There’ve been a lot of scary reports lately about how, if your state governor doesn’t “volunteer” to collaborate with the Department of Homeland Security’s “REAL-ID” scheme for a distributed national identity card and linked databases of personal information about every American resident, the DHS won’t “allow” you to board any airline flight in the U.S. […]
We think so. Ars Technica asks the question. So does Declan McCullagh on CNet News. Montana Senators Baucus and Tester, who filed the amendment on which the bill foundered, are happy to take the credit.
Stateline.org has noticed the Real ID controversy, but hasn’t figured out what’s going on. They keep reporting blather about how “citizens of states that are not compliant would be unhappy when they realize they can’t use their driver’s licenses to board flights“. They haven’t figured out yet that no federal statute can disenfranchise every citizen […]
Recent events have focused attention on the asymmetry of police demands for ID: Government agents demand that ordinary citizens provide evidence of our identity, even when we are exercising rights — such as traveling by common carrier — that don’t depend on our identity. But those same government agents typically refuse to provide the same […]
The US Department of the Treasury has announced that it plans not to enforce the provisions of the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) that were to go into effect next month requiring owners and principals of all corporations to file copies of government-issued ID credentials, including photos, with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). The Treasury […]
There are elections today in the USA. But we don’t need to know their outcome to predict many of the issues that the Identity Project and our supporters and allies will continue to face in the coming years. For what it’s worth, everything that was on our agenda for the first Obama Administration, following the […]
Brushing off objections from the Identity Project and others, the US Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has issued regulations creating the framework for an all-purpose smartphone-based national digital ID and tracking system. The TSA’s new rules are piggybacked on the REAL-ID Act of 2005, and are ostensibly standards for what states will have to do to […]
Today the Identity Project joined almost 8,000 individuals who have filed comments with the Transportation Security Administration opposing the TSA’s latest bizarre proposal for decentralized, nonstandard, selective enforcement of the REAL-ID Act of 2005. The introduction to our comments summarizes our objections as follows: By this NPRM [Notice of Proposed Rulemaking], the Transportation Security Administration […]
The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) have been working together for years to steal travelers’ money. The DEA pays informers to finger people who might be flying with large amounts of cash, and gets the TSA to identify these people when they go through TSA checkpoints at airports, claim that […]
As we discussed in our previous article, the issue in the current stage of the lawsuit challenging a Texas law requiring ID to visit some websites is what standard — “strict scrutiny” or “rational basis” review — courts should use to evaluate the Constitutionality of government-imposed restrictions on the exercise of First Amendment rights. But […]