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Administration Wants To Scale Back Real ID Law

Posted by kdawson on from the square-root-of-minus-identity dept.

The Washington Post is running a story on the Obama Administration's attempt to get a scaled-back version of Bush's Real ID program passed and implemented. We've been discussing the Real ID program from its earliest days up through the states' resistance to its "unfunded mandate." "Yielding to a rebellion by states that refused to pay for it, the Obama administration is moving to scale back a federal law passed after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that was designed to tighten security requirements for driver's licenses... Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano wants to repeal and replace the controversial, $4 billion domestic security initiative known as Real ID... The new proposal, called Pass ID, would be cheaper, less rigorous, and partly funded by federal grants, according to draft legislation that Napolitano's Senate allies plan to introduce as early as tomorrow. ...the Bush administration struggled to implement the 2005 [Real ID] law, delaying the program repeatedly as states called it an unfunded mandate and privacy advocates warned it would create a de facto national ID."

11 of 317 comments (clear)

  1. Hopefully It'll Just Go Away by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Translation: We know that for the past 8 years this has been pushed to prevent homeland terrorism but you know there hasn't really been any major events without it since 9/11. Also, we've got a lot of other shit to worry about that actually does affect your life more than having to present papers whenever you cross any political boundary inside the United States. You know, like the economy and jobs. We're getting Real ID watered down as best we can and hopefully it'll just kind of deflate and go away but there's some asshole Republicans left like Lamar Smith in Texas and Sensenbrenner in Wisconsin that like to say things like:

    We go right back to where we were on Sept. 10, 2001. Maybe governors should have been in the Capitol when we knew a plane was on its way to Washington wanting to kill a few thousand more people.

    You hear that? The lawmakers that take us to war were actually in danger of physical harm themselves! Imagine that! But their voice, urgency and argument are getting pretty pathetic now that it's been eight years and no such thing has reoccurred. The fear card isn't so strong these days. "You might lose your house and/or job" seems to worry people more than "the odds are 1:10,000,000 that a terrorist may kill you in an extremely contrived scenario!"

    Remember any sort of compromise or rational thought is bad because Sensenbrenner says doing so instantly brings us back to pre-9/11 danger. Beware of this sort of mentality. Beware the men that play with your emotions and speak in absolutes for the world is shades of grey.

    --
    My work here is dung.
    1. Re:Hopefully It'll Just Go Away by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Will anyone please accept that maybe all of the money spent for Homeland Security has actually helped prevent post 9/11 homeland terrorism from occurring? Instead of shoving it all to the side as republican war profiteering?

      You may very well be right. Nowhere in my post did I say that it didn't. What I said was that we have gotten along for 8 years just fine without a Real ID. However painful it is for me to say this, TSA & DHS are here to stay. If they or the NSA wiretapping or whatever encroachments on our rights and privacy condoned have prevented homeland terrorism then good for them. I don't like all of those things but I cannot say one way or the other that they haven't worked.

      But that's not what this is about. This is about people trying to push it even further. Do you just write them a blank check in the name of security? Do you just offer up all your rights on the spot and roll over for them? Let me quote the article:

      Supporters saw a slimmer measure as better than nothing. But critics said the changes gut the law, weakening tools to fight fraud and learn whether bad drivers, drug runners or counterfeiters have licenses in more than one state.

      My GOD! Bad drivers are running free across state borders! Here's $50 million dollars of tax payer money. Get them! At all costs! What? You need me to carry a Real ID along with my other ID and birth certificate and registration? Ok, whatever you say!

      I call for a halt to Real ID or Pass ID or whatever until we see a need for it.

      --
      My work here is dung.
    2. Re:Hopefully It'll Just Go Away by Ioldanach · · Score: 5, Insightful

      But what if I had been a terrorist, fully aware of the knife?

      You're buying into the security theater paradigm. Before 9/11, hijackings were kidnapping and ransom situations in the US. If you wanted to survive, you kept a low profile and didn't rock the boat, and odds were everything would be fine. Out of 200 people they might kill one or two, so your odds of being that one were low enough that resistance was not a good idea. 9/11 changed all that. Now the possibility that everyone might be killed is very very real, so terrorists are likely to see an overwhelming resistance if all they could get on board were knives or possibly even a couple small firearms.

      I honestly think that a modest knife, say 3" or less, presents no substantial hijack threat.

    3. Re:Hopefully It'll Just Go Away by twostix · · Score: 4, Insightful

      No.

      All this relaxed talk by Americans of "homeland" this and "papers" that as though it's just another day at the office makes me little sick btw.

      Our great friend the US of A teetering on the edge of becoming the monster that it once so valiantly wrestled. Fortunately something, a single thread perhaps, keeps holding it back...but for how much longer?

      Tune in over the next few years to find out.

    4. Re:Hopefully It'll Just Go Away by Rycross · · Score: 4, Insightful

      No I won't, because foreign terrorist attacks on mainland US were pretty much non-existent in the years leading up to 9/11 too. The way the Republicans talk, you'd think the US was a war-zone leading up to 9/11. Most of the "terrorism" we have encountered pre-911 has been rare, and against our military assets in Middle Eastern nations. And we shouldn't even have our military assets there in the first place.

      Peddle your fear elsewhere. Your tiger repellent is just a plain rock.

  2. Re:DMV by gruntled · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The real problem with ID issuance in the United States is everything -- everything, including a passport -- goes back to a birth certificate, and not all difficult to obtain a phony birth certificate. I'm not sure this problem really has a short term solution.

  3. Re:Oh? by SirGarlon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The last eight years free of collapsing buildings seem to me a great indicator of its implicit uselessness. So why push it still?

    It's useless for preventing terrorist attacks, but highly useful for helping government officials track a citizen's movements. Now they can use that power for good (more promptly serving arrest warrants) or evil (harassing political opponents as just one example). Anti-terrorism is a smokescreen. What RealID proponents really want, and won't stop until they get, is the 24/7 tracking of every person in the country.

    What I say to this is, if you're not doing anything wrong ... then where you are and what you're up to are none of the government's damned business.

    --
    [Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
  4. Tatoos are inexpensive and oh so vogue by xednieht · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why not just tattoo a number on people. Hear it worked real well about 60 years ago.

    I'd be curious are people here more apprehensive about the intrusive government or terrorists?

    When can I have my America back?

    --

    Hope is the currency of fools
  5. It will not stop terrorism by assertation · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A National ID would not have stopped the American terrorist who recently murdered the Holocaust Museum guard nor the American terrorist who murdered that doctor who performed abortions.

  6. Re:DMV by twostix · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why does there have to be a solution?

    More efficient commerce isn't an acceptable answer.

    A free people don't have to verify themselves to their government and the government has no intrinsic right to demand that of a person.

  7. Re:How scarry is a National ID ? by twostix · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "it doesn't make our government track our every move or anything."

    And you know that how?

    Because in my country at least getting government departments to tell us what they do and don't talk to each other about and what info they are and aren't mining about the citizens is like pulling teeth and requires costly court battles.

    I assume you just implicitly trust your public servants to do the moral thing in the course of their duties?

    I've worked in our federal government, if the data is there and there isn't a specific law banning the use of it, at best there's a pilot project or little dodgey in house app to play with the data a million different ways. I know this because I wrote one and though it was pretty benign to start with, the potential that it created and the hunger for information on everyone displayed by the various deparments I worked with I'm sure it's not benign (or even legal) anymore.

    The thing is, who's going to stop them from doing things like that? You?