[Infowarrior] - Senators, states beat up on Real ID plans

[Richard Forno]

 April 29, 2008 10:30 AM PDT
Senators, states beat up on Real ID plans
Posted by Anne Broache | 1 comment

http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9931323-7.html?part=rss&subj=news&t
ag=2547-1_3-0-20

WASHINGTON--Democratic and Republican senators alike on Tuesday once again
piled criticism upon forthcoming Real ID requirements, with some renewing
calls to repeal the law for which many of them voted years ago.

It's a familiar refrain for the Senate's Homeland Security and Governmental
Affairs Committee, whose members made similar remarks at a hearing around
this time last year.

Senators Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii) and George Voinovich (R-Ohio), who presided
over a Tuesday subcommittee hearing revisiting the topic, said they remain
particularly troubled by Real ID's multibillion-dollar price tag for state
governments. Akaka and others also voiced worries about the mandate's
privacy and civil liberties implications.

"The massive amounts of personal information that would be stored in state
databases that are to be shared electronically with all other states, as
well as the unencrypted data on the Real ID card itself, could provide
one-stop shopping for identity thieves," Akaka said at the hearing, where
senators heard from Homeland Security assistant policy secretary Stewart
Baker, state government representatives, and civil liberties activists.

Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii)
(Credit: U.S. Senate)

Akaka, for his part, said he will continue to push for passage of the
Identification Security Enhancement Act, which he introduced last Feburary.
That bill would yank Real ID and replace it with a "negotiated" rulemaking
process that was proposed before Real ID was glued onto an emergency Iraq
war spending bill that passed unanimously in 2005. Republicans John Sununu
and Lamar Alexander and Democrats Patrick Leahy, Jon Tester, and Max Baucus
also support the bill, as do influential state officials and civil liberties
groups, but it's unclear whether it has the momentum to go anywhere this
year.

Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security has pushed ahead in its
defense of Real ID, as necessary to prevent terrorists, criminals, and
illegal immigrants from successfully obtaining and using fraudulent driver's
licenses.

But the department effectively delayed obligations to begin complying with
its rules until at least the end of 2009, granting all 50 states--even those
that had passed legislation rejecting the federal mandate--and the District
of Columbia initial deadline extensions. Without those extensions, residents
of states without Real ID compliant licenses would have encountered
difficulties boarding airplanes and entering federal buildings come May 11.

"While these extensions have averted a near-term crisis, they do not resolve
other problems with Real ID," said Sen. Susan Collins, the Republican
ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee.

Who who protects the data, and who pays?
Baker endured repeated questions about the cost of the program, particularly
from committee Republicans. He said "hundreds of millions of dollars have
been made available" already for Real ID conversion projects, which, under
Homeland Security's revised estimates, are expected to cost about $4 billion
over the next decade. But a number of senators said they didn't think that
funding was sufficient.

Donna Stone, a Delaware state representative and president of the National
Conference of State Legislatures, and David Quam, a lobbyist for the
National Governors Association, cast doubt on Homeland Security's cost
estimates. They said that because of lingering uncertainties surrounding
Real ID's requirements, the true costs are difficult to project but likely
exceed Homeland Security's estimates.

Homeland Security put states in a tough spot by dangling the prospect of a
May deadline that might inconvenience their residents, Quam said. The
position of state governors is that "Real ID has to be fixed, it has to be
workable, it has to be cost-effective, it actually has to increase the
security of driver's license systems, and it has to be funded" by the
federal government, he said.

Perhaps the most blistering critique of Real ID on Tuesday came from Tester,
who called the program "the worst kind of Washington, D.C., boondoggle." He
suggested it was curious that his home state had been granted a deadline
extension, even though its attorney general had told Homeland Security that
state law did not authorize Montana to implement Real ID, and the state
legislature won't even meet again until next January.

"I am pleased that Montanans were not arbitrarily penalized under the law,
truthfully," he told Baker, "but I really fail to see what this exercise
actually accomplished other than to leave the details of Real ID to the next
administration."

Baker said Homeland Security has tried to be flexible by giving extensions
to states like Maine and Montana that said they're implementing certain
security features in their driver's licenses "without insisting on some kind
of pledge of allegiance to Real ID."

Baker also encountered questions, mainly from Democrats, about the lack of
detailed security rules under Real ID.

Akaka asked why Homeland Security didn't set out specific security
requirements for the databases that states will share. Baker said the agency
is requiring states to have "security plans" for their data but wanted to
"leave room for states to make choices (about) what works for them."

Tester inquired about why the administration isn't requiring the information
encoded on the Real ID cards' bar codes to be encrypted. Baker said Homeland
Security decided on that approach because police were concerned about an
inability to read the information off cards rapidly during traffic stops.

Baker also noted that the machine-readable zone will contain little more
than a person's name, address, and date of birth. "That's information that's
very hard to hide in an Internet age," he told the committee. "The notion
that somehow because it's on a machine readable zone it'll become more
available to identity thieves, I think, is pretty speculative."