Wednesday, December 30, 2015

On licenses and a National ID card

If you are a resident of Washington state, Minnesota, New Mexico, Missouri, or Illinois, you may soon have trouble boarding an airplane. The federal government says that sometime in 2016 they will start enforcing the "Real ID" standard for state driver's licenses; unless your state complies, you may not use your driver's license as ID when boarding a plane.

Right now, only 20 states are fully compliant with Real ID, which was enacted during the fear-frenzy of post-9/11 legislation. Real ID requires that states verify citizenship status when issuing driver's licenses, and issue electronically-readable cards with consistent data formatting so that the data can be easily shared by various state and federal agencies.

According to the NY Times (12/29/2015, pageB4), "a press officer for the Department of Homeland Security said the law's intention was not to create a national identification card but to extend what the agency calls best practices on issuing driver's licenses that apply to all states".  That statement is a lovely bit of crap-filled doublespeak. Let me explain.

A driver's license is, above all else, documentation that a person knows how to drive. Since it is valid in all states, there is a valid reason for national standardization. But that standardization should be focused on driving skills. Yes, it is necessary to show that the holder of the card is indeed the person licensed to drive, and so a driver's license is a de facto identification card. But that is not its primary purpose. Real ID provides no standardization of driving practices; it standardizes identification and makes it easy to share that data.

How is that NOT creating a national identification system? Simply because it is issued by the individual states does not make it less of a federal ID.

We actually HAVE a federal ID card. It's called a passport card, and you can get one for $30 from the Passport Office. The first time you apply, it is $55; processing the paperwork to prove citizenship is the reason for the extra fee for a first-time applicant (why the processing fee for a full passport is $10 more is puzzling, since they are vetting the same information.) I have no problems with a passport card. I have one, and I try to use it whenever I am asked for positive identification. Unfortunately, not many people know what it is. It SHOULD be the highest, most secure form of positive ID we can have. But the Federal government has not particularly pushed its use, and it remains a curiosity.

There are two problems with using driver's licenses for non-driving related ID. First, states are not equipped nor qualified to determine citizenship status of applicants. The brouhaha with Obama's birth certificate shows that. Hawaii does not follow the same conventions in its paperwork as certain other states, so people questioned the validity of the paperwork. It is not reasonable to require each state to be fully conversant with the paperwork conventions of all the other states - or rather, requiring such expertise is an expensive burden to place on the state. And even the Feds don't consider it adequate; a driver's license from a Real ID-compliant state is not sufficient documentation to obtain a passport.

The second problem lies in that data-sharing. How secure is a data pool designed to be read and written to by millions of police officers in 50 states and at least two territories? Not very, and this is the aspect that alarms civil libertarians.

Oh, and there is a third argument - surprise; many people in the US do not drive.  City dwellers, the elderly, people on certain medications or with certain medical conditions. Or people who simply choose not to drive. Since they do not drive, they have no need for a drivers license. Now, states allow the issuance of a non-driver ID card, but they are often hard to obtain (DMV offices tend to be away from places served by public transportation) and expensive. A passport card would be more suitable in those cases, since a passport card can usually be obtained through the Post Office, which is much more likely to be located in an accessible location. Plus, a passport card lasts for ten years; most licenses (or non-driver ID cards) are valid for 5 years or less.

My solution: get a passport card, and use it whenever you can. It will not be accepted in many places, because a) people do not know what it is (but that should change if more people use it),  and b) it doesn't show an address. But that, with any other ID—even a utility bill; remember when that was acceptable ID?—should be sufficient proof of identity and residence that anyone would need. No need to put the burden on the states, and no need to put so much personal information in a non-secure database.




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