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The Identity Project

Category Archives: REAL ID

Oct 01 2011

A real story about REAL-ID

From the Identity Project mailbag:

My life has been basically destroyed because I don’t have a valid state-issued photo ID.

Thanks to terrorists, it is illegal for any employer in my state to hire me.

I am a natural-born citizen of the United States, born and raised in the State of New Jersey. I have lived here most of my life. I have never been convicted of a felony nor even a misdemeanor. I have never been arrested, nor even ever received so much as a parking ticket. I do not receive any funds from Welfare, Social Security, or any other government program. I am not a terrorist.

Yet, in the State of New Jersey, it is illegal for any employer to hire me, and has been for about the last 6 years.

Read More →

Sep 30 2011

How would REAL-ID affect the right to travel?

In the latest step in the implementation of the REAL-ID Act and the establishment of a de facto national ID card and database, the Department of Homeland Security has requested OMB approval for the collection of additional information from states and individuals.

The public response to the DHS request, particularly these comments submitted by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), highlight the important unanswered questions about how REAL-ID Act implementation will affect the right to travel:

EPIC’s comments focus on the widely-publicized recent case of  Lewis Brown, a former high school and college basketball star who died on a street in Southern California homeless, earlier this month:

EPIC writes today to draw the agency’s attention to the death of Lewis Brown, a former college basketball prodigy, who died on the streets of Los Angeles because he could not scrape together the money to obtain a state-issued identity document…. According to the New York Times, Brown, a basketball legend at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, planned to fly to visit his family in New York and could not. Homeless and destitute, living on the sidewalks of Hollywood, Brown had developed cancer and planned to go to the hospital. Brown’s mother learned about his condition and stated that she wanted to see him “before he died.” Brown’s sister, Anita, told him to visit New York. Brown told confidants that he lacked funds to qualify for a California identification card, and was taking donations and borrowing money.

Read More →

Jun 06 2010

UK government admits it was becoming authoritarian. Can the USA do the same?

The new UK coalition government has announced its initial Programme for Government, including a plan of action on civil liberties including, “We will scrap the ID card scheme, the National Identity register and the ContactPoint database, and halt the next generation of biometric passports.”  Talk is cheap, but Bill 1 (text, explanatory notes) already introduced by the new government would repeal the UK national ID card scheme in mid-rollout.

It’s an important precedent even though, as some have already noted, the repeal would be limited to UK citizens.  Foreigners residing in the UK — including citizens of other members of the European Union, who have the right by treaty to live and work anywhere in the EU — would remain subject to a similar ID card requirement under a separate law that is not (yet) proposed for repeal.

Two aspects of the new UK government’s action seem especially significant as examples for the USA:

One, the government is making this plank of its platform a priority for action only because they perceived it as an issue that citizens and voters were prepared to act on, through noncompliance with orders to enroll in the national ID scheme and/or at the ballot box.  The government is following, not leading, UK public opinion and votes. The US government is unlikely to abandon its national ID schemes — in whatever guise they are cloaked — unless US citizens and voters demonstrate a similar commitment to direct action against them.

Two, the new UK government has admitted much more than that “mistakes were made” or that policies need to be changed:

The Government believes that the British state has become too authoritarian, and that over the past decade it has abused and eroded fundamental human freedoms and historic civil liberties. We need to restore the rights of individuals in the face of encroaching state power, in keeping with Britain’s tradition of freedom and fairness.

If the closest allies of the USA can make such an admission, and act on it, is there still a chance for the Obama Administration to make the same bravely honest admission, and take the same sort of straightforward action to scrap authoritarian measures like REAL-ID and the whole system of travel surveillance and control?

We aren’t holding our breath for fundamental change, either in the UK or the USA.  At least in principle, however, the new UK government has paved the way for what needs to be done.  It’s up to the people to see that they follow through, and that the US government follows suit.

Mar 19 2010

Obama endorses DNA database, considers biometric national ID

Yesterday President Obama met again with Senators Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC), the sponsors of the “immigration reform” bill we reported on yesterday, which has as its first “pillar” a mandatory biometric national worker ID card.  In conjunction with his meeting with the Senate sponsors of this scheme, President Obama issued a statement which didn’t mention the national ID card specifically, but praised the overall proposal as “a promising, bipartisan framework which can and should be the basis for moving forward.”

Meanwhile, President Obama has strongly and explicitly endorsed mandatory DNA sampling of everyone arrested (not convicted, arrested — people who are presumed to be innocent) and retention of DNA records in a national database. “It’s the right thing to do… This is where the national registry becomes so important,” the President said [transcript] in an on-camera interview.  We hope he reconsiders, and that his views on a national DNA database aren’t an indication of his leanings on a national biometric ID card.

Whichever way they are leaning now, the President and the Senate need to hear from the public, right away, what you think of these ideas — and that you won’t go along with unconstitutional restrictions on your rights.

Mar 18 2010

New excuses for state and Federal ID laws and databases

Heads up, Arizona readers: Your state legislature is on the verge of enacting a REAL-ID type national ID requirement in the guise of “immigration reform”.  And a heads up to readers elsewhere: Congress is also considering an ID mandate as part of an  “immigration reform” bill.

For a while after 9/11, the excuse offered by proponents of a national ID card was that it would somehow prevent terrorism.  We all know that there’s never any terrorism in police states, right?  With that excuse wearing thin, the old bugaboo of illegal immigration is emerging (or reemerging) as the rationale for a national ID requirement and database.

In Arizona, SB1070/HB2632 is under consideration on the floor of the state House of representatives today, and could be voted on at any time.  The Campaign for Liberty has a detailed analysis of the provisions of this bill. We don’t know why the state of Arizona needs any legislation on “ENFORCEMENT OF IMMIGRATION LAWS”, since those are Federal laws normally enforced by the Feds, not by state authorities.  But in the guise of an amendment to those “immigration” provisions of Arizona law, the bill would require not merely state law enforcement officers but all state and local agencies to make “a reasonable attempt … to determine the immigration status of the person” in a wide range of circumstance. As part of that attempt to determine the person’s status, “The person’s immigration status shall be verified with the federal government pursuant to 8 United States code section 1373(c).”  And checks of ID against Federal immigration databases would be allowed as a condition of virtually any state or local public services.

In Congress, “Lawmakers working to craft a new comprehensive immigration bill are proposing a new national biometric ID card that would be required of all U.S. workers… Under the potentially controversial plan still taking shape in the Senate, all legal U.S. workers, including citizens and immigrants, would be issued an ID card with embedded information, such as fingerprints, to tie the card to the worker”, according  to a report in the Wall Street Journal quoting Senators Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC).

As one commentator put it, “Every worker would have to ask permission from the federal government to get a job. American workers shouldn’t have to beg or plead to anybody to get permission to work.”  Nor should they have to have their fingerprints in a national database that, to work as designed, would have to be open to verification queries form every potential employer in the country.  (Never mind what would happen to remote workers or contractors who’ve never met their employers in the flesh for them to be able to verify their fingerprints.)

But the key problem with any of these schemes isn’t the excuse that is offered to justify their creation, but the potential they create for abuse and the inevitability that they will be used in ways that the public never imagined when they allowed them to be created — such as, for example, the historic “mission creep” of Social Security numbers.

A national ID card or database or identification requirement is wrong, regardless of whether it is created through state or local law, and regardless of the “excuse du jour” proffered as its rationale.

Aug 27 2009

Of course it’s not a national ID card

Whenever questions are raised about national ID schemes like REAL-ID or PASS-ID, their more public-relations savvy proponents are always quick to say, “But of course this isn’t a national ID card”.  The same goes for L-1 Identity Solutions, the prime drivers license, ID card, and ID and biometric database contractor, aggregator, and data miner for California and the majority of other states (and keynote presenter at ICAO’s upcoming Symposium on Machine Readable Travel Documents next month in Montreal).

So we were interested to see how L-1 describes its products to its customers in this full-page ad on the back cover of the latest issue of ICAO’s Machine Readable Travel Document Report:

But of course, this isn’t a national ID card.

Jul 17 2009

PASS ID or REAL-ID? Tweedle-dum or Tweedle-dee?

The Senate Homeland Secuirty Committee hearing this Wednesday on “Reevaluating the REAL ID Act” was a sham, in which the only”opponents” or “critics” of the current REAL-ID law allowed to testify were those who prefer the PASS-ID bill to substitute an alternate national ID card mandate.  Critics of any national ID need not apply to be heard as part of this debate between Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum.

Eevn the few positive features of  the PASS-ID bill came under attack.  Senator Collins of Maine wanted to know whether the bill would allow the sort of airport “security” measures that are used in Israel (notorious for ethnic profiling), and specifically whether the PASS-ID provision that, ““no person shall be denied boarding a commercial aircraft solely on the basis of failure to present a driver’s license or identification card issued pursuant to this subtitle,” would still allow denail of boarding, regardless of ID, solely on the basis of “behavioural profiling”.  And the National Retail Association wants to make sure that the PASS-ID prohibition on non-governmental scanning or use of machine-readable (bar-code, mag stripe, or RFID) data on government-issued ID cards would still allow stores to skim this data in order to profile patterns of “suspicious” merchandise returns.  Would anyone object, they want to know, to an exception to this provision that would allow scanning and tracking of machine-readable ID data to detect or prevent “fraud or other illegal activity”?

Yes, we would object to such an open-ended exception.  More importantly, we object to any mandatory national ID.  So do tens of millions of Americans, regardless of whether Congress does’t want our views to be part of the debate.

Jun 25 2009

Courts and Congress finally start to rein in the TSA

Until recently, the TSA has been a domestic legal Guantanamo, and the TSA has treated their domain of “checkpoints” and travel control and surveillance as a law-free zone where their powers of search, seizure, detention, and denial of passage were unconstrained by the Constitution, human rights treaties, judicial review, or stautory or regulatory standards.  As indeed it has been: Congress has enacted no law specifically defining any limits on the authority of TSA agents at checkpoints (or elsewhere), and the TSA itself has never conducted any rulemaking or issued any publicly-disclosed regulations defining its authority, the limits of that authority, what orders travellers do or don’t have to comply with, and which forms of “noncooperation” are considered grounds for which sanctions (more intrusive search, denial of transportation, admninistrative fine, detention, etc.). While the TSA has never been explicitly exempted from the Constitution or treaties such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the DHS has sought to avoid ever allowing judicial review of fly/no-fly decisions, and the courts themselves have gone out of their way to avoid ruling on the legality of TSA actions — such as when the 9th Circuit invented a counter-factual claim (without ever allowing an evidentiary hearing on the facts) that John Gilmore hadn’t actually been required to show ID credentials in order to fly, as a way to avoid ruling on whether an ID-to-fly requirement would be Constitutional. As for the Executive, President Obama has yet to nominate an Administrator of the TSA, leaving this one of the highest-ranking vacancies in the Administration and leaving the TSA operating on autopilot under lame-duck holdovers.

In the absence of any explicit rules or any judicial, legislative, or executive oversight, the TSA has felt no need to seek authority for its ever-expanding assertions of authority through legislation or rulemaking.  Nor has the TSA recognized any duty of self-restraint or self-policing to ensure its actions conform to the law. Instead, the TSA has simply wielded its power to do whatever it wished, on the disgraceful assumption that, “If we’re doing something wrong, the courts will tell us — if and when someone can afford to sue us, and they win a court judgment against us.”  In the meantime, the TSA will do, and claim the right to do, anything that hasn’t already specifically been ruled illegal. Kind of like the thief who assumes that they can steal whatever they want, and that if something turns out not be theirs, they’ll give it back if and when someone sues and wins a court judgment ordering its return.

Time and again we’ve pointed out this failure to subject the TSA to the rule of law. See, for example, our most recent prior post on this topic, our agenda on the right to travel submitted to the Obama Administration and Congress after the 2008 elections, and our comments earlier this month at the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference session with Obama Administration representatives and others at 1:45:53 of this video.  Until recently, however, neither the Courts, the Congress, nor the Executive branch have wanted to confront the question of what rules govern the TSA.

We’re please to report that this is finally beginiing to change, in small ways but on numerous fronts:

Read More →

May 14 2009

California DMV plans crackdown on “look-alikes”

Has anyone ever looked at your face and mistaken you for someone else?

If so, and if you live in California, you could be a victim of a proposal by the California Department of Motor Vehicles which is now under consideration in the state legislature.

At a hearing yesterday (May 13, 2009) before the Assembly Budget Subcommittee No. 5 on Information Technology/Transportation, the Director and Chief Information Officer of the DMV pleaded for more money (in spite of the desperate state budget crisis) to hire a contractor to digitize and store the photographs taken for every California drivers license or state ID, and then use “biometric” facial recognition and matching software to compare each new photo of an applicant for a license or ID with every photo in the database. (The DMV proposal next goes before the Senate Budget Subcommittee No. 2 on Resources, Environmental Protection, Energy and Transportation on Wednesday, March 20th.)

If the computer thinks your picture looks like any other picture in the database, both you and the other person whose photo the robot thinks looks like yours would be placed under suspicion of fraud, identity theft, or worse. Read More →

Mar 10 2009

DHS considering hackable long-range RFID as “alternative” to REAL-ID

Chris Strohm of the National Journal’s CongressDaily reports:

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, a former governor of Arizona, said Monday that her office is participating in a working group established by the National Governors Association to review the so-called Real ID law, which Congress passed in 2005 while under Republican control.

“What they’re looking at is whether statutory changes need to be made to Real ID,” Napolitano said after a speech to Homeland Security employees marking the sixth anniversary of the department’s creation.

“They are looking at whether some version of an enhanced driver’s license that perhaps creates options for states would be feasible. They’re looking at what the fiscal impact would be particularly given that states have no money right now,” she added.

“I would expect that over the course of the spring we’ll be rolling something out,” she said.

So-called “enhanced” drivers licenses, already being issued in Washington and Vermont, contain a remotely-readable long-range (“vicinity”) RFID chip, in violation of ICAO international standards for only shorter-range RFID chips in travel documents, with a globally unique identification number to permit anyone within range to track the card or the movements of the person carrying it.  Hackers have already demonstrated, in on-camera real-world tests on the streets of San Francisco, that these enhanced drivers licences and the passport cards that use the same type of RFID chips have succeeded in their design goal of being readable from inside or outside a moving car as it passes by.

This is no “solution” to the problems of the REAL-ID Act, and no improvement.

As we’ve argued in our proposals to the administration and Congress, the only solution to REAL-ID is repeal.  Until Congress takes that essential action, states and citizens should continue their refusal to comply with REAL-ID.