WASHINGTON--One of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's most prominent Real ID cheerleaders made a more timid than usual push on Tuesday for states to adopt the controversial identification card standards.I only wish there were a lot of push back on this.
Stewart Baker, the department's assistant secretary for policy, has touted what he perceives as the privacy-protective, identity theft-preventive features of the congressionally mandated Real ID driver's license regime during the past year....
But, clearly fearing criticism during a Tuesday morning speech at the spring meeting of the National Association of Attorneys General, he saved any mention of the program until the tail end of a 20-minute speech about the perils of identity theft.
The former National Security Agency general counsel then launched into a kinder, gentler defense of Real ID, first acknowledging he expected "to get a little pushback on this."
The concept of the individual is fading fast. REAL ID creates an infrastructure where arbitrary rules can be added and enforced with greater ease than before--reducing the "breathing space" of the individual radically.
The justification for REAL ID has already morphed into several purposes: national security, illegal immigration, identity fraud, and cold-medicine control. However, none of these issues creates a valid need for a national id card.
When people have to gain on-going permission to live (i.e. "You're ID, please."), those people are not free; especially when that ID is controlled by an impersonal, too-powerful bureaucracy.
Is this what America was supposed to be?
Read more of Ann Broache's article here..
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