Blog posts on the WaPo story about “Real ID” being replaced with “Pass ID”
Daniel McCarthy at TAC:
Needless to say, this is far short of the outright repeal. “We don’t want to end up with National ID Lite,” Chis Calabrese of the ACLU tells the Post. The administration seems to be setting up Pass ID as a “compromise” between real ID critics and national-security statists like Rep. Lamar Smith (”Real ID, not a gutted version with a tough-sounding name, is necessary to continue to keep us safe”) and Rep. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (”Maybe governors should have been in the Capitol when we knew a plane was on its way to Washington wanting to kill a few thousand more people” — Jim deserves a demagogue of the year nomination for that one). This is typical of how liberties get chipped away: when the public in the states rallies against assaults on privacy, the security apparatus in D.C. switches tracks to implement its wish-list piecemeal. We’ll see whether the feds succeed in undercutting the grassroots revolt in the states.
Mark Krikorian at The Corner:
I know there are a lot of libertarian-minded folks on our side of the aisle who bristle at the very idea of improving document security. They don’t want any government identification system because of the possible threat to liberty, and since they can’t get that, then they’ll settle for a bad ID system instead. The problem is that in a modern, mobile, anonymous society, where you don’t spend your whole life in the same village with the same people, some universal ID mechanism is essential, and a bad one simply helps bad guys of all kinds conceal their nefarious activities. And the current system, reinforced by REAL ID, helps maintain the relatively decentralized approach that conservatives rightly favor, which has developed organically at the state level over the years via birth certificates and driver’s licenses. Without credible national standards, there will be an irresistable push for a single national ID the next time something big blows up here, which is a lot more likely to happen than it was before January 20.
