It seems that the Real ID Act was attached to an emergency military spending bill. So we now have federally mandated national ID cards (within three years). Note that you won't actually have to carry a new card becasue each states' drivers license will have to meet the new standard. Also, all the states' databases will be linked together.
There are good arguments for the national ID card and national database. There are also good arguments against the card and database. Had there been a seperate congressional vote on the topic, these pros and cons could have been debated.
Friday, June 03, 2005
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2 comments:
I don't really think this is as scary as the critics make it out to be. To me, it makes sense. It kinda bugs me how it passed under the radar however. Usually the Instapundit is on top of libertarian-type stuff like this, I wonder why he didn't mention it. I really only caught a whiff of this news when Drudge posted a headline to it for a couple hours, but I never read the story.
Like you said, it's the fact that it was passed under the radar which is the problem. I agree that it seems like a good idea to be able to easily varify that someone is a US citizen. A lot more thought (as apposed to none) should have been given to writing safeguards into the act which created the national ID database. For instance, an explicit prohibition from linking gun ownership data to the ID database would have been good. Official provisions for hiding the address of judges and police officers might have been nice. A standard on the security (password strength, data encryption, etc.) of the individual states' databases should have been recognized as vital. As the pcworld article points out, the whole system will only be as secure as the weakest state's system. Therefore, if a terrorist hacks into one state with a backwater DMV, he can add all the data he wants to the de facto national database. So from a terrorism standpoint we are less secure (given that we will come to rely on an insecure system).
Had congress passed the Real ID Act by itself, all these issues and more could have been debated. If, after all that, congress decided that a secure and beneficial system could be implemented, then I would trust their judgment. As it stands, what am I suppose to trust? The dirty politics of attaching a pet project to a must pass bill? _Bad_ senator. No slush fund.
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