Today the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) published new regulations for the REAL-ID Act in the Federal Register, finalizing a bizarre and clearly illegal proposal the agency made in September 2024. The new TSA regulations leave it even more unclear than before who the TSA will allow to fly without ID, and who it will prevent […]
[“The welcoming, friendly and visually pleasing appearance” of the TSA’s headquarters at 6595 Springfield Center Drive, Springfield, VA.] We spent most of a day last week outside the headquarters of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), trying and failing to find out what the rules are for the TSA’s new digital-ID scheme. What we did learn […]
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has again backed down from its decades-old threats to start requiring all airline passengers to show ID that the TSA deems to be compliant with the REAL-ID Act of 2005. But the new rules proposed by the TSA would create new problems that won’t go away until Congress repeals the […]
A year before the most recently self-imposed “deadline” on which the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has threatened to start illegally denying passage through Transportation Security Administration (TSA) checkpoints at airports to would-be travelers without ID it deems sufficiently “compliant” with the REAL-ID Act of 2005, the DHS has launched a new campaign of advertisements, […]
A bill introduced in the current session of the Alaska state legislature, HB 389, would end the issuance by the state of Alaska of driver’s licenses that comply with the Federal REAL-ID Act of 2005. In addition, HB 389 would give Alaska residents “the option of having the applicant’s driver’s license photograph captured with a […]
[Slide from internal TSA presentation, Identity Verification Staffing Support Overview, March 2017, released in response to FOIA request by the Identity Project.] As of 2016, almost 2,000 people a day were allowed through TSA checkpoints at US airports either without showing any ID at all, or with other forms of ID that the TSA or […]
The Department of Homeland Security has once again postponed its self-proclaimed “deadline” for enforcement of the REAL-ID Act at airports, this time from October 1, 2021, to May 3, 2023. The latest postponement proves, once again, that the dates of the DHS threats to begin “enforcing” the REAL-ID Act at airports are as changeable as […]
The Department of Homeland Security has published a Request For Information (RFI) from vendors and other stakeholders regarding standards for drivers licenses and other IDs stored on smartphones or other mobile devices to be considered compliant with the REAL-ID Act of 2005. Responses to the RFI are due by June 18, 2021. The amendments to […]
Amendments to the REAL-ID Act of 2005 were included in the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021, which was signed into law by President Trump on December 27, 2020. But somewhere in the sausage-making that saw the REAL-ID Modernization Act and numerous other unrelated measures inserted into the 2,124-page omnibus pandemic relief and appropriations bill, the […]
For the last fifteen years, as both Republican and Democratic administrations have come and gone, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been using the threat of “enforcement” of the REAL-ID Act of 2005 to extort state legislators, governors, and driver licensing agencies into complying with the REAL-ID Act of 2005 and uploading their […]