Thursday, February 1, 2018

The New National ID Systems

Recognizing the threat to liberty, Americans have consistently rejected national identity systems that take the form of a card people might have to carry and produce in response to demands for "Papers, please." Soviet-style papers and passbooks may be things of the past, but the cameras and other sensors springing up in cities and towns all over the country may be the vanguard of the far more intrusive new national ID. Americans should ask what their state and local governments are doing with high-tech tracking, as well as whether safety and security claims used to justify tracking technology outweigh the privacy, liberty, and dollar costs of these systems.

The pages that follow examine briefly the stances of each of the 50 states toward the well-recognized national ID systems and the technologies that make up the new national ID. It is only a snapshot, and many policies are currently under debate and rapidly changing.

An addition to the E-Verify program called RIDE shares driver data with the E-Verify system to check the authenticity of drivers' licenses issued by states that opt in.6 With the continued push for REAL ID by DHS and for E-Verify in conservative political circles, it is not difficult to imagine E-Verify and REAL ID becoming fully integrated so that government offices and businesses alike can be required by law to check the validity of every American's state-issued, DHS-approved REAL ID. The day would not be far off when a national ID is required for picking up prescriptions, purchasing guns and ammunition, paying by credit card, booking air travel, and reserving hotel stays, to name just a few types of transactions the federal government might regulate.

Figure 1 summarizes each state's status at the time of this paper's publication with respect to formal national ID systems and the new national ID. The ID symbol in each column indicates that the state supports that part of the new national ID project.

With regard to other elements of the new national ID, Arizona does not currently make use of a facial-recognition system, either by the state DMV or the various state police agencies.

Arkansas has a mixed record when it comes to privacy and the new national ID systems, like several other states in the South.

87 The one thing Indiana does not do to make itself a new national ID state is provide state residents' DMV data to the E-Verify program through the RIDE program.

Maine's legislature passed noncompliance resolutions for REAL ID as early as 2007, and the state remained noncompliant for a long time in the face of federal efforts to force adoption of the national ID law.104 In April 2017, the state legislature finally capitulated, passing legislation to enter Maine into the national ID system.

There is one black mark on New Hampshire's record: REAL ID. New Hampshire was an early state to reject REAL ID, passing a ban on implementation of the federal standards in June 2007.167 That ban was overturned in May 2016 with the passage of HB 1616, a bill to bring New Hampshire - the birthplace of the REAL ID rebellion - into compliance with the federal ID law.

New Mexico once rejected compliance with REAL ID; the state's practice of issuing standard, undifferentiated driver's licenses to unauthorized migrant residents ensured that it could not comply with the terms of the national ID law.174 In late 2016 New Mexico adopted a two-tiered licensing system, offering both compliant and noncompliant licenses.

https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/new-national-id-systems#full 

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