Anyone checking in for an airline flight on January 1, 2016 and thereafter will be turned away if his driver’s license isn’t “REAL ID compliant,” according to Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officials.
But, “it’s a choice,” according to Nevada’s Department of Motor Vehicles Public Information Officer David Fierro: “It’s not mandatory. It’s a choice for secured identification. If you use a passport when you’re travelling you won’t have any problems. If you use your driver’s license for identification, you’ll need to either apply for the REAL ID card, or get a passport.”
To be compliant, driver’s licenses must capture specific identifying details about the person and then associate them with a unique identification number. DMV.org lists those details:
• Full legal name
• Residence
• Birth date
• Gender
• Driver’s license identification number issued by the state
• Digital front-facing photograph, and
• Signature
When the REAL ID Act was signed into law on May 11, 2005, it didn’t include adding RFID (radio-frequency identification) chips but the TSA can add that as an additional requirement in the future. To get past security, that driver’s license must also include a barcode along with a star in the upper right-hand corner, which signifies that the driver’s identity has been verified by the TSA.
Resistance to the original law resulted in its being repeatedly postponed, giving states time to change their minds and become compliant. The TSA set up four phases of implementation with Phase Four starting January 1, 2016. Privacy and constitutional issues remain, however. Anthony Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), in 2007 stated: “Real ID is an unfunded mandate that violates the Constitution’s 10th Amendment on state powers, destroys [the] states’ dual sovereignty and consolidates every American’s private information, leaving all of us far more vulnerable to identity thieves.”
When former Texas congressman Ron Paul was quizzed about the issue in 2010, he said:
People over the decades now in this country … have wanted this national ID card. They’re looking for every opportunity to do it. To me it violates the whole principles of privacy, the principles of the Constitution, the principles of the republic. And to me it is a gross distortion of what we should be doing. It’s part of an authoritarian society. Dictatorships have this, but not a republic.
Compounding the error, by voice vote the House and the Senate have just passed the Girls Count Act of 2015, which impresses various U.S. government agencies to force an International ID card on nations around the world that don’t already have them. As the Ron Paul Institute noted on June 1, the day that the bill passed the House, the previous bill that died in November, 2014 would have made it “the policy of the US government to encourage other nations to require all citizens to have their own national identity cards, as well as direct the US government to work with multinational organizations and private entities on imposing registration, identification and documentation laws on people around the world.”
The new bill is slightly softer in language but just as treacherous in its intentions and purposes: “The new bill avoids explicitly stating that its purpose is to require people worldwide to have national ID cards … but … the imposition of national ID cards [fits] squarely within the broad powers in the new bill.”
After reviewing the bill that died at the end of the 113th Congress as well as the new one sponsored by Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Norm Singleton, writing for the Campaign for Liberty, says that under the new law, “The U.S. Government is going to use your money to work with the UN, the World Bank, and other “multinational organizations” to set up a system of National IDs in other countries. These IDs will no doubt be identical, as it is doubtful the international bureaucrats would go through the effort to create separate ID cards for every country.”
Once fully in place, it is easy to contemplate an international United Nations database that can, and will, track the location, the movement, and the conversations of every individual on the planet, all in the name of security.
When Ben McClintock, blogger at www.defendingutah.org, called to see if any of Utah’s federal representatives had acquiesced in going along with the voice vote that foisted the Girls Count Act onto sovereign citizens, he was chagrined to learn that all of them did, including worthies such as Senator Mike Lee and Orrin Hatch. The only one who didn’t was Representative Jason Chaffetz, who was in the hospital undergoing gallbladder surgery.
Benjamin Franklin put the matter succinctly: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
Photo of TSA PreCheck station at Detroit Metropolitan Airport: AP Images
A graduate of an Ivy League school and a former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American magazine and blogs frequently at www.LightFromTheRight.com, primarily on economics and politics.
