Real ID will ‘strengthen’ Americans’ privacy
In written testimony (DHS Secretary Michael) Chertoff submitted (PDF) on Wednesday to the U.S. House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee, he made another pitch for his department’s requirements, which generally say that starting on May 11, 2008, Americans will need a federally approved, “machine readable” ID card to travel on an airplane, open a bank account, collect Social Security payments or take advantage of nearly any government service.
A Real ID-compliant document will be of higher “quality” than existing driver’s licenses and other state-issued identification cards, thus helping prevent terrorists and identity thieves alike from committing forgery, Chertoff said in his testimony.
That improved quality will come about, in part, because motor vehicle administrators will be required to link into databases to verify the legitimacy of the
underlying identification documents, such as birth certificates, that Americans submit when they apply for Real ID-compliant cards, the Homeland Security chief suggested. Another senior Homeland Security official, Stewart Baker, made similar claims earlier this year.Opponents of the Real ID plan, meanwhile, have cited numerous privacy and security flaws in the plan. One of their concerns is that the government’s failure to require encryption on the cards’ two-dimensional bar code could lead to information being swiped and harvested by outsiders for potentially invasive purposes.
I think is important to emphasize the last statement about numerous flaws in this plan. I would also like to point out that having the government build and maintain a national database is just a recipe for disaster. How long until the bad guys hack into that system? How long until some smart kid somewhere does the same thing? No IT system is flawless and just opens up numerous opportunities for more fraudulent activities that wont make us more secure!
Would it not be easier, and less costly to focus on tracking down the 10-20% of the total US population that might be planning on doing bad things here or abroad, rather than trying to track 240 million or so law abiding citizens who have no plans to perform acts of terror? You do the math. We just seem to be moving more towards a
Here is another story from a similar vein of why DHS or any part of the federal government should have anything to do with building a substantial database like this:
DHS Data Mining System Shut Down After Privacy Slip Ups
Homeland Security is shelving a $42 million data mining system, following revelations that the system development was paused after a report that it was tested using personal data without first doing a required privacy audit, according to a story from the Associated Press.
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