There’s not a lot of discussion about the Real ID Act on the geek boards so it might be nice to drop a round-up of stories and offer our take on the surprisingly low-profile treatment. The act, which passed the house last Thursday and is likely to make it through Senate, is intended to prevent illegals from receiving state validated identifications.
The act also calls for new National ID cards which will be essentially driver’s licenses with new, federally mandated information including, but not limited to, biometric data stored in machine-readable areas. Databases of cards will be shared between states and with the federal government.
More meanderings after the jump.
The bill will require drivers license applicants to provide four different types of identification including birth certificates and alien registration cards. Obviously, this will centrally effect new drivers and legal—and illegal—aliens and legal immigrants applying for a license for the first time. I believe the privacy concerns that the ACLU and others are discussing are quite valid and the planned embedded security systems, including biometric data, are still eminently hackable and reproducible. However, we must ask if this bill matters much, as a whole? No.
Identification in this country and in many countries is built on the basis of documentation. Documents can be faked and the wall of documentation, no matter how high, can be scaled at points. As Bruce Schneier often likes to point out, the appearance of security—the theatre of security that we go through every day which reduces insurance rates and makes us feel safe—is often enough to deter would-be miscreants and give us warm fuzzies.
Will this bill deter illegal aliens? No. There are ways around any system. If a person’s livelihood depends on it, they will drive unlicensed and uninsured. The end result will be a number of high-profile cases of immigrants getting into serious accidents, being deported, and leaving their victims with little legal and financial recourse.
No security system is perfect and no security system will ever take away our innate freedoms. Only force and the resulting fear can do that. As we see from today’s Zabasearch rumblings and similar outcries, all the data anyone could ever need to track and trace you is already commercially available. The Real ID Act will affect us all in invisible ways. Will it change much? Probably not. But a step in any direction towards a more sane and intelligent discussion of data collection and misuse on any level suggests, in a culture of hope, that we can still expect some of those steps to be steps forward.
Real ID Act edges closer to passage [USAToday]
FAQ: How Real ID will affect you [CNET]
The Emergence of a Global Infrastructure for Mass Registration and Surveillance [Schneier]
