Massachusetts Joins the Real ID Fight

In the battle against big government and the infamous Real ID, Massachusetts has hopped on board. In the words of State Senator Richard T. Moore, D-Uxbridge, "Historically, Americans have resisted the idea, which totalitarian governments have tended to do, of having a national ID. That's the broad philosophical issue. I don't think it's a good move and I would be reluctant to see why we are going to that step." And State Attorney General Martha Coakley thinks "it's a bad idea." Should be interesting to see how it gets voted.

Comments

Sadly...

[fyngyrz]

I have a nagging feeling that the real reason this is being resisted is because congress expected the states to bear the cost. If they ran it through again, 100% federally funded, I doubt there would be any significant resistance.

Re:Sadly...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually it is two fold. They are making the states implement it, but the money they steal from the citizens in the form on national taxes are being used to blackmail/ the states into implementing the ID. So if the states don't go along with their fascist idea of a national ID, the fed keeps the money and spends it in other states. Thus, your freedom is being sold off for your own taxes. God bless the government and legalized blackmail

Hyperbole much?

Re:Sadly...

[lawpoop]

Yeah, its not like these "totalitarian governments" already have me [seven different items].

I like the national ID because it arguable can fold services 1, 2, 4, and 7 into one stupid card and cut the bureaucracy. The whole idea behind Totalitarianism is to get rid of the bureaucracy and centralize power so that when the dictator says "jump", everyone jumps. The United States was founded on the concept of separation of powers, so that no part of the government would become overly powerful and tyrannical.

Sure, everyone hates to see their tax dollars wasted on duplication and inefficiency. But the opposite is *much*, *much* worse -- a totally efficient, effective government, where one strong, charming person who comes into power could send millions to their death with the stroke of pen. When you have a powerful government with little bureaucracy to slow down the functioning of governments, a tyrant can easily increase his own powers without anything slowing him down. Layers of government, separation of powers, the insanity of various forms and departments, are the boring, mundane details that protect us from concentration camps.

Re:Sadly...

[ihandler]

I guess I am getting tired of this argument since both sides are missing critical functional specs (so to speak). A national ID will never furnish any "security" and will, at best, marginally improve government ability to track individuals (assuming they can actually competently implement a system of the size needed). Our privacy has already been compromised by the government and zillions of corporations, opposing the national id protects nobody. The right wing nut cases in intelligence and law enforcement are lazy and think this is some type of magic bullet that is why this thing never dies.

On the other hand, the id is useful for delivering services to citizens, such as national health insurance or at least consolidating one's health records so that you never have to fill out the same idiotic form every time you visit a new doctor and your history is already there including the last time you had a tetanus shot. It will also be important if you end up unconscious in the ER and are allergic to the drug they think they need to give you immediately.

I believe it is more important to fight for legislation that demands that information is used properly for the right reasons and that all use of personal information be audited and available for individuals on demand. That combined with serious penalties for abuse, especially from the private sector (which I think does far more with this than the government) would be a much more potent way of addressing a national id.

Re:Sadly...

[lawpoop]

You are half-right in that the separation of powers that the Founder specified in the constitution is the division between the federal executive, legislative, and judicial branch. The other separation of powers that they specified is the separation between federal, state, and local governments. Supposedly, each is sovereign. We and any readers probably know how the sovereignty of the state and local governments has fared in the past 250+ years.

The point that I didn't make clear is that the various bureaucracies, for all their waste and inefficiency, *do* serve as a de facto check on the powers of government. The political scientist James Wilson talks about this. From that perspective, bureaucratic 'duplication' and fighting between agencies and levels of government are not entirely unwanted, if you are interested in separation of powers.

That's why I think projects like the Patriot Act, breaking down the walls between various federal, state, and local governments, or the CIA and FBI co-operating, are so insidious. We really don't want law enforcement working in perfect harmony or tandem, because then when some dictator-to-be shows up, he has a much easier time. When Blackwater troops are dispatched in New Orleans, for example, and the Governor of Louisiana and the Mayor of New Orleans have already ceded power to the President because of the national emergency, there is no oversight of Blackwater troops, aside from the executive branch. A personal, private republican guard is what every good dictator needs to do his dirty work. In this case, the seperation of powers between the federal, state, and local law enforcement, has been side stepped, and in a national emergency, the congress and the judiciary are just not involved. Add to that a national ID, and you have one-stop-shopping for rounding up dissidents.

Passport?

[KermodeBear]

Isn't a passport essentially the same as a national ID? It is physical proof of citizenship (and records where you've been, via stamps). Why not just issue everyone passports? What benefit would a new card/system have?

I'm probably missing something important, so I'm not trying to troll here.

Re:Passport?

[gstoddart]

Isn't a passport essentially the same as a national ID? It is physical proof of citizenship (and records where you've been, via stamps). Why not just issue everyone passports?

Cause you're not required to walk around with your passport to prove who you are at all times when you're within the country.

You're not supposed (at least according to that pesky Constitution) to be required to show ID everywhere you go within the US. But, that has largely been trampled upon since 9/11.

Cheers

Re:Passport?

[garcia]

I'm probably missing something important, so I'm not trying to troll here.

Yes, it's another tax to apply to the citizenry in order to keep them under the Federal Government's illegally far reaching arms. Sadly only a few of the states in this country are standing up to the Federal Government (regardless of the reason) in any way (medical marijuana, Federal ID, and in the past waiting till they forced DUI limits to be lowered).

Sadly most of the public has NO historical memory of the atrocities committed by oppressive regimes like Germany and Russia of less than 70 years ago. Yeah, History classes in HS sucked but you should have at least grasped SOME of this.

National ID == license to exist

[dazedNconfuzed]

National IDs are basically a license to exist.
If you can't show one on demand, you are detained (to wit: your participation in society is suspended) until your license to exist or one is issued, or you are removed from society.

Not exactly what the Founding Fathers had in mind when creating a free country.

Re:National ID == license to exist

[MightyMartian]

How often through history have the villainous and the thoughtless used temporary tragedies to institute permanent tyrannies. National IDs would not have prevented 9-11. Those people were in the US legally. What would have prevented 9-11 would have been the enormous "intelligence" bureaucracy doing its job, listening to its field agents, actually gathering intelligence and generally not sitting on its post-Cold War laurels. For goodness sakes, the US kept the Soviets at bay without need of National IDs.

Re:National ID == license to exist

[gad_zuki!]

>National IDs are basically a license to exist.

No, social security numbers are a license to exist. That along with yoru state ID and birth certificate. You're not getting too far in society without these. Lets not pretend that this is a new idea. If anything its a consolidation of the stuff that's already out there.

Also, my passport is my right to exist in other countries.

Re:National ID == license to exist

[Chris Burke]

The Founding Fathers were living in a country that had never been attacked with weapons of mass destruction.

And what fucking country are you living in that has?!

Please don't tell me that 6 years of non-stop fearmongering has caused those planes to morph into nukes in peoples' easily manipulated memories! Please!

Re:National ID == license to exist

[Rakishi]

The founding fathers were criminals with respect to the British government. They as a result tried to make a system which neither trusts the government (too easily corrupted) or the people (too easily swayed) fully.

The Founding Fathers were living in a country that had never been attacked with weapons of mass destruction. Neither has the US ever been attacked by such weapons, unless you count every single explosive as a WMD since if properly placed it could kill thousands. Hell my fist could likely kill thousands at once in some situations, say if I took out the support of a rickety platform on which they were standing.

I think we can be relatively safe in utterly denying them any voice in 21st century security discussions. Their views are now more relevant than ever since technology has magnified the potential of what they feared a hundred fold.

Anonymity is just the right to take away rights from your neighbors. And lack of it is the right of the government to take away the rights of those that disagree with it.

Re:National ID == license to exist

[m0rph3us0]

Yes. Clearly the Founding Fathers were never under the threat of a rag tag bunch of disorganized fanatics. They were merely under the threat of one of the greatest empires the world has ever known. I would hazard a guess that the threat the British Empire posed to the United States in 1776 was much greater than Al Qaeda could ever hope to be.

Consider two things, A) Foreign terrorists will not have a REAL ID since they are not citizens, B) Domestic terrorists are already here. Both of these problems are not solved by a REAL ID.

Also, everyone in the United States still lives in a country that has not been attacked by "weapons of mass destruction".

Re:National ID == license to exist

[MightyMartian]

You know what irritates me about this claim, it's that people (and by this I think you mean all those Mexicans which Americans love to love and hate) have been coming across the border for a long time now. Like all ad hoc explanations for creating a national ID system, it ignores history.

I'll be blunt, I can't imagine anything that flies more in the face of the fundemental liberties as espoused by the Founding Fathers than having the Federal government forcing a national ID system upon its citizens. If it wasn't necessary to fight the British, the Mexicans, the Confederacy, the Spanish, the Axis Powers or the Soviets, and if it hasn't been deemed necessary for all the decades that Mexicans have been crossing the border, it's hard to justify it now. When you factor in that 9-11 was an intelligence failure, the national ID system seems to be pretty damn worthless, unless you start imagining that the real purpose is the Feds being able to better track US citizens.

Do you honestly believe that anything will prevent individuals sufficiently motivated to cause carnage? Repressive Nazi overlords and their willing servants in Occupied France couldn't stop bridges from being blown up. The military might of Napoleonic Spain couldn't stop the dehabilating and demoralizing actions of anti-French forces. The British intelligence community couldn't stop IRA operatives from blowing up people. As Churchill once said, when civilization as we know it really was on the brink, "All we have to fear is fear itself."

The Founding Fathers knew damn well what would happen when personal liberties were sacrificed, even in the name of some greater good. That's why they sought to limit the powers of government. The greater the power held by a relatively small number of individuals, the more likely it would corrupt them, that even as they might believe that what they did was for the greater good, they would poison the well of liberty.

Re:National ID == license to exist

[swillden]

What would have prevented 9-11 would have been the enormous "intelligence" bureaucracy doing its job, listening to its field agents, actually gathering intelligence and generally not sitting on its post-Cold War laurels.

Unlikely, and you shouldn't depend on it anyway.

People need to get it through their heads that *nothing* would have prevented 9/11. Nothing that is compatible with a free and open society, anyway. We often hear people say "Freedom isn't free" and nod our head, but we're thinking that the price is someone else's kid going over some ocean and getting hurt or killed to defend our freedom. Sometimes that is the price, but the fact is that sometimes the price is that bunch of innocent civilians die right here at home. Sometimes even kids.

A free society is always going to be at some level of risk from terrorists and other nutjobs who decide for whatever reason that they're more interested in hurting random strangers than in living. Actually, even the most restrictive police/nanny state is at some risk of such things because, fundamentally, the world is not a safe place. But free societies that allow people freedom of movement and association and the freedom to own and operate potentially dangerous tools are at more risk, and there is simply no way to avoid that without giving up a significant measure of freedom.

It's vaguely possible that the 9/11 terrorists could have been caught if the intelligence agencies had done a better job, but it's just as likely that if the intelligence agencies were more efficient, Al Qaeda would have been more careful and they still would have gotten away with it. You simply cannot defend against a small group of determined, inventive terrorists. Especially when they're smart and well-funded.

On the other hand, the actual damage that such a group can do is small. To a nation the size and strength of the US, 9/11 was a fleabite. More people die every month on our highways in auto accidents. More property damage is done every couple of years when a major hurricane rips across Florida, to say nothing of Katrina-scale disasters. The reason that terrorists choose terror tactics is because they don't have the ability to do real damage. If they could, they would. Terror is successful because of the response of the victim, not because of the actual damage it inflicts.

Even if they were able to inflict significant damage, however, the fact remains that if a low level of risk to ourselves and our families is the price of freedom, we should be willing to pay it. There is a limit, of course, but to my way of thinking the risk has to at *least* exceed the level of voluntary activities most of us willingly do every day, like driving an automobile, before we start reacting in extreme ways.

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

-- Thomas Jefferson

And in the case of a war of terror, some of the patriots are simply ordinary citizens going about their lives with a quiet determination that they will not be terrorized. If more people understood this, terrorists would be forced to find another way to air their grievances.

Re:National ID == license to exist

[Darby]

Al Qaeda's real strength is in a rather novel new concept- individualized warfare, where anybody can declare war on anybody even without an army to back them up.

No, Al Queda's greatest strength by far is the US government and media organizations providing hundreds of millions (at least) in free publicity to blow the threat of a few scattered loons into a totally made up global conspiracy.
That is something they could not have done for themselves.

Re:Privacy is already dead

[The Living Fractal]

I'm not against my STATE ID doing exactly what you said. I'm against a FEDERAL one though. If the Feds want to connect the states together, so be it. But screw them if they want to start blurring the line between State and Federal. We have states for a reason.

Re:Privacy is already dead

[Attila Dimedici]

Besides the privacy issues there is another reason to be afraid of ONE database that all identification is based on. Right now there are multiple ways that any individual can be idnetified. When one of those databases gets corrupted, it is possible to appeal to an alternate, independent database to provide information to correct the corrupted database. With one database (or several interdependent databases, which is ultimately what this system will become), if an individuals data becomes corrupted there is no place to get evidence that the data in the database is inaccurate. "I'm sorry, but John Doe is dead." "I'm John Doe and I'm standing right in front of you." "The database says John Doe is dead. You must be a criminal trying to steal John Doe's identity." There are a lot of other scenarios that could also happen, this is just a similar to things that have happened to people already. The system thought they were dead, they had to jump through hoops to prove that they were who they said they were and that they were still alive. What happens when the only system for proving who you are says that you aren't you?

Re:Privacy is already dead

[Bearpaw]

Simply repeating something doesn't make it a more convincing argument. (Well, except in the case of Fox News.) Repeating the insults along with it makes it even less convincing.

Re:Privacy is already dead

[Chris Burke]

Unless you're suggesting that I'll be giving blood at the car rental place so they can run the dna analysis and prove who I am, I have a hard time understanding how this would make identity theft harder. Not having a bazillion cards in our wallet means there's only one document that needs be stolen.

Sadder still

[EmbeddedJanitor]

National IDs really don't offer the powers that be any more control over your life than a drivers license etc which you need to show for many transactions etc. Face it: the real reason you don't have a national ID is because you don't need one and the Feds can do fine with what they have.

What this issue does really provide is an inflammatory diversion to attract the attention away from something else.

Re:Sadder still

[fyngyrz]

National IDs really don't offer the powers that be any more control over your life than a drivers license etc which you need to show for many transactions etc.

That remains to be seen. One of the things that RealID has (legislatively) plugged into it is an as-yet unspecified standard for technologies such as RFID. This would provide a nationally uniform means to track individuals each and every time they came into range of an RFID reader, which in turn provides the incentive to create such a network. Once you're pegged as being located in any particular place, that same network could be used to deliver all manner of specific information about you (and database integration is also part of the legislation.) I find this both likely and unsettling; I think liberty requires privacy, freedom to travel, and some measure of limits upon the government - if you're not currently being hunted as a criminal, punished as a criminal, or under post-release, sentence-imposed limits as a criminal, I can't see that they have any right or need to know where you are, what you are doing, or why you are doing it.

Re:Sadder still

[fyngyrz]

I have the cure for an RFID chip. It is also coincidentally a known terrorist weapon also known as a common household hammer.

And I am quite sure the government has a cure for your smashed RFID chip. It begins with "please step this way, sir" and ends with habeas corpus nowhere in sight. In a retail setting, it begins with you walking up to the cash register and the cash register refusing to complete the purchase because it can't figure out who you are. Which leads back to "please step this way, sir." During a traffic stop, it leads directly to jail, like the monopoly square. So, about that hammer... maybe that's not such a good idea after all. They may not have legitimate power, but don't confuse that with them not having power at all.

Re:Sadder still

[fyngyrz]

And the government would want to spend millions doing this, why?

I'll answer that with a question and an answer: Why does a state trooper always check your criminal record (via NCIC) when they're simply giving you a traffic ticket? (or they may not even be doing that, they may have stopped to help you change your flat tire.) The answer: because they can.

Re:Sadder still

[fyngyrz]

Do you frequently use a credit card?

No. I have no debt and I am not interested in debt. I use money, and will continue to do so as long as it remains legal. "Credit" cards are badly misnamed: They are debt cards with the interesting ability to increase your debt position just by getting a day older.

Ever use your real name at a restaurant?

I've never had a restaurant ask me my name, only what I wanted to eat. If they ever did make such an inquiry, I would be quite happy to leave before answering in detail any greater than my first name.

RFID range from my understanding is not that large,

RFID range is sufficient to talk to the cash register when you make a purchase, to talk to the teller when you go to a bank, to talk to the terminal when you apply for federally or state issued anything, to talk to the booth when you go through a toll station. It is short, but that's because it doesn't need to be long.

...and frankly having a National ID program would mean that everytime I travel to other states they can't refuse to sell my alcohol because they don't like the fact that I have an out of state ID.

As for the alcohol thing, that's a different problem, a consequence of society's war on consensual and personal, informed, victimless choice. You should fight that battle on its own turf rather than trying to be accommodating. A line in the sand drawn by age is certain to make errors on both sides. Those lines, if they are to be drawn at all, must be drawn upon a metric that determines if you are informed or not. Otherwise it is a straightforward affront to liberty.

Re:Sadder still

[b0s0z0ku]

And I am quite sure the government has a cure for your smashed RFID chip. It begins with "please step this way, sir" and ends with habeas corpus nowhere in sight.

If it ever comes to that, there's a cure for tyranny, too. It begins with the Second Amendment and ends with a length of rope formed into a circle with a sliding knot closing the loop.

-b.

Re: Won't do a thing for identity theft

[evought]

Even if I agreed with the idea of a national ID (I don't). Taking all of the government assumptions at face value, the plan still won't touch identity theft. Why not?

1) Base documents. How will you get a Real ID? You will have to present base documents (driver's license, birth certificate, passport, social security card, proof of address, whatever) to prove your identity. These can already be forged and already are to get perfectly valid driver's licenses. Without fixing the base documents, there is no foundation for Real ID. Someone can quite happily get the fake documents they need to get a very real document which will be accepted for a gold standard. What does someone do when they go to the government to get their Real ID, and someone says "Can't, someone's already got one."?

2) Existing identity theft. Issuing a new ID won't straighten out the existing tangled records. Which fraudulent credit lines go to which real person? How about income taxes and criminal records? You can't fix IDs that have already been stolen with a new document based on the already bad information.

3) Electronic transactions. An ID won't help you in electronic communications. You can't present your ID to a web page. They might start collecting Real ID numbers, but, like SS numbers, they can be stolen.

4) Lack of verification even in person. Right now, businesses and agencies are not required (and don't have the ability) to check the information that is there, like the fact that a given Social Security number belongs to a two year-old girl, not a thirty year-old man applying for a job. This is the source of a lot of fraud.

What you *might* be able to do is focus on fixing base documents, like fixing birth certificates, Social Security cards, and voter registrations. If those were harder to forge, easier to verify, it would be harder to get a fake ID of any kind. Once you had a significant chunk of the population with good base documents, people who currently have ****ed identities will eventually die off. Then, maybe, *maybe* a Real ID would make sense, but I think there are still better ways.

Right now, they're focusing on the wrong end of things. Probably because a real solution takes time, care, and won't be done before they leave office. A bad solution looks good now, and won't be discovered bad until long after they care.

You're joking, right?

[Kadin2048]

I like the national ID because it arguable can fold services 1, 2, 4, and 7 into one stupid card and cut the bureaucracy.

Hahahahahaha(snort)hahha ... ha. .. ha.

Okay, I'm done.

Seriously, do you really think that's going to happen? Have you ever worked with the government? What you'll end up with is one gigantic new Federal agency, which contains all the bureaucracy of the agencies it was supposed to replace, plus a lot of administrative overhead, plus the added cost of high-level management ... it'll be a total shitshow. That's what the government does. They don't "cut bureaucracy," they are bureaucracy.

And none of this ID crap would change the state drivers' license procedure, so you'd still have all the same crap at the state-level DMVs. No elimination there. And this ID wouldn't replace Passports, so you still have that separately, under the State Department -- that's not going away any time soon.

There's no "reduction" of anything happening here. All it's going to do is create a new layer of bureaucracy on top of what already exists in the form of your state drivers license.

It'll be a few hundred million dollars of taxpayer dollars down the drain, and the end result will be a whole lot of personal data siloed in some giant database run by a brand-new agency in Washington.*

* Probably not actually in Washington; it'll probably get an office somewhere out on the fringes somewhere.

Re:Privacy is already dead

[k1e0x]

Knowing who people are is the first step towards knowing how to truly protect people from fraud and invasion. Privacy as we knew it is dead. Get over it, and let's get ONE card that identifies us down to the DNA level so that we don't have to keep a bazillion cards in our wallet. Only luddites and con artists would be against this- as it would make identity MUCH harder to steal.... You bring up some points here and all of them are flat wrong.

* Invasion? How will your little card protect you from an invasion? An armed and well regulated militia does this best, or the national guard.

* Fraud? You want the government who is not liable for anything they do wrong to protect you from fraud? There is a private company LifeLock http://lifelock.com/ that already does this, better and cheaper than the feds could, if they screw up you can sue them, AND they can't throw you in jail if you loose your lifelock card.

* Security? ID is NOT security.. they are not the same thing. The 9/11 hijackers had ID, Timothy Mcvay ID, Cho Seung-Hui had ID. The Washington snipers had ID. What can we assume from this? ID makes us NO safer.

* Theft? How does they government tracking you physically and digitally help against theft? I can SILL steal your lawn mower if you don't lock it up and your little card does nothing. Maybe you mean ID theft.. see lifelock above.

*wallet? Right now you don't have to carry any card in your wallet if you so choose.. You can still get on air planes without ID. This is freedom. It's how it should be.

We can't secure our schools, we cant secure our shopping malls, hell... we cant even secure our prisons and that's about as secure as I can imagine. I'll have you know that I am a honest small business owner and I will not accept this card. I flat out refuse to do so even if they have to throw me in Jail.. is that fair? for me to go to jail because you want to *feel* secure in your Police state? This is my breaking point. I will not be traced and tracked and have every action purchase and message I send analyzed by the state.

Will you be willing to destroy my life because I don't want to be tracked? How many more like me are there? 100? 1,000? How about them? At what point does using force on others in your aims become ok?

If BillG were here

[ksd1337]

That's the dumbest fucking idea I've heard since I've been at Microsoft.

Re:It's not a privacy issue

[RingDev]

Immediately, it's a States Rights issue. In the near future it will become a human rights issue.

-Rick

Re:Can someone explain something to me?

[Coraon]

I think the real issue people are having here is that you would HAVE to have this ID to be considered a citizen under the law. In otherwords if you dont have it on you then you arnt american and do not enjoy the protection that offers. Theres a RPG called shadowrun that kinda explored this, their were 2 tiers of socity those with SIN numbers that could goto and use goverment programs, welfare, ect. and the SINless who the cops could effectivly jail forever and no one could say anything. Think about some random homeless man, if he dosnt get his card and keep it on him when/if he gets jailed they can pretty much treat him as an illegal alien and kick this man out, despite having always lived in the USA. Your forefathers saught to create a land of free men, now, they would be slaves to a piece of plastic.

Libertarians and abortion

[SonicSpike]

Wrong answer.

Libertarians are split on the abortion issue. Some libertarians think that the right of a women to choose what to do with her body is paramount (I agree to an extent), and other libertarians think that the individual unborn child is also sovereign and is deserving of the same human rights as everyone else (this is what I fully support). In other words you don't have the right to kill your child because the child is a sovereign individual.

Re:And the reason is ....

[rtb61]

The only way to have a national ID in a free democracy is to make a legally and permanently voluntary, not only for obtaining one but also for displaying one.

A typical petty abuse of a compulsory ID is quite simply for enforcement officer to request it and simply flick it into the street drain when you present it and then again demand that you show failure to do so means a trip to the station and a few hours wasted attempting to prove your identity and obtain a temporary internal passport, combined with a large fine to pay for a new ID.

Extreme abuse is for governments to strip you of your compulsory ID, and make you a non citizen, pretty much the same as some corrupt governments deem it acceptable to strip their citizens of the right to vote making them slaves to their society.