Massachusetts Joins the Real ID Fight 330
In the battle against big government and the infamous Real ID, Massachusetts has hopped on board. In the words of State Senator Richard T. Moore, D-Uxbridge, "Historically, Americans have resisted the idea, which totalitarian governments have tended to do, of having a national ID. That's the broad philosophical issue. I don't think it's a good move and I would be reluctant to see why we are going to that step." And State Attorney General Martha Coakley thinks "it's a bad idea." Should be interesting to see how it gets voted.
Sadly... (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a nagging feeling that the real reason this is being resisted is because congress expected the states to bear the cost. If they ran it through again, 100% federally funded, I doubt there would be any significant resistance.
Passport? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm probably missing something important, so I'm not trying to troll here.
National ID == license to exist (Score:5, Insightful)
If you can't show one on demand, you are detained (to wit: your participation in society is suspended) until your license to exist or one is issued, or you are removed from society.
Not exactly what the Founding Fathers had in mind when creating a free country.
Re:National ID == license to exist (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Passport? (Score:5, Insightful)
Cause you're not required to walk around with your passport to prove who you are at all times when you're within the country.
You're not supposed (at least according to that pesky Constitution) to be required to show ID everywhere you go within the US. But, that has largely been trampled upon since 9/11.
Cheers
Re:Privacy is already dead (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Privacy is already dead (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Privacy is already dead (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sadly... (Score:1, Insightful)
Hyperbole much?
Re:National ID == license to exist (Score:3, Insightful)
No, social security numbers are a license to exist. That along with yoru state ID and birth certificate. You're not getting too far in society without these. Lets not pretend that this is a new idea. If anything its a consolidation of the stuff that's already out there.
Also, my passport is my right to exist in other countries.
Re:Privacy is already dead (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:National ID == license to exist (Score:5, Insightful)
And what fucking country are you living in that has?!
Please don't tell me that 6 years of non-stop fearmongering has caused those planes to morph into nukes in peoples' easily manipulated memories! Please!
Re:Passport? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, it's another tax to apply to the citizenry in order to keep them under the Federal Government's illegally far reaching arms. Sadly only a few of the states in this country are standing up to the Federal Government (regardless of the reason) in any way (medical marijuana, Federal ID, and in the past waiting till they forced DUI limits to be lowered).
Sadly most of the public has NO historical memory of the atrocities committed by oppressive regimes like Germany and Russia of less than 70 years ago. Yeah, History classes in HS sucked but you should have at least grasped SOME of this.
Re:National ID == license to exist (Score:5, Insightful)
Sadder still (Score:2, Insightful)
What this issue does really provide is an inflammatory diversion to attract the attention away from something else.
Re:National ID == license to exist (Score:4, Insightful)
Consider two things, A) Foreign terrorists will not have a REAL ID since they are not citizens, B) Domestic terrorists are already here. Both of these problems are not solved by a REAL ID.
Also, everyone in the United States still lives in a country that has not been attacked by "weapons of mass destruction".
Re: Won't do a thing for identity theft (Score:4, Insightful)
1) Base documents. How will you get a Real ID? You will have to present base documents (driver's license, birth certificate, passport, social security card, proof of address, whatever) to prove your identity. These can already be forged and already are to get perfectly valid driver's licenses. Without fixing the base documents, there is no foundation for Real ID. Someone can quite happily get the fake documents they need to get a very real document which will be accepted for a gold standard. What does someone do when they go to the government to get their Real ID, and someone says "Can't, someone's already got one."?
2) Existing identity theft. Issuing a new ID won't straighten out the existing tangled records. Which fraudulent credit lines go to which real person? How about income taxes and criminal records? You can't fix IDs that have already been stolen with a new document based on the already bad information.
3) Electronic transactions. An ID won't help you in electronic communications. You can't present your ID to a web page. They might start collecting Real ID numbers, but, like SS numbers, they can be stolen.
4) Lack of verification even in person. Right now, businesses and agencies are not required (and don't have the ability) to check the information that is there, like the fact that a given Social Security number belongs to a two year-old girl, not a thirty year-old man applying for a job. This is the source of a lot of fraud.
What you *might* be able to do is focus on fixing base documents, like fixing birth certificates, Social Security cards, and voter registrations. If those were harder to forge, easier to verify, it would be harder to get a fake ID of any kind. Once you had a significant chunk of the population with good base documents, people who currently have ****ed identities will eventually die off. Then, maybe, *maybe* a Real ID would make sense, but I think there are still better ways.
Right now, they're focusing on the wrong end of things. Probably because a real solution takes time, care, and won't be done before they leave office. A bad solution looks good now, and won't be discovered bad until long after they care.
Re:Sadder still (Score:5, Insightful)
That remains to be seen. One of the things that RealID has (legislatively) plugged into it is an as-yet unspecified standard for technologies such as RFID. This would provide a nationally uniform means to track individuals each and every time they came into range of an RFID reader, which in turn provides the incentive to create such a network. Once you're pegged as being located in any particular place, that same network could be used to deliver all manner of specific information about you (and database integration is also part of the legislation.) I find this both likely and unsettling; I think liberty requires privacy, freedom to travel, and some measure of limits upon the government - if you're not currently being hunted as a criminal, punished as a criminal, or under post-release, sentence-imposed limits as a criminal, I can't see that they have any right or need to know where you are, what you are doing, or why you are doing it.
You're joking, right? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hahahahahaha(snort)hahha
Okay, I'm done.
Seriously, do you really think that's going to happen? Have you ever worked with the government? What you'll end up with is one gigantic new Federal agency, which contains all the bureaucracy of the agencies it was supposed to replace, plus a lot of administrative overhead, plus the added cost of high-level management
And none of this ID crap would change the state drivers' license procedure, so you'd still have all the same crap at the state-level DMVs. No elimination there. And this ID wouldn't replace Passports, so you still have that separately, under the State Department -- that's not going away any time soon.
There's no "reduction" of anything happening here. All it's going to do is create a new layer of bureaucracy on top of what already exists in the form of your state drivers license.
It'll be a few hundred million dollars of taxpayer dollars down the drain, and the end result will be a whole lot of personal data siloed in some giant database run by a brand-new agency in Washington.*
* Probably not actually in Washington; it'll probably get an office somewhere out on the fringes somewhere.
Re:Privacy is already dead (Score:5, Insightful)
* Invasion? How will your little card protect you from an invasion? An armed and well regulated militia does this best, or the national guard.
* Fraud? You want the government who is not liable for anything they do wrong to protect you from fraud? There is a private company LifeLock http://lifelock.com/ [lifelock.com] that already does this, better and cheaper than the feds could, if they screw up you can sue them, AND they can't throw you in jail if you loose your lifelock card.
* Security? ID is NOT security.. they are not the same thing. The 9/11 hijackers had ID, Timothy Mcvay ID, Cho Seung-Hui had ID. The Washington snipers had ID. What can we assume from this? ID makes us NO safer.
* Theft? How does they government tracking you physically and digitally help against theft? I can SILL steal your lawn mower if you don't lock it up and your little card does nothing. Maybe you mean ID theft.. see lifelock above.
*wallet? Right now you don't have to carry any card in your wallet if you so choose.. You can still get on air planes without ID. This is freedom. It's how it should be.
We can't secure our schools, we cant secure our shopping malls, hell... we cant even secure our prisons and that's about as secure as I can imagine. I'll have you know that I am a honest small business owner and I will not accept this card. I flat out refuse to do so even if they have to throw me in Jail.. is that fair? for me to go to jail because you want to *feel* secure in your Police state? This is my breaking point. I will not be traced and tracked and have every action purchase and message I send analyzed by the state.
Will you be willing to destroy my life because I don't want to be tracked? How many more like me are there? 100? 1,000? How about them? At what point does using force on others in your aims become ok?
Re:Sadly... (Score:5, Insightful)
I like the national ID because it arguable can fold services 1, 2, 4, and 7 into one stupid card and cut the bureaucracy.
Sure, everyone hates to see their tax dollars wasted on duplication and inefficiency. But the opposite is *much*, *much* worse -- a totally efficient, effective government, where one strong, charming person who comes into power could send millions to their death with the stroke of pen. When you have a powerful government with little bureaucracy to slow down the functioning of governments, a tyrant can easily increase his own powers without anything slowing him down. Layers of government, separation of powers, the insanity of various forms and departments, are the boring, mundane details that protect us from concentration camps.
If BillG were here (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:National ID == license to exist (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll be blunt, I can't imagine anything that flies more in the face of the fundemental liberties as espoused by the Founding Fathers than having the Federal government forcing a national ID system upon its citizens. If it wasn't necessary to fight the British, the Mexicans, the Confederacy, the Spanish, the Axis Powers or the Soviets, and if it hasn't been deemed necessary for all the decades that Mexicans have been crossing the border, it's hard to justify it now. When you factor in that 9-11 was an intelligence failure, the national ID system seems to be pretty damn worthless, unless you start imagining that the real purpose is the Feds being able to better track US citizens.
Do you honestly believe that anything will prevent individuals sufficiently motivated to cause carnage? Repressive Nazi overlords and their willing servants in Occupied France couldn't stop bridges from being blown up. The military might of Napoleonic Spain couldn't stop the dehabilating and demoralizing actions of anti-French forces. The British intelligence community couldn't stop IRA operatives from blowing up people. As Churchill once said, when civilization as we know it really was on the brink, "All we have to fear is fear itself."
The Founding Fathers knew damn well what would happen when personal liberties were sacrificed, even in the name of some greater good. That's why they sought to limit the powers of government. The greater the power held by a relatively small number of individuals, the more likely it would corrupt them, that even as they might believe that what they did was for the greater good, they would poison the well of liberty.
Re:It's not a privacy issue (Score:3, Insightful)
-Rick
Re:National ID == license to exist (Score:5, Insightful)
Unlikely, and you shouldn't depend on it anyway.
People need to get it through their heads that *nothing* would have prevented 9/11. Nothing that is compatible with a free and open society, anyway. We often hear people say "Freedom isn't free" and nod our head, but we're thinking that the price is someone else's kid going over some ocean and getting hurt or killed to defend our freedom. Sometimes that is the price, but the fact is that sometimes the price is that bunch of innocent civilians die right here at home. Sometimes even kids.
A free society is always going to be at some level of risk from terrorists and other nutjobs who decide for whatever reason that they're more interested in hurting random strangers than in living. Actually, even the most restrictive police/nanny state is at some risk of such things because, fundamentally, the world is not a safe place. But free societies that allow people freedom of movement and association and the freedom to own and operate potentially dangerous tools are at more risk, and there is simply no way to avoid that without giving up a significant measure of freedom.
It's vaguely possible that the 9/11 terrorists could have been caught if the intelligence agencies had done a better job, but it's just as likely that if the intelligence agencies were more efficient, Al Qaeda would have been more careful and they still would have gotten away with it. You simply cannot defend against a small group of determined, inventive terrorists. Especially when they're smart and well-funded.
On the other hand, the actual damage that such a group can do is small. To a nation the size and strength of the US, 9/11 was a fleabite. More people die every month on our highways in auto accidents. More property damage is done every couple of years when a major hurricane rips across Florida, to say nothing of Katrina-scale disasters. The reason that terrorists choose terror tactics is because they don't have the ability to do real damage. If they could, they would. Terror is successful because of the response of the victim, not because of the actual damage it inflicts.
Even if they were able to inflict significant damage, however, the fact remains that if a low level of risk to ourselves and our families is the price of freedom, we should be willing to pay it. There is a limit, of course, but to my way of thinking the risk has to at *least* exceed the level of voluntary activities most of us willingly do every day, like driving an automobile, before we start reacting in extreme ways.
And in the case of a war of terror, some of the patriots are simply ordinary citizens going about their lives with a quiet determination that they will not be terrorized. If more people understood this, terrorists would be forced to find another way to air their grievances.
Re:Can someone explain something to me? (Score:3, Insightful)
Libertarians and abortion (Score:3, Insightful)
Libertarians are split on the abortion issue. Some libertarians think that the right of a women to choose what to do with her body is paramount (I agree to an extent), and other libertarians think that the individual unborn child is also sovereign and is deserving of the same human rights as everyone else (this is what I fully support). In other words you don't have the right to kill your child because the child is a sovereign individual.
Re:National ID == license to exist (Score:4, Insightful)
No, Al Queda's greatest strength by far is the US government and media organizations providing hundreds of millions (at least) in free publicity to blow the threat of a few scattered loons into a totally made up global conspiracy.
That is something they could not have done for themselves.
Re:Sadly... (Score:3, Insightful)
On the other hand, the id is useful for delivering services to citizens, such as national health insurance or at least consolidating one's health records so that you never have to fill out the same idiotic form every time you visit a new doctor and your history is already there including the last time you had a tetanus shot. It will also be important if you end up unconscious in the ER and are allergic to the drug they think they need to give you immediately.
I believe it is more important to fight for legislation that demands that information is used properly for the right reasons and that all use of personal information be audited and available for individuals on demand. That combined with serious penalties for abuse, especially from the private sector (which I think does far more with this than the government) would be a much more potent way of addressing a national id.
Re:Sadder still (Score:4, Insightful)
And I am quite sure the government has a cure for your smashed RFID chip. It begins with "please step this way, sir" and ends with habeas corpus nowhere in sight. In a retail setting, it begins with you walking up to the cash register and the cash register refusing to complete the purchase because it can't figure out who you are. Which leads back to "please step this way, sir." During a traffic stop, it leads directly to jail, like the monopoly square. So, about that hammer... maybe that's not such a good idea after all. They may not have legitimate power, but don't confuse that with them not having power at all.
Re:Sadder still (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll answer that with a question and an answer: Why does a state trooper always check your criminal record (via NCIC) when they're simply giving you a traffic ticket? (or they may not even be doing that, they may have stopped to help you change your flat tire.) The answer: because they can.
Re:Sadder still (Score:5, Insightful)
No. I have no debt and I am not interested in debt. I use money, and will continue to do so as long as it remains legal. "Credit" cards are badly misnamed: They are debt cards with the interesting ability to increase your debt position just by getting a day older.
I've never had a restaurant ask me my name, only what I wanted to eat. If they ever did make such an inquiry, I would be quite happy to leave before answering in detail any greater than my first name.
RFID range is sufficient to talk to the cash register when you make a purchase, to talk to the teller when you go to a bank, to talk to the terminal when you apply for federally or state issued anything, to talk to the booth when you go through a toll station. It is short, but that's because it doesn't need to be long.
As for the alcohol thing, that's a different problem, a consequence of society's war on consensual and personal, informed, victimless choice. You should fight that battle on its own turf rather than trying to be accommodating. A line in the sand drawn by age is certain to make errors on both sides. Those lines, if they are to be drawn at all, must be drawn upon a metric that determines if you are informed or not. Otherwise it is a straightforward affront to liberty.
Re:Sadly... (Score:4, Insightful)
The point that I didn't make clear is that the various bureaucracies, for all their waste and inefficiency, *do* serve as a de facto check on the powers of government. The political scientist James Wilson talks about this. From that perspective, bureaucratic 'duplication' and fighting between agencies and levels of government are not entirely unwanted, if you are interested in separation of powers.
That's why I think projects like the Patriot Act, breaking down the walls between various federal, state, and local governments, or the CIA and FBI co-operating, are so insidious. We really don't want law enforcement working in perfect harmony or tandem, because then when some dictator-to-be shows up, he has a much easier time. When Blackwater troops are dispatched in New Orleans [truthout.org], for example, and the Governor of Louisiana and the Mayor of New Orleans have already ceded power to the President because of the national emergency, there is no oversight of Blackwater troops, aside from the executive branch. A personal, private republican guard is what every good dictator needs to do his dirty work. In this case, the seperation of powers between the federal, state, and local law enforcement, has been side stepped, and in a national emergency, the congress and the judiciary are just not involved. Add to that a national ID, and you have one-stop-shopping for rounding up dissidents.
Re:And the reason is .... (Score:3, Insightful)
A typical petty abuse of a compulsory ID is quite simply for enforcement officer to request it and simply flick it into the street drain when you present it and then again demand that you show failure to do so means a trip to the station and a few hours wasted attempting to prove your identity and obtain a temporary internal passport, combined with a large fine to pay for a new ID.
Extreme abuse is for governments to strip you of your compulsory ID, and make you a non citizen, pretty much the same as some corrupt governments deem it acceptable to strip their citizens of the right to vote making them slaves to their society.
Re:Sadder still (Score:3, Insightful)
If it ever comes to that, there's a cure for tyranny, too. It begins with the Second Amendment and ends with a length of rope formed into a circle with a sliding knot closing the loop.
-b.