Real ID -- is it a real benefit, or real intrusive?

Homeland Security Secretary talks about REAL ID.

The Associated Press

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff speaks at a news conference on REAL ID at the National Press Club on Friday.

Featured Topic | Posted 45 weeks 4 hours ago

Real ID -- is it a real benefit, or real intrusive?

The Bush administration hit the brakes Friday on a controversial law requiring Americans to carry tamper-proof driver's licenses, delaying its final implementation by five years, until 2017.

A number of states have balked at the law, objecting to it largely over cost and privacy concerns. But under the administration's new edict, states that continue to fight compliance with the law face a penalty: Their residents will be forbidden from using driver's licenses to board airplanes or enter federal buildings as of May 11 of this year.

A basic problem with the law remains, opponents say: People will have difficulty obtaining the original documents, such as a birth certificate, that eventually will be required to obtain a Real ID license.

But proponents say it will make us safer.

Ben likes: Get REAL

National Review

The act simply does not create a national ID card. Any modern society must have a means of identifying people—for national security, business transactions, and more. Most countries have opted for unitary national-identification documents. The U.S., on the other hand, has over the years stumbled into a decentralized approach, with state motor-vehicle administrators taking the lead. Regardless of whether this system is ideal, it is the system we already have, and it needs to be more secure. Moreover, as Phyllis Schlafly has written, the REAL ID Act may be “the best way to prevent the demand for a national ID card, which might prove irresistible if we suffer another terrorist attack on our own soil.”

Joel likes: Identity crisis

Farhad Manjoo/Salon

By focusing our resources on a plan to prevent a repeat of 9/11, we may be failing to anticipate and prevent a different attack -- one in which the attackers aren't foreigners but American citizens, whose weapons aren't airplanes but buses, and whose target isn't an office building but a shopping mall.
"Here's the question to ask," says security expert Bruce Schneier, whose book, "Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World," argues against the implementation of national I.D. cards. "If we spend $20 billion to stop people from attacking airplanes and then terrorists start blowing up shopping malls, did we become any safer?"