Prepare for backups and even repeat visits to the Motor Vehicles office with the coming of Real ID. That's fair warning from the Delaware administrator about the looming federal security law that lumps counterterrorism with ordinary state transactions to license drivers.
That is, unless Congress repeals Real ID because of its logistical and financial burdens. And there is a contingent of Washington legislators who think the law should be scrapped and redone more reasonably.
The overarching logic of Real ID is compelling after the country's tragic experience. Americans know the sorry saga of the 9/11 hijackers who passed through airport security, belatedly red-flagging failures in intelligence, aviation, immigration and border control. While in the United States, those terror plotters also opened bank accounts and obtained personal identification from several states' motor vehicles departments.
The 9/11 Commission that investigated the 2001 plot concluded, "Targeting travel is at least as powerful a weapon against terrorists as targeting their money." And the commission recommended, "The federal government should set standards for the issuance of birth certificates and sources of identification, such as drivers licenses."
But the execution of the Real ID law is a huge technical challenge. The law ordered that driver licenses and identification with photos be tamperproof, machine-readable and verify U.S. citizenship or legal immigration status.
So every issuing jurisdiction must not only supply such materials and do background checks to vouch that an applicant's documents are valid, all these old and new documents must be interchangeable everywhere for 245 million U.S. drivers.
Americans are inherently jealous of their liberties and privacy, even though modern interaction at every level of life involves institutional accumulation of personal information literally from birth. Of necessity, we all have documents and records -- regardless of conspiracy theorists' dire scenarios about bureaucratic intrusion.
Fraud does have potentially disastrous consequences in national security as well as personal identity theft by common criminals. Yet U.S. Sen. Daniel K. Akaka of Hawaii, of the Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management, fears Real ID might actually make identity theft "one-stop shopping" for thieves.
Moreover, he and others cite the huge financial gap between varying multi-billion-dollar estimates for Real ID's execution and the paltry millions allocated to help states do all this work. Sen. Akaka and several cosponsors are for repeal.
Since the Homeland Security Department's creation, recurring disappointments and delays with technology still being invented for such tasks certainly raise doubts about Real ID's effective start date of 2010.
With a year and a half to go before Real ID is supposed to be ready to roll, it's time to decide if it's really possible to link up such a fail-safe system, and at what price. And will the government back up a federal security commitment with the right amount of money?
If this is only going to be an unreliable make-work project, pull the plug.
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