DHS Secretary Chertoff on REAL ID's "COUNTLESS OTHER" USES.

READ WHERE DO YOU PLACE YOUR DISTRUST?

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

DHS: Real ID is 'pro-consumer' and 'antiterrorism'

Ann Broache, on behalf of CNet News, blogs about DHS's push to make states comply with REAL ID:
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.

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."
I only wish there were a lot of push back 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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