What You Need to Know About the New ID Law and Travel
By Shivani Vora
The Real ID Act, which takes effect in early 2018, will require some air travelers to have identification other than a driver's license.
In the past several months, there has been plenty of conversation about the Real ID Act and how it will affect air travelers. Passed by Congress in 2005, the act is intended to prevent identity fraud, and starting on Jan. 22, 2018, fliers who reside in some states, even if they're flying domestically, will need identification other than a driver's license to pass through Transportation Security Administration security checkpoints at airports.
Who exactly is affected and what additional identification will the T.S.A. require? Here, answers to questions about what the Real ID Act means for travelers and why having a passport now may be more important than ever.
Several states have refused to comply with the "Real ID" law, although it remains to be seen if they will bow to complaints from their citizens when voters are denied boarding for a non-refundable airline flight.
The question, of course, is who benefits from this law, and the answers aren't as obvious as they should be.
A short list of guesses:
- Drug stores want to be sure that holders of "good" prescription plans aren't sub-letting their plan to others.
- Companies that are screening job applications want to be sure that the guy who takes their tests or plays word games with their HR department is the same one who will show up on the first day at work.
- Bankers are scared that thieves will keep figuring out their Nineteenth-century security measures, and keep stealing from their insurance carriers and keep causing insurance rates to rise.
- Retailers want a unique identifier to use as a key field when issuing loyalty cards, preferably something that applicants won't realize is keyed to their SSN. Since files that contain SSN's have to be secure, they also want to avoid the administrative overhead and rely on drivers license numbers instead.
- Database brokers, ditto: SSN's are not provably unique, and "Real ID" drivers license numbers are.
However, what makes the "Real ID" law scary is not what's on that list: after all, drivers licenses are so common that nobody thinks twice about showing them anymore. What a national ID card offers is, sad to say, instant access to information about all the things I am not: not rich, not well-connected, not from the right school, not the right religion, not anything that might make a petty dictator hesitate to demand that I become something he desires me to be and I do not.
Here's the bottom line: federal bureaucrats have wanted a national ID card for decades, and they're doing it by forcing states to verify identities for them, and the resulting document - which will now be used for any interaction with the government at any level, is the holy grail of their quest for ultimate control. Imagine being required to show that document any time you use a credit card, a debit card, or even cash, board an airplane, a train, or a bus, or check into a hotel. Then, imagine what you would do if that document could be confiscated by any agent of the state, at any time, for any reason.
Bill Horne Moderator