Who’s paying for the national ID database?
As part of a flurry of overdue year-end responses to our Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) requests, we’ve gotten some curious messages about Federal government funding for SPEXS, the national database of drivers’ license and state ID-card data being created — with no apparent consideration of its impact on privacy and civil liberties — to enable states to comply with the Federal REAL-ID Act of 2005.
The DHS continues to claim that SPEXS isn’t a Federal database: “REAL ID does not create a federal database of driver license information.” But we know that much of the funding for the SPEXS database and the “State-To-State” (S2S) system of which it is a component has come from Federal grants laundered through grants to states and then reassembled by the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA) to pay the contractors building and operating the database and network.