Is federal Real ID Act for your own good? Not really
May 27, 2007
BY TIM O'BRIEN
Tim O'Brien says Michigan ought to join the states fighting Real ID.
"He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name." -- Revelation, 13:16-17
We are now less than a year away from the deadline for states to comply with the federal Real ID Act.
By next May 12, all state-issued driver's licenses and ID cards must include your personal information, signature and a machine readable zone to contain all the data. That may be either a credit card type swipe strip or a Radio Frequency Identification tag, called an RFID chip, like those used to track products and identify lost pets via low-power radio waves.
Though maintained by the individual states, the information will be mutually available among them, as well as to the federal government, effectively creating a national database accessible from tens of thousands of locations throughout the country.
It is true that under the U.S. Constitution the federal government has no authority to impose a national identity card. The 10th Amendment explicitly declares that all powers not delegated to the federal government "are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people."
But Big Brother is not so easily frustrated in his determination to watch you (for your own good, you understand). So state-issued driver's licenses that are not Real ID compliant will not be accepted by the federal government as valid identification for any purpose including boarding a flight, receiving Social Security or opening an account at a federally chartered bank. In other words, the federal government has made it "so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark" of its national ID.
But the good news -- for those of us who still harbor the quaint notion that we ought to be presumed innocent until there is, at minimum, probable cause to believe otherwise -- is that we are seeing the biggest 10th Amendment showdown in nearly a century and a half.
Thirteen states have enacted resolutions or legislation opposing Real ID. Hopefully, Michigan will do so, too.
The sad thing about all of this is that the whole premise upon which the Real ID is founded -- that verifying an individual's identity will somehow prevent terrorism -- is demonstrably false. In point of fact, only two of the 19 9/11 hijackers would not have qualified for a Real ID. And, in any case, none of the rest bothered to use false ID.
TIM O'BRIEN is executive director of the Small Government Alliance, a statewide, nonpartisan, independent, political action committee.
Copyright © 2007 Detroit Free Press Inc.
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