privacy and local control, many states remained defiant, with 32 states and territories hesitating to turn their driver's licenses into glorified federal identification documents as recently as 2016. But federal pressure, including the prospect of many Americans being turned away from airports and office buildings, caused them to cave one after another. Some, like Arizona, made compliant documents voluntary, so that people willing to forego passage through TSA checkpoints or access to federal buildings and facilities could also skip the new ID standards. That was enough to satisfy the feds and keep existing documents acceptable until 2020.

After that time, everybody who wants to travel by air or enter a Social Security office will have to have REAL ID-compliant documents in-hand. Or, they could just embrace the new reality and use U.S. passports for domestic travel as well as international trips. That would also make the feds happy.

"Starting October 1, 2020, every state and territory resident will need to present a REAL ID compliant license/ID, or another acceptable form of identification, for accessing Federal facilities, entering nuclear power plants, and boarding commercial aircraft," DHS adds. "The card, itself, must be REAL ID compliant unless the resident is using an alternative acceptable document such as a passport."

Like so much of what has changed about the laws and governance of the United States since the turn of the millennium, we have overwrought post-9/11 fears of terrorism to thank for REAL ID requirements passed in 2005.

"All but one of the Sept. 11 hijackers carried government IDs that helped them board planes and remain in the country illegally," huffed then-Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff in a 2008 op-ed. He brushed off concerns that they could have purchased the new IDs from the same corrupt officials who sold them many of the old ones. Prior to passage of the law, any sort of discussion was brushed-off.


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