"YOUR PAPERS, PLEASE"
National ID Card Bill Making Its Way Through Congress
By A. Kronstadt

The SHADOW has reported in recent issues on freedom-destroying legislation that has been rushed through Congress during the post-September 11 eclipse of reason. The Patriot Act, passed while the haze from the devastated Twin Towers still hung in the air, did away with rights as fundamental to Anglo-Saxon law as attorney-client privilege and vastly expanded the government's right to spy on our communications without judicial oversight.
        In February 2005, the House of Representatives voted in favor of a bill entitled the Real ID Act (HR 418), which, under the guise of denying drivers' licenses to undocumented aliens in order to "disrupt terrorist travel," effectively creates a national identity card along with a corresponding database enabling the government to find out a vast array of information about the person carrying the card--information that has never before been assembled in one place. First instituted in France during the reign of Napoleon, the national identity card has been a mainstay of authoritarian regimes, ranging from the former Soviet Union to apartheid South Africa. American resistance to the concept of a national ID card has been attributed to our tradition of freedom and our spirit of rugged individualism, luxuries that our government insists we must now give up in the interest of being protected.
        HR 418 was sponsored by Republican Representative James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin. The lengthy title of HR 418 reads: "To establish and rapidly implement regulations for State driver's license and identification document security standards, to prevent terrorists from abusing the asylum laws of the United States, to unify terrorism-related grounds for inadmissibility and removal, and to ensure expeditious construction of the San Diego border fence." The bill was approved in a roll call vote by the House of Representatives on February 17, 2005, and has now been sent back to the House Judiciary Committee for further steps in the process by which a bill is adapted, including negotiations with the Senate about corresponding legislation necessary to make HR 418 a law.
        Under the provisions of HR 418, all states would have to subscribe to a "Driver License Agreement" requiring the state to share its driver's license database with the federal government. A newly created master federal database of license information would contain information "at minimum" about the individual's driving history, but states could be ordered to supply additional information, or the Feds themselves could supply it, at the discretion of the Director of Homeland Security, concerning other topics including, for example, criminal history or the results of drug tests. The Department of Homeland Security is authorized under the terms of the bill to add new ID parameters to all licenses, ranging from iris scans and other biometric data to RF chips that would enable the government to track people from a distance. If a state refuses to agree to the terms of the Driver License Agreement, the driver's licenses issued by that state will not be recognized as valid ID for boarding an airliner or in dealings with Federal agencies. This database would be shared with authorities in Canada and Mexico--a point which suggests, to many opponents of the bill, a relinquishment of U.S. sovereignty in which private information concerning U.S. citizens is given away to foreign governments.
        The bill also contains a hodgepodge of other proposals which are only peripherally related to the issue of drivers' licenses, including one that essentially allows the Attorney General and/or the Secretary of Homeland Security to define "terrorism" for immigration purposes and to deny visas to and facilitate deportation proceedings against persons who fall under categories defined
as "terrorist" by either of those two officials. Section 103 of the legislation allows the government to deny admission to anyone who "endorses espouses terrorist activity or persuades others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization," in other words, for expressing opinions in favor of terrorism without having actually been involved in terrorist acts. Be-cause terrorism would be defined by government bureaucrats, and a mere opinion on an international issue would be enough to define a person as a terrorist for immigration purposes, the possibility exists of all sorts of opinions, not just those of Islamic fundamentalists, being defined as terrorist. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez or Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff could decide that this law allows them to deny visas to anarchists, or even anti-abortion or gun-rights activists who wish to attend a demonstration or conference in the U.S.
        Like its predecessor the Patriot Act, HR 418 embodies anti-immigrant measures that have been part of the right-wing agenda since long before Sept. 11, 2001.Rep. Sensenbrenner and other Republican sponsors of the Real ID act do not care about the havoc that the driver's license restrictions will bring about in the lives of thousands of immigrant families who bear no responsibility for the acts of terrorism but who will be deprived of the ability to live their lives in this car-dependent nation. The right-wingers who are sponsoring the Real ID Act see the devastation of Sept. 11 as an opportunity to enact a regime of social control that they have dreamed of for decades. The national ID card provision in particular is drawing a broad spectrum of opposition that has united the American Civil Liberties Union and immigrant advocacy groups such the Arab- American Anti-Discrimination Committee, and League of United Latin American Citizens with conservative groups including the American Conservative Union and Gun Owners of America. We must realize that the September 11 attacks were allowed to happen because the government did not act upon the information that it had at its disposal, and that giving the government additional powers to invade our privacy is not the way to stop any so-called "terrorism."