With REAL ID, America now has national ID cards and internal passports

I don’t have a REAL ID–compliant driver’s license and don’t plan to get one. I figure if the federal government wants to implement internal passports in the U.S., which after 20 years of political and legal battles is now happening, we might as well be honest about it and use actual passports. So, from now on, I’ll enter the secure areas of airports and federal buildings with my actual passport, which is good for travel both external and internal to the U.S. Or we could call REAL ID–compliant licenses, which must adhere to federal standards, “national ID cards.” A little honesty is a good thing.

“The United States is getting a national ID card,” security expert Bruce Schneier wrote in 2005 when the REAL ID Act was passed. “The REAL ID Act … establishes uniform standards for state driver’s licenses, effectively creating a national ID card. It’s a bad idea, and is going to make us all less safe.”

The federal government denies that REAL ID means we all now have to carry national identification cards. Sort of. In 2007, after the REAL ID Act had been enacted but in the midst of state refusal to implement the law and popular opposition, then-Sen. Lamar Alexander (R–Tenn.) conceded the nature of the beast. “It may be that we need a national identification card,” he commented on the floor of the Senate. “I’ve always been opposed to that. We live in a different era now.”

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) still denies that standardized identification documents required by the U.S. government for domestic air travel and entrance to federal facilities are national ID.

“REAL ID is a national set of standards, not a national identification card,” DHS insists in a FAQ. “REAL ID does not create a federal database of driver license information. Each jurisdiction continues to issue its own unique license, maintains its own records, and controls who gets access to those records and under what circumstances.”

That’s true-ish, but beside the point. The REAL ID Act set minimum standards for the information contained in an identification card, the conditions (such as citizenship or legal residency) qualifying a person to receive a card, and for the documentation that must be presented for an application. The law also prescribes that information be presented on identification cards in “a common machine-readable technology, with defined minimum data elements.” That common technology is helpful since the law also requires that ID issuers “provide electronic access to all other States to information.” Data is mostly shared through the State-to-State Verification Service, which links those different databases.

Everything besides that is just cosmetic. That includes the names of issuing states, color schemes, and background imagery. They may make ID cards look different from issuing state to issuing state, but they’re all interchangeable, with shareable data.

And none of this is going to make us safer—which was the justification for the law.

“All but one of the Sept. 11 hijackers carried government IDs that helped them board planes and remain in the country illegally,” DHS then-Secretary Michael Chertoff complained in 2008 amidst debates over REAL ID and refusals by some states to comply.

But most people with fake driver’s licenses don’t acquire them by walking up to a Department of Motor Vehicles clerk with a pleasant smile and a note from mom. Instead, they buy them from corrupt officials.

“The manager of the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles office at Springfield Mall was charged yesterday with selling driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants and others for up to $3,500 apiece,” The Washington Post‘s Jerry Markon reported in 2005. That was “the second time in two years that a Northern Virginia DMV employee was accused of fraudulently selling licenses for cash.”

If corrupt officials are bypassing normal bureaucratic procedures to issue fraudulent identification documents, standardizing those documents across the nation won’t fix the problem. But it could create the illusion of enhanced security. And it will create that illusion even as all that standardized data is placed in linked databases that actually enable identity fraud.

“The massive amounts of personal information that would be stored in State databases that are to be shared electronically with other States, as well as unencrypted data on the card, could provide one-stop shopping for identity thieves,” then-Sen. Daniel Akaka (D–Hawaii) warned during committee hearings on the REAL ID Act. “REAL ID may make us less secure by giving us a false sense of security.”

Yes, government officials argue that their agencies’ database security is super-secure. They would never let hackers go browsing through their records for interesting information or for the makings of new identities. But these are the same officials who regularly hand vast quantities of sensitive records to foreign hackers (think of the Office of Personnel Management data breaches) or to aggrieved workers (as with some IRS records leaks). There may, in fact, be nothing less secure than a secure government database.

Perhaps the worst part, though, is that national IDs and internal passports as embodied in REAL ID add to the expectation that we must prove our identities on demand to the satisfaction of government officials. REAL ID makes it ever easier to insist that we produce papers containing standardized information to engage in everyday activities.

“A national identity system works against the interests of free people and a free society in several ways,” Jim Harper wrote in 2018 for the Cato Institute. “A national ID system undercuts the important background privacy protection of practical obscurity: the difficulty of learning about people when records are not created or when data are difficult to access or interpret.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Alexis Hancock emphasizes that 20 years of delays in implementing REAL ID have done the U.S. no harm, while the arrival of standardized national ID has real risks. Hancock helpfully points to a number of physical and electronic documents that can be used in the place of REAL ID–compliant identification to fly and to enter federal facilities.

Passports are on that list, and that’s what I’m sticking with. That it’s now used as a standardized internal passport and national ID card is exactly the point I’m making every time I’m required to present it so I can go about my business.