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Administration Wants To Scale Back Real ID Law
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."
The fundamental issue to having reliable, un-forged ID cards has nothing to do with federal standards. Instead it has everything to do with the drinking age. As long as the legal drinking/smoking ages are higher than the age at which an individual can figure out who to make/get a fake ID, there will be no security provided by an ID card. This is why having a passport actually makes sense. no one goes to the bar on their passport (foreign exchange students aside.) So, a good fake DL can be obtained for $100 near almost any college campus... but a good fake Passport? I'm not sure I'd even know where to begin asking for one, since I'm not a spook. This is of course predicated on the idea that you even believe having a reliable ID card system is a 'good' thing... That is a point that basically can't be argued, either you're for or against it based on a ideological differences. But until the policy makers acknowledge the issue of technical standards being circumvented by clever 15 - 19 year olds every year as technology improves, no standard that they propose will have the effects they think they want.
I have carried a one inch blade with me every time I've flown. It always passes without question, even though I put it in plain view in the X-ray bin. The I think the reason is it doesn't look like a knife so they miss it (human nature being what it is and they having to scan thousands of passengers a day). But then again, there was one time a screener picked it up, inspected it and put it back in the X-ray bin without a question. So maybe it's not that they just keep missing it.