Ignoring objections from grassroots organizations from diverse communities throughout the state and a litany of lies to the legislature from the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), Gov. Gavin Newson signed a bill into law this week which authorizes the DMV to upload information about about all California driver’s licenses and state-issued non-driver ID cards to the SPEXS national ID database. The bill, SB-169, is effective immediately.

Gov. Newsom and the DMV have made much of the “guardrails” included in the bill. But as we testified at the last hearing before this bill was enacted (see video starting at 2:48:22) once the DMV uploads information about all California driver’s licenses and IDs to AAMVA (which holds the SPEXS database), the “guardrails” in this bill would do nothing to protect Californians against the threat that Federal or other states’ law enforcement agencies could obtain an order (1) requiring AAMVA to hand over this data in bulk and (2) prohibiting AAMVA from disclosing that order to the DMV or to the Californians — especially vulnerable immigrant and transgender Californians — against whom this data will be weaponized. Neither the DMV nor impacted Californians will even know this has happened, and it won’t be detectable by the audit of DMV records (not AAMVA records) required by SB-169.

In its report on the signing of SB-169, the Sacramento Bee erroneously states (perhaps based on misinformation from the DMV and/or the Governor’s office) that the data sharing authorized by SB-169 is “required by federal law.” But the regulations cited by the Bee apply only to those states that choose to comply with the REAL-ID Act.

As a coalition of 170 organizations said in a joint statement quoted by the Bee:

The first rule of combating tyranny is do not comply in advance. It is imperative that California not willingly give away data that the federal government could turn around and use to harm our communities.

No state is required to comply with the REAL-ID Act. No state is required to upload data about its residents to a database held by a private company, AAMVA.

This is a choice — the wrong choice — for Californians.