![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
filkertomThe ever delightful Congressman F. James Sensenbrenner, R-WI, has snuck a piece of legislation that's odious even for him onto an Iraq War appropriations bill: The Real ID Act, which would standardize driver's licenses across the country, electronically encode lots of personal information into lots and lots of "common machine-readable technology" data bases, and barring illegal immigrants from getting a driver's license. So, even more government intrusion into your personal information, easy access for identity thieves, and a whole bunch of untrained, unmonitored, likely uninsured drivers. Good plan, fuckwit.
Naturally, as this was stuck onto a different bill which had no debate, it's already passed the US House. So read up on it and contact your Senator.
(Cross-posted to Mandate, My Ass.)
Naturally, as this was stuck onto a different bill which had no debate, it's already passed the US House. So read up on it and contact your Senator.
(Cross-posted to Mandate, My Ass.)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-10 02:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-10 02:32 pm (UTC)And the organised crime lobby scores another victory...
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-10 03:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-10 03:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-10 03:57 pm (UTC)A rant
Date: 2005-05-10 04:53 pm (UTC)Yes, I know that schools and states are moving away from the SSN for drivers licenses and stuff, but you still need to apply a SSN the day you're born because you can't claim your child as a deduction unless they have one. Never mind that you can't work and add to it for what, 15 years in most states? I didn't get one until I was a teenager. We applied for my son's before we checked out of the maternity ward. The driver's license, no matter what number is on it, is another de facto national ID card, they're reciprocal between states, you can use them to cash checks (I didn't realize the DMV authorized my good standing at the bank!) in short, it is not what it claims to be, i.e. proof that you know how to safely handle a motor vehicle. It is actually proof that you-may-write-checks-and-you-are-not-a-terrorist. If you don't have a driver's license... you must be here illegaly. Or a terrorist. Because everyone who is an adult MUST have a driver's license. We as a culture are tied with an umbilical cord to our automobiles, unable to live without them- and anyone who dares say we could potentially do without is a commie pinko tree hugging whacko. So we elevate the drivers license to proof of cultural legitimacy, and only manage to increase the number of unlicensed drivers on the road. And it makes it that much harder to revoke licenses of non-terrorists who have shown that they cannot handle a motor vehicle, because the stigma surrounding the loss of license is too great a punishment to inflict on people. Joy.
Now- using the national ID to DENY the right to rent or drive an automobile, to purchase a house, a car, whatever, that is a problem. That is in the legislation, as I understand it, and THAT is a real problem. But to say that the National ID will allow us to deny things we're not denying now is a bogus argument. DMVs/MVA's in most states have already become effectively an arm of DHS, approving who may be a legitimate person, not just who may drive a vehicle. I live in Virginia- the amount of heat our DMV got for letting 9-11 hijackers get drivers' licenses was great, but it wasn't their car driving that caused all that pain at the Pentagon and NYC, it was the fact that drivers' licenses are the key to cultural legitimacy that was the problem- and we won't let go of that.
Whether or not we have the means to take everyone's driver's license numbers and passport numbers and munch them in a national database now doesn't matter, we will be able to do so in 5 years and carry the entire data set around in our pockets, even without a standardized ID and numbering system. The fact that we've made SSNs and DL's into de facto IDs means that we have subconsciously admitted that we need them. As we move from SSNs, we are making drivers licenses even more stigmatized, and that's as bad a solution as a new card, if not worse. Or maybe, even better, we can swipe our debit cards and use the check-approval system to prove our legitimacy, maybe? Instead of writing driver's licenses down as proof of identity, we can prove we own money. The more money in your account, the faster your application gets processed.
If the act is wrong, it's in the use of the card, not that a card needs to exist. We have the card already, your state gets to vote on the color and shape, but the next state over already has the info on you anyway. Can we move on and start talking about how we can/should/will use such a system appropriately?
Re: A rant
Date: 2005-05-10 06:10 pm (UTC)A few specific points:
* Two of my friends (in their 30s) don't have driver's licenses; they never have, nor have they ever owned or driven a car. Somehow they manage to cope with today's society.
* The use of a driver's license to establish identity does not mean that it is a "proof" of your ability to write (valid) checks, or that you're not a terrorist, and it's ingenuous to claim that it is.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/05/real_id.html (http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/05/real_id.html)
Re: A rant
Date: 2005-05-10 07:34 pm (UTC)I don't personally believe that it constitutes proof, no. But beg, to a certain extent, to differ in that it does to a large number of people constitute proof.
Virginia got nationally reamed in the press in 2001 because several of the 9/11 hijackers got drivers licenses in Virginia where it was very easy and from that could have access to resources to hijack planes. (SHOCK!) Yes, you heard me. The general public percecption at least around here is that if Virginia had not issued them drivers' licenses, those particular terrorists would not have been able to carry through their plans, and certainly, a plane would not have flown into the Pentagon.
This is, of course, pure and utter bullsh*t. But that doesn't stop the perception, nor has it stopped DHS (not INS) from breathing down the Virginia DMV's collective neck to "stop those bad people from getting drivers' licenses." The fact that illegal immigrants had been using the system for years never managed to ruffle many feathers at all. Quite frankly, I prefer everyone driving a car on Virginia roads to be licensed to do so, and it's not the DMV's job to play DHS or INS, no matter what INS says, any more than it is the bureau of Hunting and Fishing to provide the same due diligence for fishing licenses. A State ID (for VA or for the US, either one) disconnected to the DMV would be vastly superior, IMO.
Re: A rant
Date: 2005-05-10 10:22 pm (UTC)I don't think it does, actually. Showing my driver's license to Fred if I write him a check provides him with evidence (not proof) that the person writing the check is the same as the person with the checking account; it does not provide Fred with proof that I'm solvent. (Nor do I think that Fred would think that it does.)
Similarly, the Airport Security folks don't believe I'm not a terrorist because I possess a driver's license; they believe this because my name and/or other identifying information don't show up in their List Of Bad Dudes.
(If it helps, I lived in Fairfax for four years (about 15 years ago), and am well aware that Virginia is probably no more rife with bribable DMV employees than most states.)
I agree that disconnecting the DMV from identification is a good idea. However, I'd go farther than that: it's useful to think about what the real purpose of identification is, when it's used, and how that purpose could be accomplished in other ways.
For instance, in the presence of reasonably reliable biometric measurements, there's no real benefit in having a physical driver's license at all. The main point of a license is to demonstrate that the state has authorized you to drive a motor vehicle; the rest of the information on the license is to help establish that you are you (at least originally). For this purpose, a simple list of (hashed) retinal prints would suffice: you get pulled over for speeding, the cop takes your retina prints, and asks the database "is this person present in your database?". If you want to make the system a bit more generally useful (for example, so that it can keep track of your moving violations), you can allow the system to retain more information, but there's no reason, for instance, that the DMV even needs to know your name. They may need a way to say to the police, "hey, here's this person's retinal prints, go arrest them" (or whatever) but in that context the police are the ones who have the information because they need it.
The object, in this sort of design, is to avoid combining disparate information when it's not necessary. Thus, to take another of your examples, the Boy Scouts don't need their own criminal database; they only need to be able to ask whether a given individual is, or is not, a registered offender.
As for corporate use of information: I believe that both (a) contrary to your assertion, there exist regulations that govern how corporations can use (share, etc.) personal information, and (b) these regulations are probably insufficiently strict, or strictly enforced. No, the FOIA doesn't apply (AFAIK), but that doesn't mean that businesses have carte blanche to collect and use information however they like. In any case, the existence of abuses of personal information by Big Business does not constitute an argument for a national ID, so I'm not sure why you brought this up.
I agree that information is getting spread around a lot...but I don't see that making this easier is beneficial. I do not agree, however, that the distinction between 50 state IDs and a national ID is merely semantics: if there is a single backing database administered by the federal government, then there is a single set of rules that govern how it can be accessed and used; if the states have their own databases, then they can make their own rules, and the general tendency will likely not be in the direction of complete sharing of all data to anyone that wants it.
Re: A rant
Date: 2005-05-10 11:27 pm (UTC)In part because I don't really see that much difference between big business having lots of info about me and the government. Both can use data that they've gathered to make life either very useful or very painful for me. Only with business there's even /less/ oversight as to how it's used. Without much transparency to the government, it's hard to enforce regulations preventing abuse.
Most of the arguments against national ID's seem to come down to "abuse of information. Potential Police state therefore don't collect it," not "Potential Police State, let's use the information properly." I'm trying to point out that saying "Don't collect it" is too late, the genie is long since out of the bottle. "Use the information properly" is an absolutely critical need, that is what I think needs to be discussed.
>I don't see that making this easier is beneficial.
Honestly, I don't believe we're going to have to do anything to make it easier. It's going to be in business's interest to make it easier, by purchasing companies with the data, mailing lists, etc., and they will do what they have to do create it. Which gets back to why "how to use it and who may have access and how much it will cost them" needs to be discussed, before the collections get out of control, whether the fed collects the info on its own or pays the credit bureaus all sorts of taxpayer dollars to run credit checks on potential tax cheats.
>if the states have their own databases, then they can make their own rules, and the general tendency will likely not be in the direction of complete sharing of all data to anyone that wants it.
If there's a nationally recognized "ID-that-is-not-drivers-license," then states with large legitimate migrant worker populations wouldn't have the fed holding drivers license restrictions over their heads in the same way it does now, because the DMVs of many states have been made into the identity police. And it'll be easier for states to revoke licenses for DUI's, too. If the national ID system is tied to driver's licenses, what's it mean when you lose your license?
Re: A rant
Date: 2005-05-10 11:41 pm (UTC)The one major exception to that, that I can see, is the simple requirement of an ID (matching oneself, of course -- fraud is outside the scope of this discussion) in one's possession to legally inhabit public spaces, which is in fact a portion of what's been proposed. Which itself, ISTM, is a good start on a Police State, regardless of what information is on the card.
Re: A rant
Date: 2005-05-10 11:57 pm (UTC)But you bring up an interesting point, esp. juxtaposed with what
...which gets us back to no matter what we use to identify ourselves, what others may or may not do with our identification or personal information is the crux of the issue.
Re: A rant
Date: 2005-05-11 01:35 am (UTC)Re: A rant
Date: 2005-05-11 03:59 am (UTC)So you can rewrite
Re: A rant
Date: 2005-05-11 05:40 am (UTC)As to your question, which is a good one, I wonder whether such a law would be constitutional. IANAL, and I can imagine that a law requiring that one show one's face on demand to law enforcement might get by, but it would be hard to write something that was both well-defined and not too restrictive on the individual.
Of course, such restrictions are less relevant in a society that cares less for the Constitution and its principles than for, say, security. Oddly enough, Benjamin Franklin, a framer of that same Constitution, had something to say about that.
Re: A rant
Date: 2005-05-11 02:36 am (UTC)I agree that it is necessary to decide how the data that is collected can and should be used, and that this is a debate that needs to happen. I do not agree that there's nothing we can do to change what data is collected, or who has access to it, and so forth. (You don't have to convince me that it _is_ collected; I'm a PhD student whose research depends on the collection of certain kinds of personal data. It's made me particularly aware of these issues.)
No, we don't _have_ to do anything to make data collection, aggregation, and analysis easier. But we _can_ do things to make it harder, and there's even a significant difference between the current situation (in which data such as this is gathered piecemeal) and the situation created by the passage of the Real ID legislation (which has now happened, dammit), in which this data is put all in one place.
Not sure what you're trying to say with your final paragraph.
Re: A rant
Date: 2005-05-10 07:51 pm (UTC)REAL ID goes way beyond that. It's a huge power-grab by the federal government over the states' systems for issuing driver's licenses.
Yeah, and that's probably the crux of it. Our republican administration, the party of States' rights, at work.
But I've already said I don't think that's appropriate use of drivers' licenses, anyway, any more than the way most people use SSNs is. But I guess it's more credible that the fed is trying to wrestle this info away from the states than from its really big funding source, big business. Because whether or not the Fed does this sort of info-consolidation, business already is. Lexis-Nexis is going to take that info, consolidate it so that they can slice and dice it any way they chose, and what if they get hacked? (That would never happen. No, wait...) Then when we scream about the government making laws to make business protect our data better, private PI's get upset because they are locked out of some of the info. Do the Boy Scouts start making a similar database so that they can cover their corporate butts and say they've done due diligence in making sure no offenders are being cub scout leaders? How many redundant and possibly improperly secured data sets do we have out there, will require the fed to have oversight over, but don't let them have access to?
Is there a freedom of information act for this data? Hell, no. What is in that database, and how they use it, and how they may or may not make decisions based on information like checks written to churches or other organizations is all proprietary information. Opening that up would leave them at a competitive disadvantage.
But we trust them because we trust business more than government, apparently. Not that I trust either further than I can throw an ox by the tail- but the point is, that data is already out there, will continue to be more accessible, and big business doesn't have to tell squat about what they are collecting and what they're doing with it.
This doesn't mean I like the Real ID act, I think it sucks for a variety of reasons, but that's details in implementation and what is to be done with it, not that it's an ID card.. Whether it's 50 consistent state ID cards or a federal one is pretty much semantics, given how much is shared these days. But not driver's licenses, not Social Security Numbers, not fishing licenses, not hunting licenses, not something that is supposed to be something else.
Re: A rant
Date: 2005-05-10 09:10 pm (UTC)In principle, it's not a bad idea to have a unique identifier for each person. And that's basically what the SSN is: it distinguishes you from all of the other people who have the same name as you do.
Unfortunately, the SSN doesn't have any checksum, so if someone mistypes your SSN, there's no way to detect this. So God forbid you should get turned down for a loan because some clerk mistyped your SSN when looking up your credit history.
Worse, however, is the fact that a lot of businesses use or have used the SSN not for identification, but for authentication. That is, they use(d) the SSN as a password. It's one thing to say "Bank account 98765 belongs to the person whose SSN is 111-222-3333". It's another to say "If you know the number 111-222-3333, then you're allowed to withdraw money from bank account 98765".
Re: A rant
Date: 2005-05-10 10:38 pm (UTC)(1) It's not reliably unique. Not even close. (Think about the number of digits it has. We've long since had to start recycling them, since we use them for residents as well as citizens, and there is some meaning to the numbers.)
(2) It's a bad idea, security-wise, to use a number like this--which is human-readable, and which can be spread around totally without your knowledge--as an identifier on multiple unrelated systems. Precisely because the SSN has been so wisely misused in this fashion, there's a frightening amount that Joe Random Cracker can find out about you armed solely with that piece of information.
For more information on these points, check out
http://www.cpsr.org/issues/privacy/SSNAddendum#FakeNumbers (http://www.cpsr.org/issues/privacy/SSNAddendum#FakeNumbers)
and
http://www.cpsr.org/issues/privacy/ssn-faq (http://www.cpsr.org/issues/privacy/ssn-faq)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-10 09:22 pm (UTC)And the biggest problem with this bill specifically is that it's such a ridiculous unfunded mandate. There is no way in hell that cash-strapped states like Illinois can actually perform the checks required thoroughly enough to really slow down real criminals, to say nothing of organized terrorists, but if they're forced to try it will make the quadrennial ordeal of driver's license renewal an all-day horror that costs me $100, instead of just a couple of hours of bureaucratic suffering and $10.
There are big general problems with privacy, but this bill will make damned little difference to the privacy of people who are already obeying the law and living in the mainstream of society. Unfortunately, as currently presented it won't be more than a minor inconvenience to those who seek to disobey the law.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-10 09:43 pm (UTC)