{"id":14943,"date":"2020-07-20T12:31:14","date_gmt":"2020-07-20T16:31:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=14943"},"modified":"2020-09-17T12:19:53","modified_gmt":"2020-09-17T16:19:53","slug":"the-real-i-d-act-ravages-our-liberty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2020\/07\/20\/the-real-i-d-act-ravages-our-liberty\/","title":{"rendered":"The REAL I.D. Act Ravages Our Liberty"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"toolbar\" class=\"toolbar-container\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"container\" dir=\"ltr\">\n<div class=\"header reader-header reader-show-element\">\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/jpb-photo-mass-anti-spying-demonstration-DSC_0867-scaled.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-14944\" src=\"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/jpb-photo-mass-anti-spying-demonstration-DSC_0867-800x532.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"455\" height=\"303\" srcset=\"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/jpb-photo-mass-anti-spying-demonstration-DSC_0867-800x532.jpg 800w, https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/jpb-photo-mass-anti-spying-demonstration-DSC_0867-1024x681.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/jpb-photo-mass-anti-spying-demonstration-DSC_0867-150x100.jpg 150w, https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/jpb-photo-mass-anti-spying-demonstration-DSC_0867-768x511.jpg 768w, https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/jpb-photo-mass-anti-spying-demonstration-DSC_0867-1536x1021.jpg 1536w, https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/jpb-photo-mass-anti-spying-demonstration-DSC_0867-2048x1362.jpg 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 455px) 100vw, 455px\" \/><\/a><a class=\"domain reader-domain\" href=\"https:\/\/www.fff.org\/explore-freedom\/article\/the-real-id-act-ravages-our-liberty\/\">fff.org<\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/08\/ffflogo.gif\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright wp-image-6071 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/08\/ffflogo.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"160\" height=\"97\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<h1 class=\"reader-title\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.fff.org\/explore-freedom\/article\/the-real-id-act-ravages-our-liberty\/\">The REAL ID Act Ravages Our Liberty<\/a><\/h1>\n<div class=\"credits reader-credits\">by James Bovard<\/div>\n<div class=\"meta-data\"><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"content\">\n<div class=\"moz-reader-content reader-show-element\">\n<div id=\"readability-page-1\" class=\"page\">\n<div>\n<section id=\"content\">\n<div>\n<article id=\"post-99894\">\n<header><time datetime=\"2020-07-20\">July 20, 2020<\/time><\/header>\n<section>National ID cards have been atop the command-and-control political wish list for decades. In the 1990s, Republican Congresses shot down efforts to move toward national identification cards. However, after 9\/11, \u201ceverything changed\u201d and politicians seized the chance to unleash far more snooping and create potentially hundreds of millions of dossiers on American citizens.<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=There%20is%20no%20reason%20for%20citizens%20to%20trust%20REAL%20ID%20more%20than%20Washington%20trusts%20American%20citizens.&amp;url=http:\/\/www.fff.org%2Fexplore-freedom%2Farticle%2Fthe-real-id-act-ravages-our-liberty%2F&amp;via=FutureofFreedom\">There is no reason for citizens to trust REAL ID more than Washington trusts American citizens.<br \/>\n[Click to Tweet]<\/a>Congress passed the REAL ID Act in 2005 as part of an enormous piece of legislation dealing with military appropriations and tsunami relief. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.), one of the few opponents, warned that the REAL ID Act granted \u201copen-ended authority to the Secretary of Homeland Security to require biometric information on IDs in the future. This means your harmless-looking driver\u2019s license could contain a retina scan, fingerprints, DNA information, or radio frequency technology.\u201dWhile Ron Paul was often derided by the media as paranoid while he was in Congress, the bandwagon against REAL ID was quickly boarded by both liberals and conservatives. Twenty-five states passed resolutions objecting to the law or signaling that they would not comply. The Electronic Frontier Foundation declared in 2007, \u201cA federal law that aims to conscript the states into creating a national ID system \u2026 is precisely the kind of scheme that the framers expected that federalism would guard against.\u201d Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff fanned fears after he wrote an op-ed that boasted that \u201cby embracing REAL ID, we can indeed cash a check, hire a baby-sitter, board a plane, or engage in countless other activities with confidence.\u201d But why should federal bureaucrats have any role in certifying babysitters?<\/p>\n<p>The DHS eventually compelled submission by state governments by announcing that the TSA would prohibit Americans from flying unless they have either a REAL ID Act\u2013approved driver\u2019s license or a passport. The Supreme Court ruled in 1999 that the \u201c\u2018constitutional right to travel from one State to another\u2019 is firmly embedded in our jurisprudence.\u201d However, after 9\/11 politicians, bureaucrats, and judges discovered another exemption to the Fourth Amendment. But REAL ID Act policies routinely scorned both the Bill of Rights and Supreme Court rulings.<\/p>\n<p>Most Americans do not possess passports, so federally approved state driver\u2019s licenses are the new de facto internal passports. Almost a hundred million Americans do not have REAL ID\u2013compliant identification as of late 2019, according to the U.S. Travel Association. In Minnesota, fewer than 12 percent of drivers have licenses that will not be rejected at TSA checkpoints starting on October 1. States and individuals are chaotically scrambling to meet the law\u2019s shifting demands. Twitter is echoing with howls of people who spend hours at motor vehicle administration offices only to have their paperwork rejected because of picayune quibbles.<\/p>\n<h2><b>Driver\u2019s licenses<\/b><\/h2>\n<p>But the REAL ID law poses perils far beyond the airport entrance. Maryland began issuing REAL ID driver\u2019s licenses in 2009. In 2017, the Department of Homeland Security notified the state that its REAL ID licenses were invalid unless Maryland snared more documents for each driver. More than half a million drivers remain at risk for losing their licenses. Maryland is revoking thousands \u2014 if not tens of thousands \u2014 of driver\u2019s licenses of people who failed to obey the MVA\u2019s latest document demands.<\/p>\n<p>By August 2019, 8,000 Maryland driver\u2019s licenses had been suspended and almost 60,000 others were at risk of being revoked. MVA spokesmen failed to respond to repeated press inquiries seeking the latest number of suspended licenses. Maryland police began seizing the license of any driver whom they stopped whose only offense was failure to hustle to show Maryland bureaucrats his birth certificate, passport, utility bills, Social Security card, or other proof of his identity.<\/p>\n<p>I was one of the Marylanders who received a summons to show up at MVA offices to prove my identity to comply with the REAL ID Act. I would have ignored the summons except that I didn\u2019t want the state to again suspend my license or vehicle registration on frivolous pretexts. The state of Maryland claimed to be unsure who I was though they never hesitate to cash my property tax payments. Nor did my local government doubt my authenticity when they sent me a ticket from a red light camera at an intersection where the yellow light was quicker than a cat\u2019s somersault.<\/p>\n<p>Even though I was aware of REAL ID perils, I showed up at a local MVA at the appointed time. The MVA clerk sifted through my stash of documentation and quickly found a problem.\u00a0 While my driver\u2019s license and passport identify me as \u201cJames,\u201d the IRS Form 1099s I provided her identified me as \u201cJim\u201d \u2014 a well-known ploy by terrorist groups. Luckily, I had brought extra documents and found a few 1099s with \u201cJames.\u201d Otherwise, I might still be in Identity Oblivion.<\/p>\n<p>Since the 2005 enactment of the REAL ID Act, the federal government has helped bankroll the license-plate scanner networks that permit tracking any driver on the roads in many parts of the nation. If Maryland decides to target people who received cancellation notices, there are almost 500 license-plate scanners deployed in police cars and elsewhere in the state that compile almost half a billion scans of drivers per year. If the order is given to use the scanners, a thousand people a day could be stripped of their licenses and arrested. MVA spokesmen also failed to respond to inquiries about whether license-plate scanners may be used for enforcing REAL ID compliance demands. The same type of hammer could fall on citizens in other states who are snared by federally funded covert license-plate surveillance.<\/p>\n<h2><b>Keeping us safe<\/b><\/h2>\n<p>The REAL ID Act specifies a \u201cmandatory facial image capture\u201d for every applicant for a driver\u2019s license, which must be \u201cretained in electronic storage in a transferable format.\u201d As Techdirt recently reported, \u201cFederal investigators have turned state Department of Motor Vehicles databases into the bedrock of an unprecedented surveillance infrastructure.\u201d The FBI is regularly tapping into databases with more than 600 million facial photos. But citizens have nothing to fear because, as the FBI\u2019s Kimberly Del Greco recently testified to Congress, facial recognition technology is critical \u2018\u2018to preserve our nation\u2019s freedoms, ensure our liberties are protected, and preserve our security.\u2019\u2019 Del Greco did not seek to ease apprehensions on potential abuses of facial recognition regimes by invoking the example of China, where the communist regime uses such spying to round out its totalitarian surveillance.<\/p>\n<p>National ID cards will do far more to control than to protect Americans. The REAL ID Act could enable the feds to demand far more information in the future. If Maryland or other states have the prerogative to cancel driver\u2019s licenses because of federal demands for people to show up with their passports or birth certificates, there is nothing to prevent future cancellations of licenses for people who balk at providing DNA samples or submitting to retina scans. The Justice Department proposed in January 2020 to begin collecting DNA from anyone (including U.S. citizens) detained at the U.S. border \u2014 an estimated 740,000 people a year. If another major terrorist attack occurs within the United States, politicians will very likely again stampede to grant any biometric-identity demands made by the FBI, DHS, or other federal agencies. And the same people who tell us we have no reason to fear such an abuse previously told us that we had nothing to fear from TSA screeners who were doing routine checks to ensure aviation safety.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The biggest folly would be to presume that data roundups spurred by REAL ID and other federal policies will somehow keep Americans safe.<\/strong> REAL ID \u201charms national security by creating yet another \u2018trusted\u2019 credential for criminals to exploit,\u201d warns the Electronic Privacy Information Center. The New Jersey Civil Liberties Union warned in 2016, \u201cThe collection, storage, and sharing of all New Jerseyans\u2019 private identification information will create a treasure trove for cybercriminals and identity thieves. This amassment of sensitive information could easily be abused or misused by government officials as we have seen happen at federal agencies in the past.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>There is no reason to presume that the REAL ID regime will not produce the same type of identity thefts that have long afflicted other federal personal data systems. REAL ID\u2013compliance debacles later this year will be followed by security breaches that bureaucrats and politicians will claim they could never have anticipated. Centralizing personal data in vast databases increases the profits and risks of identity thefts, including thefts committed by state officials entrusted to keep the secrets. More than a dozen Maryland MVA employees have been convicted since 2005 for issuing fraudulent driver\u2019s licenses, in some cases exploiting the names and data of real people to create phony identification. There were so many cases in recent years that the U.S. attorney for Maryland should have considered setting up branch offices at MVA offices to speed the arrest of MVA clerks.<\/p>\n<p>In July 2019, two California Division of Motor Vehicle employees were convicted of bribery and identity fraud for fraudulently issuing licenses to unqualified drivers. In New York, two Department of Motor Vehicle employees were arrested and charged with selling hundreds of \u201cofficial driver\u2019s licenses with other people\u2019s names to customers, which included convicted sex offenders, a drunk driver, and even someone who said they were on the no-fly list,\u201d NBC News reported.<\/p>\n<p>REAL ID could also be used to undermine Second Amendment rights. The 2020 presidential campaign has spurred repeated promises to seize all privately owned AR-15s and to impose other sweeping prohibitions on peaceful Americans. If an overtly anti-gun candidate becomes president, the federal government might seek to require showing REAL ID papers to purchase firearms. The resulting database could provide a roadmap for future confiscations. California is already restricting purchases of ammunition; the REAL ID Act could make it easy to stretch that nitwit mandate nationwide.<\/p>\n<p>Massive databases of personal data will do nothing to boost the candor of the FBI or the competence of the TSA (which misses up to 80 percent of the weapons and mock bombs testers take through checkpoints). TSA agents are so lunkheaded that they routinely hassle people with driver\u2019s licenses from the District of Columbia \u2014 as if that was a foreign country.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The biggest REAL ID fraud is the claim that Americans will be more secure after the feds further overrun their privacy. At the same time that the government is demanding ever more personal information from Americans, it is keeping more secrets than ever before \u2014 trillions of pages per year. There is no reason for citizens to trust REAL ID more than Washington trusts American citizens.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><em>This article was originally published in the May 2020 edition of<\/em> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.fff.org\/explore-freedom\/journal\/\">Future of Freedom<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>fff.org The REAL ID Act Ravages Our Liberty by James Bovard July 20, 2020 National ID cards have been atop the command-and-control political wish list for decades. In the 1990s, Republican Congresses shot down efforts to move toward national identification cards. However, after 9\/11, \u201ceverything changed\u201d and politicians seized the chance to unleash far more [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14944,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2471,2234,280,361,203,2470,117,2231,37,30,972,76],"class_list":["post-14943","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-biometric-identifiers","tag-dna","tag-gun-control","tag-homeland-security","tag-maryland","tag-minnesota","tag-privacy","tag-real-i-d-act","tag-ron-paul","tag-surveillance","tag-trust","tag-tsa"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>The REAL I.D. 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Act Ravages Our Liberty"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/#website","url":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/","name":"James Bovard","description":"","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/79550830ad81c14be529a2c37469974f","name":"Jim","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/d95466cfd0934e38803c5035629df727ae4ec1f3f96c6883c05b5c52e2044505?s=96&d=mm&r=r","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/d95466cfd0934e38803c5035629df727ae4ec1f3f96c6883c05b5c52e2044505?s=96&d=mm&r=r","contentUrl":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/d95466cfd0934e38803c5035629df727ae4ec1f3f96c6883c05b5c52e2044505?s=96&d=mm&r=r","caption":"Jim"},"description":"Bovard's homepage is at http:\/\/www.jimbovard.com He can be contacted at jim@jimbovard.com James Bovard is the author of ten books. The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism &amp; Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. Bovard\u2019s writings have been publicly denounced by FBI director Louis Freeh, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.jimbovard.com","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jim.bovard","https:\/\/x.com\/jimbovard"],"url":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/author\/admin\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14943"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14943\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15068,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14943\/revisions\/15068"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14944"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}