Real ID: You Can Still Fight It 1040
toupsz writes "Bill Scannell has created a website where anyone and everyone can fax their senators regarding the Real ID Act. Note that the act is up for vote on Tuesday, May 10th!
All those against the Act might want to go to Bill's site: UnrealID.com.
Thanks, Cory from BoingBoing!"
What's so bad? (Score:3, Informative)
Most European Countries use ID's like this already.
Bruce Schneier on RealID (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What's so bad? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why Bother. (Score:3, Informative)
The minority party in the Senate isn't nearly so toothless as you make it sound. Every vote counts, and with the filibuster rules, the minority party wields a significant amount of influence.
Re:cherry os! (Score:1, Informative)
If you actually care, scroll down and read the original story. Otherwise, get on with life and stop being so paranoid.
Re:Line Item Veto? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:And before you fax your Senator... (Score:5, Informative)
I always wanted to be above the law. Now, to become Secretary of Homeland Security...
Re:What's so bad? (Score:5, Informative)
How Real ID will affect you
By Declan McCullagh [com.com]
What's all the fuss with the Real ID Act about?
President Bush is expected to sign an $82 billion military spending bill soon that will, in part, create electronically readable, federally approved ID cards for Americans. The House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved the package--which includes the Real ID Act--on Thursday.
What does that mean for me?
Starting three years from now, if you live or work in the United States, you'll need a federally approved ID card to travel on an airplane, open a bank account, collect Social Security payments, or take advantage of nearly any government service. Practically speaking, your driver's license likely will have to be reissued to meet federal standards. News.context
What's new:
The House of Representatives has approved an $82 billion military spending bill with an attachment that would mandate electronically readable ID cards for Americans. President Bush is expected to sign the bill.
Bottom line:
The Real ID Act would establish what amounts to a national identity card. State drivers' licenses and other such documents would have to meet federal ID standards established by the Department of Homeland Security.
More stories on this topic
The Real ID Act hands the Department of Homeland Security the power to set these standards and determine whether state drivers' licenses and other ID cards pass muster. Only ID cards approved by Homeland Security can be accepted "for any official purpose" by the feds.
How will I get one of these new ID cards?
You'll still get one through your state motor vehicle agency, and it will likely take the place of your drivers' license. But the identification process will be more rigorous.
For instance, you'll need to bring a "photo identity document," document your birth date and address, and show that your Social Security number is what you had claimed it to be. U.S. citizens will have to prove that status, and foreigners will have to show a valid visa.
State DMVs will have to verify that these identity documents are legitimate, digitize them and store them permanently. In addition, Social Security numbers must be verified with the Social Security Administration.
What's going to be stored on this ID card?
At a minimum: name, birth date, sex, ID number, a digital photograph, address, and a "common machine-readable technology" that Homeland Security will decide on. The card must also sport "physical security features designed to prevent tampering, counterfeiting, or duplication of the document for fraudulent purposes."
Homeland Security is permitted to add additional requirements--such as a fingerprint or retinal scan--on top of those. We won't know for a while what these additional requirements will be.
Why did these ID requirements get attached to an "emergency" military spending bill? Because it's difficult for politicians to vote against money that will go to the troops in Iraq and tsunami relief. The funds cover ammunition, weapons, tracked combat vehicles, aircraft, troop housing, death benefits, and so on.
The House already approved a standalone version of the Real ID Act in February, but by a relatively close margin of 261-161. It was expected to run into some trouble in the Senate. Now that it's part of an Iraq spending bill, senators won't want to vote against it.
What's the justification for this legislation anyway?
Its supporters say that the Real ID Act is necessary to hinder terrorists, and to follow the ID card recommendations that the 9/11 Commission made last year.
It will "hamper the ability of terrorist and criminal aliens to move freely throughout our socie
Re:Wow... (Score:2, Informative)
Nothing he can do (Score:4, Informative)
It's part of the spending bill, which just so happens to be a war bill, and was passed by some 350-50 margin in the house. If you think the Senate is gonna vote an 80 billion spending bill down you need your head examined.
Bush will sign this into law even tho he doesn't want to, because if he doesn't, he'll never get anything through the Judicial committee. Sensenbrenner pretty much drew a line in the sand after the Pres promished him last November that he would get the opportunity to bring it to the floor after effectively demanding it be removed from the 9/11 bill. In some ways, the white house hopes to use this to leverage the immigration reform Bush has talked about twice.
We need to go to the source (Score:3, Informative)
This bill got slammed before, The ONLY reason it is going to make it into law ( and it will make it ) is because its attached to a huge military spending bill.
Neither side at this point wants to hamper our military by killing this bill so this law will pass no matter what you do ( ok maybe thats being over dramatic but its pretty close to true )
What can we do that would prevent this and half the other useless laws that get passed each year?
We need to voice our opinion against unrelated laws being piggy-backed together to get things past the general public and congress.
It should not be possible to have 2 laws totally unrelated in the same action!!! Congress should not be able to attach a law banning you from eating hotdogs to a law funding the federal goverment.
Its biases, deceptive but in todays congress a very common practice..
"Hey you, yea you republican, Yea if you get your people to vote for this democratic bill giving us all raises, we will let you piggy-back that important bill we vetoed last year to ban those evil hotdogs you hate so much, You know I rub your back you rub mine?"
Right facts ... wrong conclusion (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What's so bad? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hurrah! Real ID is bound to fail (Score:2, Informative)
LLM
Re:Why Bother. (Score:5, Informative)
I think this is a moot point -- it's been removed (Score:3, Informative)
Uh oh...speeding in other states is coming to end. (Score:3, Informative)
Remember the days of speeding through Wyoming or Texas, paying the fine right there when you got caught and not having to report it back on your home state insurance?
Well, those days are over.
Re:Worldwide (Score:2, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
THE HORROR! (Score:4, Informative)
An adress of current residence
A signature (oh, no!)
A photograph (the horror!)
and... wait for it... a DRIVERS LICENSE NUMBER.
Those bastards! How dare they force my driver's license to reveal confidential information like my driver's license number! It's a crime against humanity, I tell you?
Seriously, though. I have applied for drivers license in two states and neither of them will have to change a thing under this law, except being overseen by a federal organization. Maybe this means I'll finally stop getting jury summons for a state I haven't lived in in three years.
Re:Am I the only one who remembers this? (Score:4, Informative)
It's the same reason why directly requiring states to raise their drinking ages to 21 is unconstitutional, but withholding highway funds for states that decline to do so is not.
Re:Hurrah! Real ID is bound to fail (Score:5, Informative)
1. Hand-write a letter (that means in handwriting - I know, low-tech, but it works) stating your opposition and the reasons.
2. A polite phone call stating the same.
In both cases, be sure to mention that this an issue you care about strongly and will remember it during the next election.
Re:What's so bad? (Score:5, Informative)
Last May, I went to a family friend's house on a small private island off the Florida Keys for Memorial Day. (The owner went to boarding school with my Dad, became a banker, grew to be super-rich, all years before I was born.) Because the island was outside US territorial waters, I had to show my passport at airport customs to get back in, even though the entire island where we went was privately owned.
Passports are required by the United States when a US citizen crosses the border inbound, no matter where you're coming from.
Re:Bruce Schneier on RealID (Score:2, Informative)
You do understand that this current government is "faith based" and rather sneeringly refers to people who use argument as "reality based," then goes out and wins with peer pressure, don't you?
Nor is soliciting your elected representative in government a form of "peer pressure." It is electorate pressure, i.e. pressure from a superior. That's what they're frickin' there for! Not to rule, to represent.
KFG
Re:Hurrah! Real ID is bound to fail (Score:4, Informative)
Hand written letters, sent by US Mail, postmarked from the house member's district or senator's state, individually written and uniquely phrased, from a whole lot of different people, expressing their disapproval. Emails and faxes are generally given little or no weight because they require almost no time investment to send. Phone calls are only slightly better than emails or faxes. Old-fashioned letters in large enough quantities do make a difference.
MESSAGE TEMPLATE (Score:3, Informative)
------------------
I am a constituent who cares about privacy and national security, and I urge you to oppose the REAL ID Act provisions of the House emergency supplemental spending bill. The REAL ID Act creates a de facto "national ID," threatening our privacy, security, and the principles of federalism that safeguard both.
National identification systems are prone to abuse at every step of their creation and use. The REAL ID Act would establish an enormous national database of ID holders, where even a small percentage of errors would cause major social disruption. Also, the ID would function as an internal passport that would be shown before accessing planes, trains, national parks, and court houses - an irresistible target for forgers and identity thieves. The Act also requires IDs to include "common machine-readable technology," which would likely include controversial radio-frequency identification (RFID) technologies that can broadcast personal data to passersby. Worst of all, the REAL ID Act would divert resources from security measures that could actually work.
Moreover, states do not want this kind of system. A similar program called "MATRIX" recently failed because states abandoned it due to privacy concerns. This is an example of federalism at work. We should respect a state's decision to protect its citizens' privacy, not conscript it into an ill-conceived national system.
I hope that you will work to strip the REAL ID Act provisions from the emergency supplemental spending bill. Thank you for your time.
-------------
here is why this is bad with Excerpts: (Score:5, Informative)
`(1) IN GENERAL- Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the Secretary of Homeland Security shall have the authority to waive, and shall waive, all laws such Secretary, in such Secretary's sole discretion, determines necessary to ensure expeditious construction of the barriers and roads under this section.
`(2) NO JUDICIAL REVIEW- Notwithstanding any other provision of law (statutory or nonstatutory), no court, administrative agency, or other entity shall have jurisdiction--
`(A) to hear any cause or claim arising from any action undertaken, or any decision made, by the Secretary of Homeland Security pursuant to paragraph (1); or
`(B) to order compensatory, declaratory, injunctive, equitable, or any other relief for damage alleged to arise from any such action or decision.'.
Secretary of Homeland Security can do what he wants, and nobody has any recourse at ALL. He wanst to put in land mines, nothing we can do about it. Wants to spend 80 Billion dollars a year patrolling our borders, nothing he can do about it.
It errods Attorney General position by giving the Secertary of Homeland security the same power. Bear in mind the attorny general has checks and balances that the Secretary of Homeland Security does not.
NO judicial review??? (Score:5, Informative)
How completely, absolutely UNAMERICAN this Sensenbrenner person is. Has no grasp of the long term impact things like this will be to the US. Has no place in our government.
Yah buddy, I said it, get out of our country since you obviously don't respect what made our country great.
------------------
SEC. 102. WAIVER OF LAWS NECESSARY FOR IMPROVEMENT OF BARRIERS AT BORDERS.
Section 102(c) of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (8 U.S.C. 1103 note) is amended to read as follows:
`(c) Waiver-
`(1) IN GENERAL- Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the Secretary of Homeland Security shall have the authority to waive, and shall waive, all laws such Secretary, in such Secretary's sole discretion, determines necessary to ensure expeditious construction of the barriers and roads under this section.
`(2) NO JUDICIAL REVIEW- Notwithstanding any other provision of law (statutory or nonstatutory), no court, administrative agency, or other entity shall have jurisdiction--
`(A) to hear any cause or claim arising from any action undertaken, or any decision made, by the Secretary of Homeland Security pursuant to paragraph (1); or
`(B) to order compensatory, declaratory, injunctive, equitable, or any other relief for damage alleged to arise from any such action or decision.'.
Re:Worldwide (Score:3, Informative)
Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Switzerland. The latter is particularly interesting as their militia system makes the "weapons" part equivalent to "assault rifles in every house".
You could probably use most of the West European countries as answers to this quiz...
House Voting Record (Score:3, Informative)
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2005/roll031.xml [house.gov]
Re:And before you fax your Senator... (Score:3, Informative)
That is scary stuff. If not for the actual consequences, then for the precedent of waiving the entire body of law, and judicial review, at the sole discretion of a single person in government.
It's not about driving. It's about election fraud (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, that's some REAL good insight.
The prohibition on issuing drivers licenses isn't about driving. It's about identity fraud - including election fraud.
In some states (when you can challenge a voter's identity at all) a driver's license is adequate proof of identity to respond to the challenge.
California (for instance), where a LOT of illegals vote (often multiply), recently almost passed a law explicitly granting illegals the right to be issued a driver's license with no special markings to indicate that they were anything other than a full citizen and resident at the indicated address.
There are a lot of security implications to issuing official identity cards to illegals and deliberately looking the other way about their status.
IMHO the way to spike this bill is to add a rider that:
- requires voters in federal elections to show the card as ID at the polls and give the number when registering to vote and when asking for an absentee ballot, and
- tie the state registration databases into a national system to insure that no vote is cast without a valid ID number and each ID number only votes once in a given election, and that each ID represents a real person who is still alive and has no other ID nuber.
That (combined with the security-related federal checks on the database) would effectively spike a number of forms of voting fraud. Current legislators were elected under a system WITH the fraud. So even the honest ones will worry about how much fraud their party machines might have used to get them their seats, and whether they'd be voting themselves out. B-)
What I'd expect of such a rider:
- The Rs would be for it. (They believe the Ds are the major beneficiaries of such fraud and thus the Rs would benefit from the cleanout of the voter rolls.) But many of them are against other personal-info probing aspects of a National ID system. So they'd push for including the rider (and given their majority in congress might succeed). But many would vote against the bill even with the rider.
- Successfully adding the rider would convince a lot of Ds to vote against the bill containing it, because they too believe they are the beneficiaries of machine politics.
Together these two effects might raise enough nays to kill the bill.
Sounds like it's too late for this go-around. But if the ID bill does pass, and the system is deployed, it will be hard for a congresscritter to justify voting against a new every-voter-counts-ONCE act to use it to reduce election fraud. So the spectre of such use can be brought up when calling your congresscritter (if you think he's corrupt) and it might work as well as if the rider WERE present.
Of course you'll have to couch such arguments as using the card to harass minorities and such at the voting booth. B-)
Not anymore (Score:4, Informative)
Until a few years ago you were correct, hand written letters go the most weight. However this is no longer the case.
Now any letter is unopened for several weeks, while they carefully check it for various poisons. (well anthrax and the like which are not exactly poison, but are deadly)
Email is now preferred, everyone has email. Most people do not own a fax machine, though they are also liked. Phone calls work too, but they take more time.
Make sure that you give your home address. Not a P.O. box, but a real address where you get mail. They will respond with a letter to that address for everything you send if you are in their area. If you not in their area they will forward your letter to your representative from that area who will respond.
Be scared of this as well... (Score:2, Informative)
Reread your history books (Score:5, Informative)
We entered WW I because the Germans sank the Lusitania. Even though they published a full page ad in American Newspapers warning people sailing to Britain that any ship carrying war goods was subject to sinking, (which the Lusitania was), when it was sunk with americans onboard we got sucked into the war.
We entered WW II because of Pearl Harbor.
Before BOTH incidents the majority of people here in the US were Isolationalist. Doing the "right" thing, had nothing to do with our entrance into either war.
"and if we were in iraq for the oil, we sure as hell wouldn't be paying opec's prices for it."
I'd suggest you read Wolfowitz's papers for the Project for a New American Century [sourcewatch.org] to understand why we invaded Iraq. Iraq not only has the 2nd largest oil reserves, but being centrally located in the middle east it is the perfect place to have permanent military bases.
Keep in mind this was written in the 1990's long before 9/11 and the whole preemptive strike/WMD
tale.
Re:Don't bother with unrealid.com (Score:3, Informative)
Here in MA everyone gets carded (normally with one's driver's license) to buy a pack a smokes. A friend of my has had many stores scan in the PDF417 bar code on the back of his license. When he questioned why some said it was the law, others said it was to guard against fake IDs. The fact is decoding this bar code is a trivial matter and it contains your name, address, date of birth, license number and license type/restrictions. All this information is now property of the store. BTW, he ended up duct taping the bar code and no one has refused to sell him anything.
So, for example, do you thing insurance companies would pay for a list of smokers?
A few years ago there was a guy who slipped and injuried himself at a Ralph's market. When he sued they used the data from his shopping card (as in the beer and wine he bought) against him.
To go from carding for smokes and beer to everything is a very small technological step. All the tools are in place. Thing about stores like Home Depot that sell some dangerous stuff when used incorrectly. I could see RealID being slowly extended over time, item by item, to cover any and all purchases all in the name of protection from "terrorists".
The fake image of the "Real ID" card indicates that the card will contain information such as Religion and Occupation. It will not. Read the bill. FUD.
I could see religion being added in the future. The "Radical Right" aka "Christian Right" would say it's a good thing so, in case of an accident, the proper religious person could be summoned. Of course the inverse would be it ending up like a system in Nazi Germany with Star of David or upside-down pink triangle. Maybe add a crescent for current times. Before anyone says this could never happen, that's what most people thought of the Holocaust.
Oppression does not happen in one big swoop, but in very small steps. IMO RealID is one of those steps.
FYI (Score:3, Informative)