NATIONAL
IDENTITY CARD BILL PASSES SENATE WITHOUT DEBATE
By
A. Kronstadt
In the early 1970s, Richard Nixon's administration rejected suggestions that the Social Security card be transformed into a type of national ID card, and in 1981, the Reagan administration described itself as "explicitly opposed" to the introduction of a national identification document. In 1993, Bill Clinton was lambasted for suggesting the introduction of a Health Security Card, and the idea died on the vine.
However, as part of the post September 11 rush by the Republican-controlled Congress to sacrifice our liberties in the name of security, we are now faced with the introduction of a National ID Card which, though its proponents deny that it is either national or compulsory, will give the government surveillance capabilities that the Nazis and communists in their day could only have dreamed of.
In SHADOW #50, we reported on the Real ID Act, a piece of legislation (HR 418) which had just been adopted by the House of Representatives (February 2005) and passed on to the Senate. The
Senate ratified that legislation on May 10, 2005, after a closed-doors caucus of Republicans attached the Real ID bill to a military appropriations bill for Iraq and Afghanistan, forcing their more skeptical colleagues to vote for it or "leave our troops in harm's way" by rejecting the military funding. As a result, debate was successfully quashed and the Real ID Act has quietly become a done deal.
The sponsor of HR 418 was Republican Congressman James F. Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin. Heir to the Kotex fortune, Sensenbrenner is one of the House's most consistent right-wing boneheads. Last year, he used his committee chairman's position to block House consideration of a bill to ban dog and cock fighting. Sensenbrenner introduced the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act on the floor of the House on October 3, 2001, stripping Americans of a whole layer of constitutional rights even before the flames of the World Trade Center had been extinguished.
Some of
Sensenbrenner's legislative agenda these days seems to have a
curious relationship to the fortunes of the Digimarc Corporation [See
<http://www.digimarc.com>], a specialist in "identity solutions"
whose stock has soared as Real ID has wound its way through Congress,
and which already has a line of "Real ID Compliance" products, one of
which we discuss below.
Sensenbrenner is also the sponsor of the Digital Transition Content
Security Act of 2005 (HR 4569), which would require manufacturers of
machines for transferring video to digital format to comply with
standards for a digital watermark intended to protect video
broadcasters from illicit digital recording. The digital watermark
technology that would be used, like much of the Real ID compliance
technology, is also a product of Digimarc.
Let us sum up the provisions of the Real ID Act:
1. All state-issued driver's licenses and non-driver ID shall include a
"biometric parameter," commonly understood to mean fingerprints, from
at least two of the identified person's digits. This will result in a
dramatic increase in the number of people fingerprinted and in the size
of computerized fingerprint databases. Currently, fingerprinting is
common in conjunction with arrests, as well as for certain forms of
employment, but is not usually required for a driver's license.
2. All of the
above-mentioned documents are to include a "common
machine-readable technology," understood to mean that the cards will be
swipe-able like a credit card, and that all of the information encoded
on the card would be available to the owner of the card-reading
machine. The legislation itself does not specify whether only
government agencies or private persons such as bar owners checking the
age of patrons would have access to the encoded data, but "common" does
imply that the authorities in California would be able to read licenses
from New York, so the card-reading
machines would have to be pretty generic.
The Department of Homeland Security is pushing for the introduction of
RFID chips, also known as
"proximity chips," into licenses and ID cards, which enable anyone with
the right instrument to read the card while it is still in its owner's
pocket. The Digimarc Corporation has already sold systems for
"contactless" smart card driver's licenses to North Carolina and other
states. Digimarc touts
the smart card licenses for their ability to be scanned by border
authorities on the Mexican and Canadian side, more or less the way
tolls are paid via Easy Pass at bridges and tunnels, at quite a
distance.
3. In order to obtain a driver's license, a real geographical address
will have to be provided, not a post office box. This will essentially
bar homeless people (or people whose home is their car) from obtaining
licenses.
4. The Real ID Act requires states to link the databases of information
on their issued IDs into a national database and to share this data
with Federal law enforcement officials, as well as those from other
states, and from Canada and Mexico.
5. Real ID includes several provisions that do not pertain to identification at all, but to immigration policy. One of these deprives state and local authorities of the right to use their own zoning or eminent domain provisions to interfere with the building of the border fence that is intended to hinder illegal immigration. Another allows the Department of Homeland Security to arbitrarily define the meaning of the word "terrorist" when deciding who shall and shall not be allowed to enter the country. This provision will probably be used to restrict the ability of non-citizens opposed to U.S. policies on a whole range of issues to travel in and out of the country, effectively cutting off the free exchange of information on those issues.
The Real ID Act
places the onus for many of its provisions upon the
states, and for that reason, its proponents deny that it will result in
a national ID card. It is true that individual states can opt out of
the new standards and continue to issue driver's licenses according to
their own rules, but,
according to the text of Real ID, these
documents will no longer be acceptable as identification for
federally-policed activities, such as air travel and entry into
government buildings and other facilities.
The idea is to create a de facto National ID Card that everyone will
eventually be forced to "voluntarily" accept. One of the things that
opponents of Real ID have emphasized is that the states are not only
responsible for enforcing Real ID, but for financing it as well, and
these fingerprint databases and common machine readable technologies do
not come cheap. The factors that may eventually scuttle Real ID might
just as likely come from the financial end as the political end. [See
Citizens Against Government Waste at: <http://www.cagw.org/site/PageServer?pagename=reports_realid>]
Opponents of the Real ID Act point to the
fact that expanding the size of the fingerprint database carries with
it the danger of increased "false-positive" hits that result from the
fact that the more fingerprints stored in the database, the more likely
it is that near-duplicate ones will turn up and that innocent people
will get caught up in criminal investigations just because they have
prints similar to someone else's. This is what happened to Brandon
Mayfield, an Oregon lawyer whose prints, on file with the FBI in
connection with a minor arrest long ago, showed a putative match with
latent prints found at the scene of one of the 2004 Madrid railway
bombings. Placed under surveillance and later detained when the Feds
discovered that he was a convert to Islam, Mayfield was completely
cleared after Spanish authorities detained another suspect whose
fingerprints matched the latent prints more closely than Mayfield's.
Most regular people in the U.S. realize that what little freedom we
have left here results, not from the government respecting our
constitutional rights, but from anonymity and simply not being
observed. Freedom is a zero-sum game--our freedom exists in the pores
of the beast, and any
increase in the government's abilities to observe and detect our
activities is at the people's expense.
Although the pretext for the Real ID Act was the events of September
11, 2001 and the "War on Terrorism," the alleged September 11 suicide
pilots were in the U.S. legally and Mohammed Atta's student visa was
mailed by the State Department to the flight school where Atta was
enrolled on September 13, 2001, days after the WTC attack in which he
is said to have perished.
There is no proof that enhanced ID card technology will prevent
terrorism, though there is ample
reason to suspect that it will expose many citizens to identity theft
when a person's entire identity, right down to fingerprints, are stored
on a single card and digitized on a single black magnetic strip or
perhaps one of Digimarc's "contactless" smart chips that can be read
from yards away.
The concept of a standardized document that everyone must present when
boarding an airplane, applying for federal jobs or funding or anything
else that requires American citizenship, is part of a post-9/11
mentality that is supposed to displace traditional American notions of
freedom of movement and privacy. However, these notions are dying hard
and, since we last reported on the issue, a whirlwind of opposition has
developed to the Real ID Act, primarily on the state level.
Since the Real ID Act is a done deal on the federal level, much of the activism against HR 418 focuses on impeding the implementation of Real ID on the state level, since it would be a multi-billion dollar boondoggle for the states.
As of this writing, the legislatures of 16 states have passed laws and resolutions condemning Real ID, or, in some cases, flatly opting out of it. The language of these bills straddles and in some cases transcends traditional left/right or liberal/conservative boundaries. Utah passed a bill in February 2007, denouncing the Real ID Act on the grounds of "individual liberties, free markets, and limited government." Montana, another western, conservative state, has enacted legislation rejecting participation in Real ID.
On June 27, 2007, the New Hampshire State Legislature enacted a law that includes the wording "...New Hampshire shall not participate in any driver's license pro-gram pursuant to the Real ID Act of 2005 or in any national identification card system that may follow from the Real ID Act." As justification, the legislature ruled that Real ID violates the New Hampshire state constitution and Amendments 4 through 10 of the U.S. Constitution. On that same day, the South Carolina legislature passed a similar bill, prohibiting the state from participating in the implementation of Real ID.
These states join Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, Tennessee, and Washington in enacting laws distancing themselves from the provisions of the Real ID Act. Such a law is also pending in the Massachusetts legislature.
Some other states, however, have made significant efforts to comply with Real ID. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has given honorable mention to California, Alabama, and North Carolina for their zealous attempts to meet the new requirements.
As of March 1, 2007, the Federal Government had allocated only 50 million dollars to help states with the implementation of Real ID. It is estimated that putting into effect the provisions of the Real ID Act will cost the states 11 billion dollars over a 5-year period [See: <http://www.ncsl.org/realid/>] In many respects, state opposition to Real ID is as much motivated by bottom line considerations as by a concern about civil liberties.
There are presently bills pending in the House and Senate, each now with a tenuous Democratic majority, to repeal the Real ID Act. An amendment to the bill eliminating the requirement that employers demand a Real ID-mandated identification card from all new hires was passed by the Senate in June.
On March 1 2007, the Department of Homeland
Security announced that the deadline for states to comply with Real ID
would be extended to December 31, 2009. Perhaps the mounting opposition
is beginning to register. In any event, all of us who fear living in a
world where any tin horn bureaucrat may ask for "your papers please"
should continue to apply pressure to their state and federal
legislators.
To read the REAL ID Act
(HR 418), see:
<http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c109:H.R.418:>
For an overview and analysis of the Real ID Act (HR 418), see:
<http://www.cause7.com/admin/upload/Real
ID Act LAO.pdf>
<http://www.cause7.com/admin/upload/LAO
Analysis of Federal Real ID Act.doc>
To learn more about
anti-Real ID activism, see:
<http://www.unrealid.com/>
<http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/05/real_id.html>
<http://www.realidrebellion.com/>
<http://www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/realidact.html>
NATIONAL ID CARD IMPLEMENTED IN
CHINA, WITH HELP FROM THE US + CANADA:
As America's individualistic traditions continue to assert themselves,
with freedom-loving Americans from all wavelengths of the political
spectrum uniting to defeat the Real ID Act, the Communist rulers of the
People's Republic of China are moving full speed ahead to exploit all
of the social control possibilities afforded by the latest smart-card
technology. Unlike earlier and less successful Communist police states,
such as the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany) and Soviet
Union (USSR), where secret police developed their own arcane systems
for tracking citizens, China has enlisted the active co-operation of
the Western information technology industry, for whom government
snooping, Commie or capitalist, just means more money in the bank.
In November 2000, the Chinese government sponsored the Security China 2000 trade show in Beijing, at which a project code-named "Golden Shield" was unveiled. The goal of Golden Shield as explained by security officials was to create a database giving the government immediate access to records on every citizen in China, and also linking to vast networks of police cameras and telecommunications surveillance. One of the lynchpins of Golden Shield was to be the introduction of smart cards specifically intended for the purpose of being scanned without the owner's knowledge, from several meters away. Among the 300 companies from 16 nations represented at Security China 2000, Canada's Nortel Networks eagerly jumped into the China security market by initiating a joint project with Tsinghua University on speech recognition technology to be used in the automated surveillance of telephone conversations. Nortel had previously been involved with a similar telephone interception project of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), code-named CALEA.
The 2000 plan for the master database linked to smart cards and cameras is just now coming to fruition. For several years already, all Chinese citizens have been required to carry ID cards that indicate name and date of birth. As of August-September of 2007, starting in China's heavily-populated southern cities of Shenzhen and Guangdong, residency cards have been issued to all citizens that include reprogrammable RFID chips encoding employment history, housing/landlord information, education, religion, reproductive history to enforce the one-child policy, and police record. Plans are being made to integrate the ID card with credit cards that will keep track of travel expenses and even everyday personal purchases. The link between the smart cards and the cameras lies in the ability to design facial recognition software that can scan a database of digital photographs taken to be displayed on the cards, and which are now stored in government computers. All large cities have been ordered to adopt the new system in the coming years, and the new cards are being issued to all citizens who move from one city to another within China.
The software giving the Chinese cops control of this system runs on regular U.S.-distributed hardware, notably that supplied by Hewlett-Packard, using regular U.S.-distributed operating systems, especially Microsoft Windows. The specific hardware and software for the cards, the big government database, and the facial recognition capabilities are the product of China Public Security Technologies (CPST), a holding company incorporated in Florida with several Chinese subsidiaries. CPST describes its Residence Card Information Management System on their web site [http://www.chinapsh.com] as an "integrated information transfer platform" integrating "social welfare management, education management, and housing rent-al service management." They state that the system "may be expanded to be compatible with other applications, such as medical, personal credit history, and driving records."
China Public Security Technologies has financed its ID card projects via mainstream U.S. capital channels, including Oppenheimer & Company of New York, Roth Capital Partners of California, and the Pinnacle Fund of Plano, Texas. To all of these investors, the erosion of personal freedom and privacy is just business.
--A. Kronstadt
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
By Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX)
This bill purports to make us safer from terrorists who may sneak into the United States, and from other illegal immigrants. While I agree that these issues are of vital importance, this bill will do very little to make us more secure.
It will not address our real vulnerabilities. It will, however, make us much less free.
In reality, this bill is a Trojan horse. It pretends to offer desperately needed border control in order to stampede Americans into sacrificing what is uniquely American: our constitutionally protected liberty.
What is wrong with this bill?
The REAL ID Act establishes a national ID card by mandating that states include certain minimum identification standards on driver´s licenses. It contains no limits on the government´s power to impose additional standards.
Indeed, it gives authority to the Secretary of Homeland Security to unilaterally add requirements as he sees fit.
Supporters claim it is not a national ID because it is voluntary. However, any state that opts out will automatically make non-persons out of its citizens.
The citizens of that state will be unable to have any dealings with the federal government because their ID will not be accepted. They will not be able to fly or to take a train. In essence, in the eyes of the federal government they will cease to exist. It is absurd to call this voluntary.
Republican Party talking points on this bill, which claim that this is not a national ID card, nevertheless endorse the idea that "the federal government should set standards for the issuance of birth certificates and sources of identification such as driver´s licenses." So they admit that they want a national ID but at the same time pretend that this is not a national ID.
This bill establishes a massive, centrally-coordinated database of highly personal information about American citizens: at a minimum their name, date of birth, place of residence, Social Security number, and physical and possibly other characteristics.
What is even more disturbing is that, by mandating that states participate in the "Drivers License Agreement," this bill creates a massive database of sensitive information on American citizens that will be shared with Canada and Mexico!
This bill could have a chilling effect on the exercise of our constitutionally guaranteed rights. It re-defines "terrorism" in broad new terms that could well include members of firearms rights and anti-abortion groups, or other such groups as determined by whoever is in power at the time.
There are no prohibitions against including such information in the database as information about a person´s exercise of First Amendment rights or about a person´s appearance on a registry of firearms owners.
This legislation gives authority to the Secretary of Homeland Security to expand required information on driver´s licenses, potentially including such biometric information as retina scans, finger prints, DNA information, and even Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) radio tracking technology.
Including such technology as RFID would mean that the federal government, as well as the governments of Canada and Mexico, would know where Americans are at all time of the day and night.
There are no limits on what happens to the database of sensitive information on Americans once it leaves the United States for Canada and Mexico - or perhaps other countries. Who is to stop a corrupt foreign government official from selling or giving this information to human traffickers or even terrorists? Will this uncertainty make us feel safer?
What will all of this mean for us? When this new program is implemented, every time we are required to show our driver´s license we will, in fact, be showing a national identification card.
We will be handing over a card that includes our personal and likely biometric information, information which is connected to a national and international database.
H.R. 418 does nothing to solve the growing threat to national security posed by people who are already in the U.S. illegally. Instead, H.R. 418 states what we already know: that certain people here illegally are "deportable." But it does nothing to mandate deportation.
Although Congress funded an additional 2,000 border guards last year, the administration has announced that it will only ask for an additional 210 guards.
Why are we not pursuing these avenues as a way of safeguarding our country? Why are we punishing Americans by taking away their freedoms instead of making life more difficult for those who would enter our country illegally?
H.R. 418 does what legislation restricting firearm ownership does. It punishes law-abiding citizens. Criminals will ignore it.
H.R. 418 offers us a false sense of greater security at the cost of taking a gigantic step toward making America a police state.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
New York State Senator Michael Balboni will travel to U.S. Department of Homeland Security headquarters in Arlington, Virginia on Tuesday to join state homeland security leaders from across the nation in a meeting on the status of the federal REAL ID Act. The meeting will focus on issues important to the development of improved security of driver's licenses and personal identification cards.
Senator Balboni (R-East Williston) said, "Establishing national standards for state identification cards and state driver's licenses is vital to protecting our nation, making it easier to root out terrorists and others who use false identification to break the law. But it is essential that the REAL ID Act be implemented with input from the states that will have to comply with these new standards. That's why this meeting at Homeland Security headquarters, with representatives from many different states, is so important."
The September 11 hijackers used state-issued documents to get through security checkpoints and obtained driver's licenses using false documents while planning and executing their attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Consequently, one of the 9/11 Commission's recommendations was to enhance the identification that is required to obtain a driver's license. The deadline for states to comply is May 8, 2008.
The REAL ID ACT requires:
> Minimum standards for driver's licenses,
> Foreign Nationals to prove they are in the country legally by showing a valid visa or a pending application for asylum or protected statues,
> That a foreign national's driver's license will expire at the same time the individual's visa expires
> Computers at state departments of motor vehicles to allow departments from other state to access electronic records.
Senator Balboni is the Chair of the National Conference of State Legislators (NCSL) Executive Task Force on Homeland Security. NCSL has expressed a number of concerns about the REAL ID Act including the fact that it is in essence an unfunded mandate placed on states. Another concern is that the REAL ID Act will not allow states the flexibility to give out driver's licenses to those who are legally entitled to them. Yet another concern is that the level of states' compliance is not guaranteed.
Senator Balboni said, "If implemented in a way that will treat the states as partners, the REAL ID Act could be successful. However, the security of the program is only as strong as its weakest link. If some states do not abide by the new law, that leaves a large hole in the system."
