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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.
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.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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....
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
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.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
The difference is that not everyone *HAS* to have a passport. Making a mandatory national ID is wrong. Passports are your ID internationally, not for use when buying cigarettes. A national ID would lead to ever more invasive tracking of citizen's activities. This is wrong.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
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
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
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.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I like the national ID because it arguable can fold services 1, 2, 4, and 7 into one stupid card and cut the bureaucracy.
... ha. .. ha.
... it'll be a total shitshow. That's what the government does. They don't "cut bureaucracy," they are bureaucracy.
Hahahahahaha(snort)hahha
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
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.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
"The plan will create a massive national identification system without adequate privacy and security safeguards. It will also make it more difficult for people to get driver's licenses. And it will make it too easy for identity thieves, stalkers, and corrupt government officials to get access to such personal information as a home address, age, and Social Security number."
Slashdotters should offer their perspective. REAL ID was approved without Congressional hearings, and this is the last 24 hours for the public to comment on this proposal!
That's the dumbest fucking idea I've heard since I've been at Microsoft.
I can freely walk down the street without carrying an ID and not fear being detained.
Legally, that's correct, and you can thank Edward Lawson for fighting all the way to the supreme court to establish the precedent. Lawson was illegally arrested for declining to show his ID when a police officer decided that he was the wrong color for the neighborhood he was walking through.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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.
-Ours is the wisdom of Solomon, the magic of Merlyn, the fall of Icaris.
What you need to realize is this is a brand new set of circumstances that you are accepting as "normal." I am 50, and I have had many drivers licenses in many states and several countries. Only in the last couple of decades has it been standard procedure for them to worry about your identity details; they used to be primarily concerned with your ability to drive, as absurd as that may seem to you. They used to ask (ask, mind you, not, demand papers proving) your age, your name, test you, and issue you a license if you didn't scare a year off the examiner's life (or maybe sometimes if you did... I used to live in south Florida, and I swear, the one thing you really had to watch out for was a little grey fuzz just barely sticking up over the steering wheel in front of you... the entire concept of "right of way" instantly became a fiction.) Anyway, there was no photo on the license, the number was an arbitrary one issued by the D/L department or equivalent, the name and birth-date were issued as described, and that was it. The issue was "can you drive" and nothing else. That is reasonable. What you accept as normal is what we used to use to laugh and point our fingers at the Soviets over. There are other issues peripheral to this; you can even find old references to them in pop culture. Watch "Hunt for Red October" and ponder when the sub's second officer asks the captain if you can drive "state to state" without papers. RealID is an internal passport. Nothing less.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
... other libertarians think that the individual unborn child is also sovereign and is deserving of the same human rights as everyone else...
However not just libertarians but people of a large number of other political persuasions recognize the concept that a slave has a right to be free - even if the slaveowner's must be killed to accomplish this liberation.
By this argument a woman would have an uncontested right to terminate a pregnancy at any time, despite the "unborn child"'s state as a "sovereign individual".
Once the child is capable of independent viability it can be argued that its own rights mandate the MEANS of terminating the pregnancy might be limited to those that attempt to preserve the child's life - within the constraint of not adding risk to the life of the mother.
= = = =
Non-libertarian arguments based on the "personhood" of the fetus/unborn child bring up the question "when does it stop being anonymous tissue and become a person". My own preference for that time is "when the brain begins to function in a human fashion". (Before that you're dealing with either religious arguments over souls or claims that genetic potential = actuality which could justify rape and give cancers human rights.)
A slippery slope that would lead to infanticide and euthanasia of the mentally "sub-par" can be avoided by pushing the cut-point back to the date when the nerve cells of the brain begin to interconnect. (Before that the brain is no more a "person" than a kit of chips and boards is a "computer".)
Interestingly, this occurs about a week into the third trimester - just about the point where the Supreme Court, in Roe v. Wade, put the cutpoint between the sovereign interests of the mother and her doctor/patient relationship on one hand and the state's interest in preserving the life and rights of a new citizen on the other.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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.
The right to remain anonymous died in 2004 in the Supreme Court case, Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District Court of Nevada. All we're haggling about now is what kind of ID they can force us to show.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
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.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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.
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 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.
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.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
If enough people refuse the chip by breaking it, maybe someone somewhere will get the hint. Besides, it'll never come to what you suggest....at least not in my lifetime. If it does I'll move somewhere else.
"Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
the id is useful for delivering services to citizens...
such as national health insurance...
Forget that! I don't want any national healthcare! All that leads to is rationing. I'm all for affordable health insurance for everyone but I oppose mandated nation healthcare run by the government.
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
I don't want anyone to be able to see my medical records unless I authorize it. When I go see a new doc I'll bring my medical records from the last doc I saw.
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.
There are alert bracelets and Medi Alerts people can get identifying allergies or other medical conditions for healthcare personel.
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.
Once collected, the info will be ABUSED!!!
FalconShould there be a Law?