California Edges Toward Joining Real ID Revolt

The Department of Homeland Security's Real ID program has a real challenge on its hands from California. DHS had said it will only grant extensions from the Real ID rules taking effect on May 11 to states that apply by March 31 and promise to implement Real ID by 2010. California requested an extension but would not make the latter promise. DHS buckled and said, in effect, "Good enough." Perhaps they realized that trying to slap giant California around is qualitatively different than doing the same to New Hampshire. In another crack in the wall. DHS has granted Montana a waiver it explicitly did not ask for. From Wired: "For a short moment Thursday, millions of Californians were in danger of facing pat-downs at the airport and being blocked from federal buildings come May 11... DHS had said before Thursday it won't grant Real ID extensions to states who don't commit to implementing the rules in the future. That meant Tuesday's letter looked like enough to join California to the small rebellion against the Real ID rules. For Californians that would mean enduring the same fate facing citizens of South Carolina, Maine, Montana, and New Hampshire... [A]fter Threat Level provided Homeland Security spokesman Laura Keehner with the letter, Keehner said California's commitment to thinking about commitment is good enough."

Comments

Did the MT extension had anything to with this?

[snarfies]

Borodin: Do you think they will let me live in Montana?
Capt. Ramius: I would think they'll let you live wherever you want.
Borodin: Good. Then I will live in Montana. And I will marry a round American woman, and raise rabbits, and she will cook them for me. And I will have a pick-up truck, or umm... possibly even...a recreational vehicle, and drive from state to state. Do they let you do that?
Capt. Ramius: Oh yes.
Borodin: No papers?
Capt. Ramius: No papers. State-to-state.

Re:Did the MT extension had anything to with this?

[zappepcs]

Not only is that insightful, but brilliantly used. People get all wishy washy when libertarians talk about state's rights. Uhmmmm this is one of those times folks, where state's rights protect your own rights. For some truly interesting reading you might try this link I saw yesterday http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharia It's a long read but I think an important one when you consider what the Federal government is trying to foist upon us all. The entire notion of ID kind of falls apart when you actually dig into the constitution and laws which govern this country, your state, and local municipality... at least here in the US.

Re:Did the MT extension had anything to with this?

[drooling-dog]

This setback for DHS is a very good and important thing. What I'd really like to see, though, is about 100,000 citizens converging on their local airport and taking it back through the sheer weight of their numbers.

Good

[johnsonav]

I wish states would step up and grow a pair more often. It's about time the states remembered their place in our system of checks and balances.

Re:Good

[johnsonav]

I've oft heard the argument made that the idea of states' rights makes less sense nowadays when people regularly move to a different state than their own for university, and then perhaps to a different state to work, and then perhaps to yet another state to retire. There are many people who move to Wisconsin to take advantage of their great public University. Then move away to a state, like California or Arizona to work where there are more jobs in their area of expertise. Then they retire to Florida, where they pay no state income tax. It is only because of the states' sovereignty, separate from the Federal Government, that the people in those states can decide for themselves what is important.

States' rights make more sense now than ever before. People are able to move from state to state more easily than in the past. It's a feedback loop. As more retirees move to states like Florida and vote, more retiree friendly legislation gets passed, and more are drawn there as a result. They are happy because they get to live in a state where they have the votes to get what they want. And I'm happy they aren't here driving ten under the speed limit, clogging up the highways where I live. It's win-win.

Re:Good

[twistedsymphony]

I wish states would step up and grow a pair more often. It's about time the states remembered their place in our system of checks and balances.

Whenever someone goes on about giving more power to the federal government I politely remind them that this is the UNITED STATES of America ... not the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT of America.

I live in NH and a co-worker was complaining about NH was not adopting RealID and that they would have to suffer additional search and seizure at the Airports and borders because of it. After explaining what Real ID entails, they agreed with me that it's good to be a NH citizen, where on many an occasion we thumb our noses at invasive federal programs that do more harm than good.

There's a reason NH was chosen for the Free State Project, as much as I hate the winter months here, IMO, it's politically the best state to live in (tax wise it's the 2nd best state to live in too, and that's only because Alaskans get oil kickbacks).

Re:Good

[Panaflex]

If Cali had a pair they'd let this date slip without a word... TSA would hit the wall, DHS would get no respect.

You want to kill a law? Then ignore it.

Re:Good

[johnsonav]

We can, and do. But there is nothing in the constitution that could be interpreted to remove states' sovereignty. The constitution was written, and remains, a compact between states and their respective citizenry. The constitution does not grant the states the right to exist; the states grant the federal government the right to exist. We can come up with new ways of interpreting the constitution, or even write a whole new one, but without rewriting each state constitution there is no way to remove their sovereignty.

The states have ceded a lot of authority to the federal government over the past 200 years, especially since the Civil War. Much of that, civil rights for example, has been for the best. But the ability of the states to write and enforce their own laws is what made it possible for this country to grow from 13 colonies to one of the most geographically and culturally diverse countries in the world. Laws that may apply to the dairy farmers in Wisconsin may be counterproductive in a largely urban state like New Jersey.

States rights are still important even after the closing of our western frontier and slower growth today. State governments are more responsive, flexible and approachable than the federal government. Local politics may not be as sexy as the soap opera in Washington, but if you truly want your voice to be heard, local and state is the only way to go.

The states have tremendous untapped power even now, in this age of a strong central government. Washington just got used to pushing whatever they wanted down the states' throats. Even if I thought that REAL ID was a good idea, I still want the states to dust off their boots once in a while, just to keep everyone on their toes.

Re:Good

[electrictroy]

You seem to have missed the main point:

- State Legislatures operate as a counter-balance against the D.C. government becoming too dictatorial. For example, California's Legislature refusing to implement the "real id" (or as I say, Spy ID) in its current form is a way to remind the D.C. politicians to stop acting like nationalized tyrants.

If States rights did not exist, we'd all be living like D.C. residents (no medical marijuana allowed, ~$100 a year vehicle tax, universal gun ban, et cetera, et cetera). By allowing States to act independently, we keep at least *some* of our freedoms because the State Legislatures act as a counterweight against power-hungry D.C.

Re:Good

[Russ Nelson]

Ugh. What a thoughtless comment. How do you create good policy? By having one set of smart people in the federal government? No (how could that POSSIBLY work?). No, you create good policy by creating many different policies at the state level, and seeing what works. Then, the smart states adopt those good policies.

If it wasn't for arnold ...

[PC and Sony Fanboy]

Good thing they've got the governator.

If it wasn't for him, we'd be dead from aliens and terminators and who knows what else! Its no wonder that even the DHS can't push him around.

Who is being protected?

[Nomen Publicus]

Identity has little if anything to do with intent.

Citizens with valid and accurate papers are perfectly capable of entering a federal building with evil intent.

So you have to wonder exactly what the government thinks it is protecting itself from by using REAL ID?

Re:Who is being protected?

[AJWM]

Citizens with valid and accurate papers are perfectly capable of entering a federal building with evil intent.

Heck, citizens with valid papers and evil intent don't even need to enter a federal building to cause harm. Timothy McVeigh just parked his Ryder truck full of ANFO in front of the federal building in Oklahoma City.

The bit about preventing non-RealID holders from entering federal buildings has nothing to do with securing the buildings and everything to do with extorting compliance with RealID.

Upset Federal Judges and Litigators

[resistant]

As has been remarked before (by myself and others), one of the more interesting results of demanding such specific identification of residents of states that balk at Big Brother is the abrupt denial of the Constitutional right to seek redress of grievances in the courts (read the Federal courts). If you have such "leper" identification, suddenly you cannot sue anyone in the Federal courts, or even show up to defend yourself if you are sued in a Federal court or charged with a crime in the Federal courts, or testify as a material witness in Federal courts. Will Federal judges issue contempt of court citations against the defendants, or against the armed agents who prevent the defendants or witnesses from entering the courtrooms? Getting Federal agents to enforce a blizzard of contempt of court citations against themselves could be problematic. I am not a lawyer, nor do I pretend to be one at drunken parties, but this all seems entertaining in a grim way.

Re:Upset Federal Judges and Litigators

[resistant]

On the contrary, after the deadline, you cannot (legally) enter Federal buildings and therefore the courtrooms in them, even if you agree to be searched with a microscope and a probe captured from the aliens at Roswell. Without a "Real ID" identification or a (Federally issued) passport, you're technically screwed. Lots of people have no passport, nor feel any need for a passport, which is supposed to be only for entering and leaving the country, not for basic civil rights.

As a practical matter, though, I gravely doubt that the judges in those courtrooms would allow for an instant actually barring people from their courtrooms, leading nervous Federal security agents to ignore the black letter wording of the law, perhaps doing as you suggest and settling for giving the hairy eyeball to anyone arriving, voluntarily or otherwise, without his duly issued mark of the beast. They like giving people the hairy eyeball anyway, even without encouragement.

I suppose with this regime sooner or later someone will get cute and claim through a lawyer that he can't answer a summons regardless from a Federal judge because the law plainly forbids him from entering a Federal building without a "Real ID" identification or passport, and he has neither, and he cannot be legally forced to break the law. That would be amusing, although probably not to the judge who would be issuing contempt of court citations.

BTW, the Wikipedia entry is interesting and might as well be hereby linked

.

DHS: Will You Marry Me?

[organgtool]

DHS is coming across as a desperate guy who proposed to a woman way out of his league. He anxiously tells his friends "She didn't commit to a 'yes', but she committed to thinking about committing".

Re:Jorbs, they be taking mine

[BadAnalogyGuy]

The source of the angst is not Manuel, though. It was Binter from India who came here on an H1-B and took that PM job from Joe America Programmer. The loss of high-quality jobs to immigrants who have no intention of staying in the US for long periods is the root cause here.

There are two ways to look at Binter. The first, unfortunately, is the way we have reacted. We turned against him and Manuel and want them out of the country so that we can have those jobs back.

The second is to look at the benefits that these people bring to the country and strive to keep them here. Which is to say that we should be encouraging the best and brightest from around the world to come here and stay here instead of acting as a five year internship and then sending them home.

But anti-immigrant sentiment is nothing new, and it will always be fomented by the government whenever they need to gain some quick votes.

Montana Governor

[Speare]

A couple weeks ago, I heard the governor of Montana on NPR, talking about why his state wasn't going along with the federal plan. It was an embarrassing interview, he tried to sound folksy as a rural westerner would, but ended up sounding ornery, obstinate for no real reason, and clueless on the real issues. In my opinion, he missed a real chance to explain real reasons why Real ID doesn't make sense. I very much wish that they would get security experts like Bruce Schneier to talk in layman's terms about the actual shortcomings, or even Constitutional scholars to talk about the states-rights issues that apply here, than to get politicos who just want to explain why they "ain't signin' up today fer a concept of tomarra."

States the Last Hope?

[Phoenix666]

Congress won't defend the Constitution or Rule of Law anymore. The Supreme Court has been compromised.

Perhaps the states are our last hope. If California, New York, and just a few of the other big states say no to all the nonsense, the federal government shall have to back down or stage a coup.

It would be great to see them band together and take a very strong, pro-Constitutionalist stance on RealID, as well as the other recent intrusions on states' rights (I mean it in the Constitutional sense, not the neo-con sense).

For instance, the deployment of National Guard overseas at the expense of Civil Defense; the National Guard units belong to their respective states and actually answer to the governors, not the President. Or take the Medical Marijuana initiatives that passed all around the country in 2006 and which the Federal Government has been trying to countermand--it's not my issue but the states have the right under the Constitution to regulate such matters within their own borders.

Maybe, just maybe, if the states lead the way Congress will grow a pair.

Re:States the Last Hope?

[Curunir_wolf]

The states do have their own soverign rights. Many of them fought against changing driking laws to 21, many against manditory seat belt laws, many against multiple speed limit changes. Fact is, all the federal government has to do is wave federal highway money in front of them (or threaten to take it away) and the states will bend and take it in the ass. They have over and over and over again...

Sad, isn't it? It's really all about money. States that decide they get more highway funds than it will cost them to implement Real ID will implement it, while states that get small amounts of highway funds will oppose it.

Facts:
- The Real-ID system will be at least as secure (if not more) than the best existing state ID system in place currently. Sure, it will be a big target, but it will also be closely guarded by top security people since it's such a public issue. Access will be restricted to public sector netowrks, not open to the public or common hacking attacks, just like the ATM network and existing police and DMV systems. It will be monitored constantly. Do you think South Carolina has a top notch FBI security team monitoring access to THEIR systems? I can tell you as someone who knows a few former programmers at the for SC state who wrote that system, NO IT CERTAINLY DOES NOT! there have even been breakins at DMV offices where PC, printer, and blank IDs have been stolen since the system requires no direct connection to a secure validation network in order to print IDs.

You're kidding, right? First of all, it will still be the state DMV's that are running and controlling the system, it will just be "connected" to a nationalized database. Sure, there will be more, and more higher-paid *government* security folks, but there will also be a lot more people with access, and less centralized control over who they are.

- Currently, all you have to do if you loose your license in one state is move to another and apply for a licesne there. Too many DUI's? just move and reset. Under Federally issued ID, this will not be possible, and states can protect themselves from repeat bad drivers (driving is a privelidge, not a right, and if you abuse it, we have the right to take it away and make sure you can't get it back, even if you move). This will lower insurance costs across the board.

This is just a total fiction. If you get so much as a speeding ticket in one (of many) states, it will follow you to whatever DMV you next register with (in most places). Currently, this is accomplished mostly by states joining cooperative agreements. The only thing nationalizing will do is that they will track you down *faster* than they do now, but they do it now. Try having your license suspended in one state and going to another to get one. You won't be able to do it except in some very rare circumstances. Not worth the cost and loss of privacy, IMHO.

- Few people in security (professional residential, even bartenders) can be expected to know how to spot fake IDs from every state (There are over 200 legal forms of ID circulating in america). With a single secure ID, we don't have to even look for fake info, we can swipe it, compare a computer screen to information on the ID, and compare the picture to the person, even use a biometric scan as further confirmation. RFID may not be secure, and it may only take a few days for someone to crack the chip in the ID and distribute hardware and software to edit it, but cracking the text printed on the ID will be much tougher. The state of CT has one of the hardest to forge IDs I've ever seen, and I've not seen them all. If REAL-ID takes even a handfull of their tricks, you won't see a lot of these faked (especially if it becomes a federal crime to do so, not a local misdemeanor!)

So you expect every bar and restaurant to install biometric iris scanners just to check everybody's ID? It will all be cracked eventually, and changing the

And we all know how secure REALID is...

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, if teenagers have already figured out how to forge them, then real terrorists will have no problem with it either.

So I ask, exactly how secure does this REALID card make us again?

10th Amendment is basically ignored.

[Shivetya]

States lost a lot of their rights when they permitted people to choose Senators and ever since then the Federal Government has run over the states...

Re:Jorbs, they be taking mine

[asuffield]

The same might be said for Europe, and currently for the UK who also have a fetish for wanting a "super" biometric ID cards and, more importantly, the all-knowing database behind it.

It's fairly well known in the UK that the ID card is just a political front for MI5 and the police force's desire to build a fingerprint database of everybody in the country. Nobody wants the cards, they just want to work around the recently passed laws that prohibited them from collecting DNA and fingerprints of people who aren't criminals, and they've seized on the idea of creating an ID card as an excuse to write new laws that will let them.

I doubt they even care whether the project succeeds in producing an ID card (it's currently failing, spectacularly - after three years of funding they've started collecting the fees and writing down your names, but there is no card, no database, no fingerprint collection, and no firm plan for when or even how they are going to do anything other than collect more fees; they are still wrangling with the contractors about who is going to be responsible for working out the plans for these various parts). The important part for them is that the laws will still be on the books, so they can escape from the recently imposed restrictions, even if there never is any card.

But... didn't the states vote for REAL ID?

[MobyDisk]

I find it interesting that the states are refusing to implement REAL ID, but the state's representatives voted for it. So who are they representing if their state is willing to flat-out refuse a law? This is a very serious breakdown of representation. It is absolute confirmation that the representative democracy is not working.

The other aspect of all this is that while Slashdotters are praising the states for standing-up for civil rights, the reality is that the states are fighting REAL ID because of funding issues, not because of civil rights issues. If the government tied federal funding of schools (or highways, or parks, or somethng) to the implementation of REAL ID, then the states would quietly fall-in line.

Re:But... didn't the states vote for REAL ID?

[raymansean]

Real ID was tacked onto a must pass military spending bill. It was a sleezy thing to do and there lays the problem with a lot of things that are tacked onto bills. I bill should cover one topic and set forth only one act. IE a spending bill has nothing to do with national ID's.

Re:Damn that commy cut and paste buffer

[electrictroy]

(1) People driving large, damaging vehicles also pay more in gasoline taxes because those types of vehicles are gas guzzlers.

(2) "Don't damage the road" is not justification to deny someone's right to travel. Nor is "you are black" justification to enslave a person. Or "you are a pregnant woman" justification to deny the right to get a job. And on and on. Rights can not be taken away for trivial, bullshit reasons.

(3) Horse/buggies actually do quite a bit of damage to roads, so by your reasoning they should be banned until properly registered.

However the Amish Americans are very resourceful at getting their way. That's why they don't have licenses, they do pay property tax, but not income tax, nor social security, nor medicare. They may be "old-fashioned" but they still believe in HUMAN RIGHTS FROM GOD, and no politician is going to convince an Amish American that he has the authority to overrule the creator, or ban them from using the People's Roads. Therefore they don't follow what they consider to be unjust, illegal, unconstitutional laws.

I guess that makes Amish Americans "kooks" too?
Oh well; I suspect they don't care what you think.

Re:Damn that commy cut and paste buffer

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

I am from India. The accident rates in India are horrendously high. India has one third the area of USA and 3.5 times the population. So if count accident rate per thousand and such statistical measures you can make it appear as though accident rates are same in India and USA.

But in reality, roads are so horrible, the average speed is 40 Kmph within cities and much much lower during rush hours. Between the cities, the speeds are between 60Kmph and 80Kmph. And the accidents are horrible. Ambulance service is bad. Measured in passenger kilometer terms, India's rate is about 100 times worse than USA. See the stats below.

90000 Indians die in road accidents, despite having less than 1% of the number of vehicles in the world. Assuming USA 150 million vehicles, traveling 15,000 miles per vehicle, 25000 traffic fatalities per year, India with 15 million vehicles, traveling 6000 miles per year, the accident rate in India is 90 times worse than USA.