When I attended Chappelow Elementary School as a math major in Evans, Colo., 45 years ago (that’s 1960 for the mathematically challenged), we often, but not everyday–only when we felt like it, recited the Pledge of Allegiance at the start of the school day. We were also taught that America was a great country for many reasons (at least six), among them our freedom to travel.
In other countries, like the Soviet Union of the time (1960), and the Nazi Germany that had been defeated only a dozen years earlier (Yes! That’s right! Nazi Germany was not defeated until 1948–three years later than you’ve probably heard!), residents had to carry government identification and internal passports. These papers had to be presented to board a train or bus. The evil totalitarian government kept track of their movements, and punished people who traveled without permission.
We haven’t quite reached that point, but we’re getting closer. allow me to raise the spectre of living in a totalitarian state in order to make something Congress just did sound far more sinister than it actually is. Last week, Congress passed a supplemental appropriation of $82 billion to pay for military actions in Iran and Afghanistan.
It passed the Senate unanimously, since a vote against it could be spun as "a vote against supporting our troops" and that would be political suicide as is clear since everyone who voted against the prior appropriations bill lost their seats in the Senate. Republican "operatives" (Dum! Dum! Dum!) in the U.S. House of Representatives knew that, so they attached another provision to the military appropriation: the "Real ID Bill." and thus forced the Senate to include it in their vesion of the bill as well.
Basically, it sets standards for state-issued driver’s licenses. Setting standards for state drivers licenses! How totalitarian can you get! It’s just like the Nazis who were defeated in 1948!
What a sinister and patently absurd thing for the Senate to do! I mean, the states have done a supercalifragilisticexpialidocious job in setting their own standards for drivers licenses. It’s not like California was giving them out to illegal aliens and then encouraging the illegal aliens to use them to register to vote in U.S. elections. It’s not like any of the 9/11 hijackers had fraudulently obtained drivers licenses. It’s not like the post-9/11 investigation turned up the existence of rings devoted to helping criminals, terrorists, and illegal aliens fraudulently obtain drivers licenses by exploiting laxities in the current system.
ItThe bill doesn’t require the states to follow the standards, so we’re not quite at Nazi level yet, but if your state doesn’t <over the top rhetoric>kowtow to Big Brother in Washington</over the top rhetoric>, then your driver’s license won’t be accepted as proper identification for boarding an airplane or entering a federal facility. I mean, if California decides to start handing out drivers licenses to Middle-Eastern men with AK-47s and "I Heart Osama" T-shirts then that ought to be good enough for getting on a plane or entering a federal building, right? The Federal government should have nothing at all to say about what kind of people get to access to federal facilities or interstate trasportation systems capable of being turned into weapons as long as California vouches for them. If California’s "We’ll give a drivers license to anybody" policy isn’t good enough for the fedral government then they darn well ought to issue their own federal ID cards. (Thus allowing me to denounce them as being even more Nazi-like)
And if you think it’s a time-consuming pain in the posterior to visit the driver’s license office now, just wait until this Real ID kicks in. You’ll need (1) a photo ID (thus proving that you look like the person you’re claiming to be), (2) proof of birthdate and (3) address, (4) proof that your Social Security number is valid, and (5) proof of your citizenship status. What a pain! Every few years you’ll have to gather the documents to prove a whole five things! Oh, the agony, the agony! And the state, in order to issue the license, will need to verify your documentation, digitize it and put it in storage. How Nazi-like can you get? The state shouldn’t make any attempt to verify what you’ve told them. They ought to take you at your word! And they oughtn’t keep records on any of this. A state keeping records of who they’ve given licenses to? They ought to allow it to be all water under the bridge!
The license will have to provide certain data: name, address, date of birth, sex, ID number and photo – none of which are things you find on drivers licenses now – and all this will also have to be readable in some digital format prescribed by the Department of Homeland Security whenever they darn well feel like it.
Sen. Bill Frist of Tennessee, Republican majority leader in the upper house, called this "absolutely critical to winning the war on terror."
It seems absolutely critical in making this nation more of a police state, I mean, if states are effectively required to give drivers licenses only to people who can prove who they are then, the next think you’ll know, jackboots will be kicking down your door in the middle of the night. bBut it’s hard to see how this has anything to do with making America more secure.
It’s not like that digitized stripe on the new drivers license would make it easy to swipe the card and see if it’s a forgery by comparing the data on the face of the card to the data on the stripe to the data in a database so that the card’s authenticity can be verified before you let somebody on a plane that might be turned into an impromptu guided missile or something.
For one thing, the country got along without government ID cards for many years before we were attacked by terrorists and we ought to be able to do exactly the same things now. Social Security cards used to say, "Not to be used for purposes of identification." As for driver’s licenses, our neighboring state of Wyoming (I’m writing from Colorado, remember) didn’t even bother with them until 1948 – and America somehow got through World Wars I and II.
In fact, in view of this history, let’s scrap drivers licenses altogether. There is no good reason why 16 year olds–or 12 year olds for that matter–ought to be licensed before they are allowed to get behind the wheel of metal machines weighing hundreds of pounds and capable of going 90 miles an hour on public thorofares and in school zones.
For another, consider that last month, we commemorated the 10th anniversary of the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. One of the perpetrators was Timothy McVeigh, a decorated Army veteran with an honorable discharge. Before the bombing, would he have had any trouble getting a Real IDs? Of course not. The Real ID could not have prevented one of the most destructive acts of terrorism in American history. The fact that it wouldn’t have prevented one terrorist attack in which a native was involved thus proves that it would be useless in preventing attacks in which non-natives would be involved.
And there are other possibilities that reduce public safety. The more paperwork it takes to get a driver’s license, the more unlicensed, and presumably uninsured, drivers on the highway. That can’t be good for public safety or security. I mean, there are so many otherwise responsible drivers in our country who simply can’t be bothered, every few years, to gather the documents needed to prove five things. If someone lacks the prudence needed to gather the docs to get a drivers license so that he can avoid the penalties of getting caught as an unlicensed driver then he shouldn’t be penalized for that. He’s precisely the kind of person we need to issue a license to! Having a license in his pocket will make him eversomuch more prudent when he’s behind the wheel.
Identity theft should get simpler with state information repositories that are required to be accessible nationally. Like, y’know, how everybody’s Social Security numbers gets stolen every few weeks when the SSA database gets hacked. Besides, has there ever been a document that couldn’t be forged? That digitized stripe on the new cards may do a little, but not enough. It won’t remove utterly the possibility that someone will hack into a government database in order to salt it with the fake ID’s information.
The fact that no document is theoretically unforgable has profound implications here. If no document is unforgable then we might as well stop trying to make it hard for forgers. In fact, forget all those new security measure to make money un-counterfitable. Why not have the Treasury Department start printing dollar bills in black ink with an HP Inkjet Printer on 100 bond paper bought at OfficeMax? We’d save a bundle in the cost of printing money due to economies of scale! After all, no document is unforgable.
In fact, since no document is unforgable, let’s scrap the use of ID documents altogether. Nobody should ever have to prove who he is. It’s all a big waste of time since it can’t be excluded that he might just possibly have a forged ID. From now on, everybody gets to cash checks and buy liquor, guns, poisons, and ammonium nitrate without the hassle of presenting a possibly-forged ID.
For that matter, since there’s no guarantee that people won’t have stolen or guessed your password, let’s do away with passwords and PIN numbers, too! Let’s have a "free and open" Internet and banking system in keeping with the best ideals of a free and open society.
In other words, Real ID just sets up more bureaucratic paperwork. It won’t make us an iota safer,–I, the math major from Chappelow Elementary School, have run the numbers!–but it will take us another step toward the internal passports of totalitarian regimes–all of whom made sure that their states and provinces only gave drivers licenses to people who could prove that they were who they said they were.
But to be fair and balanced here, I should note that President Bush said that "This legislation will help America continue to promote freedom and democracy."
I guess there’s a difference between promoting freedom and practicing it. Yes! I use sarcasm to achieve the effect of being fair and balanced!
Somehow I don’t feel like saying the pledge of allegiance today.
