Opposition to REAL ID Continues to Grow

from the state-legislators-say-no dept

My colleague Jim Harper points out that the National Conference of State Legislatures has called for the repeal of the REAL ID Act. We last noted that the Department of Homeland Security was pretending that all 50 states were on schedule to implement the law, despite the fact that several of them had explicitly said they wouldn’t implement it. Now it appears that a lot of state legislators are ready to take things a step further and call for the outright repeal of a law that many of them have refused to implement in their own states. The NCSL letter makes an excellent point that can’t be emphasized enough: the worthwhile parts of REAL ID, such as making driver’s licenses harder to forge, can be accomplished at the state level without getting the feds involved. States can take what’s good from REAL ID and voluntarily incorporate it into their state identification systems without participating in a massive federal database that would become a magnet for identity theft.

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Comments on “Opposition to REAL ID Continues to Grow”

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13 Comments
just an American (user link) says:

Thank God

Americans, sometimes, still unite against government overstepping their bounds.
We need government for protection of national threats but not to protect each person from their own created problems (such as drug addiction, poverty, etc.). Education and intelligent people I value more than material possessions (including money and gold). I don’t think this is related to article in anyway but I wanted to state it anyway!
With love,
~Mireah

RAWR says:

I agree with Matt

“Totally unrelated, but if congress is actually in mood to repeal stuff, which I though basically never happened, they should repeal the ethanol requirement in gasoline. Nothing good has come of that, not even environmentally.”

Especially since your fuel MPG goes way down using Gas/Eth mixture. Back when we had MTB instead my truck got 25-30 (88 toyo pickup) MPG now with this ethanol crap I get 21-24 MPG which means I’m filling up more and polluting more since I’m burning now twice the amount.

That California MTB study was complete crap if you actually read the “research”. (Which could probably be tied to people lobbying for Ethanol…)

btw our gas prices would be slightly cheaper with MTB.
(Esp. love the people driving into mexico to fill up for $2 less than what is in the US. – Check CNN for video)

little bo beep will be upset says:

Thank the stars that opposition for the REAL ID act is gaining this much momentum. If everyone in the United States has to rely upon RFID chips, then all the government or a corporation has to do is turn off that chip and you may as well no longer exist. RFID is designed for one thing and one thing only: tracking. It’s bad enough every cell phone the world now has GPS locating, car manufactureres are implementing gps and onstar standard into new models, soon enough every electronic device we have will be able to pin point our exact loactions every second of every day.

To believe there isn’t some institution behind the scenes using all of this data to create some form of method into further increasing its power would be absurbed. Countless companies around the globe do nothing but collect data on human behavior. How often you drive, how far you drive, what speeds you drive, where you drive, all this information can be secertly recorded and sold off for millions to the appropriate agents.

Most pepople however are iggnorant to this fact, as well as most any other matter or grave importance effecting the world today; so, maybe getting that final ear-tag to finalize their transition into mindless sheep won’t come as a huge inconvenience as it most certianly will to the rest of us.

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