Real ID -- a real pain

If you're planning on using up those frequent-flier miles, you might want to make the trip before the end of the year. Unless Congress or the Obama administration takes action on a shortsighted national security law approved in response to the 9/11 attacks, the nation's air travel system will get turbulent on Jan. 1, 2010. With no debate, the Senate in 2005 approved the Real ID Act:h.r.00418: -- which had been inserted into must-pass legislation authorizing funds for the Iraq war. That may have been the only way to get the deeply controversial law through the upper house, because of all the heightened security measures passed following 9/11, none will have as dramatic and intrusive an effect on the lives of everyday Americans as Real ID. The law mandates a tamper-proof card that would become the only acceptable form of identification for federal purposes, such as boarding a commercial airliner or entering a federal building. It was clumsily drafted in a way that imposes multibillion-dollar expenses on state governments, enhances opportunities for identity theft, turns state motor vehicle departments into arms of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and will almost certainly lead to harassment of immigrants, legal or otherwise. Though legislation has recently been introduced in Congress that would repair many of Real ID's faults, it doesn't go far enough. The best way to fix Real ID is to repeal it. Real ID was a response to the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, which called for federal standards for driver's licenses and birth certificates. That's because 18 of the 19 hijackers had state IDs, some of which were fraudulent and some of which should have expired because the terrorists had overstayed their visas. The law compels states to collect and verify various forms of identification when issuing or renewing driver's licenses, including birth certificates, Social Security numbers, proof of address and proof of immigration status. States must digitize this information, enter it into a database and make the database electronically accessible to officials in other states. They also must issue hard-to-forge licenses with machine-readable data strips. When all this is completed, the licenses can be used as federal IDs.