The Real ID Act

Published 15 November 2006
(word count: 750)

What is ID Theft? What is Real ID? What is the Wizard of ID? What do these IDs have in common?

In today's Peeping Tom Dystopia, government datacrats at all levels are fixated on finding out everything about us. They track us with spycams and RFID chips and warrantless wiretaps and computer stealthbugs and black boxes in our autos and covert email intercepts and mandatory snitching from our bankers and doctors and telephone firms and credit card companies.

They need this massive database of birthdays and divorces and pay raises and colonoscopies and vaginal wart prescriptions because they are from the government and they are here to protect us.

But protect us how? And from what?

The how is to spend billions creating Real ID cards. Jim Harper of the libertarian Cato Institute has noted estimates of $9 billion to $15 billion to fully implement what is somehow magically not a "national ID card" because, quoting Former House Speakercrat Newt Gingrich, "When it created the Department of Homeland Security Congress made clear in the enabling legislation that the agency could not create a national ID system."

(And only older Americans know that Social Security cards once prominently displayed the phrase, "Not For Identification.")

Federal infocrats will force every state in the union to inflict look-alike drivers licenses upon us all, detailing just about everything we really don't want others to know about us, featuring name, address, sex, birthdate, ID number, digital photo, a "common machine-readable technology" (remember that for later) and whatever else the morbidly voyeuristic Homeland Securitycrats want to cram down our craw in the future. These national permission slips from our Homeland Hall Monitors will sport the innocuous name of "Real ID."

All to protect us from what?

For one, to protect us from identity theft.

So what exactly is identity theft?

Simply put (as put by the Federal Trade Commission's own website), "Identity theft occurs when someone uses your personal information without your permission to commit fraud or other crimes."

Will Real ID protect us? Remember, the very same bureauhacks and pettycrats who want to monitor our movements and digitize our lives can't even supervise themselves. Here's just a teeny taste:

A laptop packed with Personal data on 26.5 million veterans was heisted from the home of a Department of Veterans Affairs staffer. Three months later, another laptop with data on 38,000 other vets was stolen.

The Energy Department first covered up, then later fessed up, that a hacker datajacked the names and SS numbers of 1,500 nuclear weapons agency employees.

A hacker broke into the Agriculture Department's computer system and may have obtained names, SS numbers and photos of 26,000 Washington-area employees and contractors.

The Federal Trade Commission, the very crats charged with fighting identity theft, lost two laptops containing 110 people's personal profiles, boosted from an FTC attorney's car. Many of the 110 people were under investigation for fraud and, yes, identity theft.

And government's corporate cronies in the Government-Industrial Complex are little better:

AIG, the big box insurance shop, lost personal info on 970,000 consumers the old-fashioned way: baddies burgled their offices.

An employee of credit bureau biggie Equifax had his laptop full of names and SS numbers for 2,500 now unfriendly fellow employees swiped from a train.

Guidance Software, provider of programs used to diagnose hacker break-ins, got, yes, hacked, compromising financial and personal data detailing thousands of law enforcement officials and network-security professionals.

Beginning to feel really safe now? Read on:

England – The very Brits who bore the brunt of the original Evil Empire that made the words "papers Pleeze" synonymous with "Gestapo tactics" now plans to fine its own enslaved citizenry £2,500 if their National Identity Cards aren't in order.

Netherlands –Dutch TV reported that their biometric passport can be cracked from around 10 meters away and individual security data can be harvested.

USSA – Hackers successfully cloned a human-implanted RFID chip that uses essentially the same technology as Real ID cards (remember that "common machine-readable technology?") even though its maker, VeriChip, claims that it can't be counterfeited.

Libertarians can now answer those first three questions:

What is ID Theft? The crime of someone assuming your identity, spending your money and destroying your life.

What is Real ID? A plastic card that turns identity theft into an eminently accessible, ultra convenient one-stop shopping mall for identity thieves.

What is the Wizard of ID? A comic strip, the only bright spot in this whole headlong rush to erect The Great American Police State.