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Real ID: You Can Still Fight It
toupsz writes "Bill Scannell has created a website where anyone and everyone can fax their senators regarding the Real ID Act. Note that the act is up for vote on Tuesday, May 10th!
All those against the Act might want to go to Bill's site: UnrealID.com.
Thanks, Cory from BoingBoing!"
I mean seriously, what is so bad? Is everyone really buying into that Big Brother Crap where the government is going to know everywhere we go and shiat?
Most European Countries use ID's like this already.
Bruce Schneier's weblog has some thoughts on RealID and why it's a terrible idea and won't increase security. Highly recommended.
All movements for social change begin as missions, evolve into businesses, and end up as rackets.
The minority party in the Senate isn't nearly so toothless as you make it sound. Every vote counts, and with the filibuster rules, the minority party wields a significant amount of influence.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
It was a dupe, so it was deleted.
If you actually care, scroll down and read the original story. Otherwise, get on with life and stop being so paranoid.
The line item veto was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, so I don't see how this would be any good to Bush, who by the way supports the bill.
Check out Section 102, which allows the Secretary of Homeland Security "the authority to waive, and shall waive, all laws such Secretary, in such Secretary's sole discretion, determines necessary to ensure expeditious construction of the barriers and roads under this section." It also prevents any oversight or judicial review of those actions.
I always wanted to be above the law. Now, to become Secretary of Homeland Security...
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Peak oil is not a conspiracy. Peak Oil
At this point there is nothing that can stop the passage of REAL ID short of a line item veto when it reaches the presidents desk .. and that's simply not going to happen.
It's part of the spending bill, which just so happens to be a war bill, and was passed by some 350-50 margin in the house. If you think the Senate is gonna vote an 80 billion spending bill down you need your head examined.
Bush will sign this into law even tho he doesn't want to, because if he doesn't, he'll never get anything through the Judicial committee. Sensenbrenner pretty much drew a line in the sand after the Pres promished him last November that he would get the opportunity to bring it to the floor after effectively demanding it be removed from the 9/11 bill. In some ways, the white house hopes to use this to leverage the immigration reform Bush has talked about twice.
I stole this
What we need to do is change the reason this is happening.
This bill got slammed before, The ONLY reason it is going to make it into law ( and it will make it ) is because its attached to a huge military spending bill.
Neither side at this point wants to hamper our military by killing this bill so this law will pass no matter what you do ( ok maybe thats being over dramatic but its pretty close to true )
What can we do that would prevent this and half the other useless laws that get passed each year?
We need to voice our opinion against unrelated laws being piggy-backed together to get things past the general public and congress.
It should not be possible to have 2 laws totally unrelated in the same action!!! Congress should not be able to attach a law banning you from eating hotdogs to a law funding the federal goverment.
Its biases, deceptive but in todays congress a very common practice..
"Hey you, yea you republican, Yea if you get your people to vote for this democratic bill giving us all raises, we will let you piggy-back that important bill we vetoed last year to ban those evil hotdogs you hate so much, You know I rub your back you rub mine?"
Personal Website
Please try the website (now /.'d :-/) before commenting. The site does not provide a form fax where you fill in only your name and address. You must write your own text. Now they do provide a few bullet points to talk about, but the fax will be in your own words. I don't think they will all be "basically the same". I, myself, commented on an issue not mentioned in the bullet points.
LLM
Annoy a Conservative...
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
If I'm looking a the right Senate bill, the Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act for Defense, the Global War on Terror, and Tsunami Relief, 2005, it appears that the offending Real ID Act portion has been removed.
Have you read my blog lately?
Section 203 of the bill requires the linking of motor vehicle databases including all moving violations.
Remember the days of speeding through Wyoming or Texas, paying the fine right there when you got caught and not having to report it back on your home state insurance?
Well, those days are over.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yeah, better protest... reading the act, the card will require awful, intrusive things like
An adress of current residence
A signature (oh, no!)
A photograph (the horror!)
and... wait for it... a DRIVERS LICENSE NUMBER.
Those bastards! How dare they force my driver's license to reveal confidential information like my driver's license number! It's a crime against humanity, I tell you?
Seriously, though. I have applied for drivers license in two states and neither of them will have to change a thing under this law, except being overseen by a federal organization. Maybe this means I'll finally stop getting jury summons for a state I haven't lived in in three years.
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
It's the same reason why directly requiring states to raise their drinking ages to 21 is unconstitutional, but withholding highway funds for states that decline to do so is not.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
1. Hand-write a letter (that means in handwriting - I know, low-tech, but it works) stating your opposition and the reasons.
2. A polite phone call stating the same.
In both cases, be sure to mention that this an issue you care about strongly and will remember it during the next election.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Hand written letters, sent by US Mail, postmarked from the house member's district or senator's state, individually written and uniquely phrased, from a whole lot of different people, expressing their disapproval. Emails and faxes are generally given little or no weight because they require almost no time investment to send. Phone calls are only slightly better than emails or faxes. Old-fashioned letters in large enough quantities do make a difference.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Here is the message template that eff.org (Electronic Freedom Foundation) provides to write your representatives to speak out against the REAL ID Act. Use this if you're having trouble thinking of what to say. I know I'm encouraging thoughtless messages to congress, but hey, too bad for the idiots that support this bill:
------------------
I am a constituent who cares about privacy and national security, and I urge you to oppose the REAL ID Act provisions of the House emergency supplemental spending bill. The REAL ID Act creates a de facto "national ID," threatening our privacy, security, and the principles of federalism that safeguard both.
National identification systems are prone to abuse at every step of their creation and use. The REAL ID Act would establish an enormous national database of ID holders, where even a small percentage of errors would cause major social disruption. Also, the ID would function as an internal passport that would be shown before accessing planes, trains, national parks, and court houses - an irresistible target for forgers and identity thieves. The Act also requires IDs to include "common machine-readable technology," which would likely include controversial radio-frequency identification (RFID) technologies that can broadcast personal data to passersby. Worst of all, the REAL ID Act would divert resources from security measures that could actually work.
Moreover, states do not want this kind of system. A similar program called "MATRIX" recently failed because states abandoned it due to privacy concerns. This is an example of federalism at work. We should respect a state's decision to protect its citizens' privacy, not conscript it into an ill-conceived national system.
I hope that you will work to strip the REAL ID Act provisions from the emergency supplemental spending bill. Thank you for your time.
-------------
With the first link, the chain is forged.
I noticed several people not understanding why this is bad. Here are some excerpts from the bill:
`(1) IN GENERAL- Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the Secretary of Homeland Security shall have the authority to waive, and shall waive, all laws such Secretary, in such Secretary's sole discretion, determines necessary to ensure expeditious construction of the barriers and roads under this section.
`(2) NO JUDICIAL REVIEW- Notwithstanding any other provision of law (statutory or nonstatutory), no court, administrative agency, or other entity shall have jurisdiction--
`(A) to hear any cause or claim arising from any action undertaken, or any decision made, by the Secretary of Homeland Security pursuant to paragraph (1); or
`(B) to order compensatory, declaratory, injunctive, equitable, or any other relief for damage alleged to arise from any such action or decision.'.
Secretary of Homeland Security can do what he wants, and nobody has any recourse at ALL. He wanst to put in land mines, nothing we can do about it. Wants to spend 80 Billion dollars a year patrolling our borders, nothing he can do about it.
It errods Attorney General position by giving the Secertary of Homeland security the same power. Bear in mind the attorny general has checks and balances that the Secretary of Homeland Security does not.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
What in the mother fucking hell is wrong with these people? No judicial review? Since when do we remove a major check and balance from the American system? Just let this Homeland security guy play cowboy with no oversite from other factions of government?
How completely, absolutely UNAMERICAN this Sensenbrenner person is. Has no grasp of the long term impact things like this will be to the US. Has no place in our government.
Yah buddy, I said it, get out of our country since you obviously don't respect what made our country great.
------------------
SEC. 102. WAIVER OF LAWS NECESSARY FOR IMPROVEMENT OF BARRIERS AT BORDERS.
Section 102(c) of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (8 U.S.C. 1103 note) is amended to read as follows:
`(c) Waiver-
`(1) IN GENERAL- Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the Secretary of Homeland Security shall have the authority to waive, and shall waive, all laws such Secretary, in such Secretary's sole discretion, determines necessary to ensure expeditious construction of the barriers and roads under this section.
`(2) NO JUDICIAL REVIEW- Notwithstanding any other provision of law (statutory or nonstatutory), no court, administrative agency, or other entity shall have jurisdiction--
`(A) to hear any cause or claim arising from any action undertaken, or any decision made, by the Secretary of Homeland Security pursuant to paragraph (1); or
`(B) to order compensatory, declaratory, injunctive, equitable, or any other relief for damage alleged to arise from any such action or decision.'.
Off the top of my head:
Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Switzerland. The latter is particularly interesting as their militia system makes the "weapons" part equivalent to "assault rifles in every house".
You could probably use most of the West European countries as answers to this quiz...
For those outraged enough to complain to their House representatives for passing this crap to the senate in the first place, here's a link to the vote:
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2005/roll031.xml
If you're not living on the edge, you're just taking up space!
I thought you were kidding, then I actually read the thing. It's true. If this passes, the secretary will get to waive any and all laws as long as it is in the service of keeping illegal entrants outside of the US borders, and is excused from judicial review in any such decision he or she makes.
That is scary stuff. If not for the actual consequences, then for the precedent of waiving the entire body of law, and judicial review, at the sole discretion of a single person in government.
REAL ID also prohibits states from issuing driver's licenses to illegal aliens. This makes no sense, and will only result in these illegal aliens driving without licenses -- which isn't going to help anyone's security.
Yeah, that's some REAL good insight.
The prohibition on issuing drivers licenses isn't about driving. It's about identity fraud - including election fraud.
In some states (when you can challenge a voter's identity at all) a driver's license is adequate proof of identity to respond to the challenge.
California (for instance), where a LOT of illegals vote (often multiply), recently almost passed a law explicitly granting illegals the right to be issued a driver's license with no special markings to indicate that they were anything other than a full citizen and resident at the indicated address.
There are a lot of security implications to issuing official identity cards to illegals and deliberately looking the other way about their status.
IMHO the way to spike this bill is to add a rider that:
- requires voters in federal elections to show the card as ID at the polls and give the number when registering to vote and when asking for an absentee ballot, and
- tie the state registration databases into a national system to insure that no vote is cast without a valid ID number and each ID number only votes once in a given election, and that each ID represents a real person who is still alive and has no other ID nuber.
That (combined with the security-related federal checks on the database) would effectively spike a number of forms of voting fraud. Current legislators were elected under a system WITH the fraud. So even the honest ones will worry about how much fraud their party machines might have used to get them their seats, and whether they'd be voting themselves out. B-)
What I'd expect of such a rider:
- The Rs would be for it. (They believe the Ds are the major beneficiaries of such fraud and thus the Rs would benefit from the cleanout of the voter rolls.) But many of them are against other personal-info probing aspects of a National ID system. So they'd push for including the rider (and given their majority in congress might succeed). But many would vote against the bill even with the rider.
- Successfully adding the rider would convince a lot of Ds to vote against the bill containing it, because they too believe they are the beneficiaries of machine politics.
Together these two effects might raise enough nays to kill the bill.
Sounds like it's too late for this go-around. But if the ID bill does pass, and the system is deployed, it will be hard for a congresscritter to justify voting against a new every-voter-counts-ONCE act to use it to reduce election fraud. So the spectre of such use can be brought up when calling your congresscritter (if you think he's corrupt) and it might work as well as if the rider WERE present.
Of course you'll have to couch such arguments as using the card to harass minorities and such at the voting booth. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Until a few years ago you were correct, hand written letters go the most weight. However this is no longer the case.
Now any letter is unopened for several weeks, while they carefully check it for various poisons. (well anthrax and the like which are not exactly poison, but are deadly)
Email is now preferred, everyone has email. Most people do not own a fax machine, though they are also liked. Phone calls work too, but they take more time.
Make sure that you give your home address. Not a P.O. box, but a real address where you get mail. They will respond with a letter to that address for everything you send if you are in their area. If you not in their area they will forward your letter to your representative from that area who will respond.
http://zabasearch.com/ this pulled up everyone i knows info, this sucks.
"Just like we had no obligation to the rest of the world in both world wars. we went in not because we were obligated, but because it was the right thing to do."
We entered WW I because the Germans sank the Lusitania. Even though they published a full page ad in American Newspapers warning people sailing to Britain that any ship carrying war goods was subject to sinking, (which the Lusitania was), when it was sunk with americans onboard we got sucked into the war.
We entered WW II because of Pearl Harbor.
Before BOTH incidents the majority of people here in the US were Isolationalist. Doing the "right" thing, had nothing to do with our entrance into either war.
"and if we were in iraq for the oil, we sure as hell wouldn't be paying opec's prices for it."
I'd suggest you read Wolfowitz's papers for the Project for a New American Century to understand why we invaded Iraq. Iraq not only has the 2nd largest oil reserves, but being centrally located in the middle east it is the perfect place to have permanent military bases.
Keep in mind this was written in the 1990's long before 9/11 and the whole preemptive strike/WMD
tale.
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
Here in MA everyone gets carded (normally with one's driver's license) to buy a pack a smokes. A friend of my has had many stores scan in the PDF417 bar code on the back of his license. When he questioned why some said it was the law, others said it was to guard against fake IDs. The fact is decoding this bar code is a trivial matter and it contains your name, address, date of birth, license number and license type/restrictions. All this information is now property of the store. BTW, he ended up duct taping the bar code and no one has refused to sell him anything.
So, for example, do you thing insurance companies would pay for a list of smokers?
A few years ago there was a guy who slipped and injuried himself at a Ralph's market. When he sued they used the data from his shopping card (as in the beer and wine he bought) against him.
To go from carding for smokes and beer to everything is a very small technological step. All the tools are in place. Thing about stores like Home Depot that sell some dangerous stuff when used incorrectly. I could see RealID being slowly extended over time, item by item, to cover any and all purchases all in the name of protection from "terrorists".
The fake image of the "Real ID" card indicates that the card will contain information such as Religion and Occupation. It will not. Read the bill. FUD.
I could see religion being added in the future. The "Radical Right" aka "Christian Right" would say it's a good thing so, in case of an accident, the proper religious person could be summoned. Of course the inverse would be it ending up like a system in Nazi Germany with Star of David or upside-down pink triangle. Maybe add a crescent for current times. Before anyone says this could never happen, that's what most people thought of the Holocaust.
Oppression does not happen in one big swoop, but in very small steps. IMO RealID is one of those steps.
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST
Sweden and Switzerland are not the same country.