Real ID a Really Orwellian Idea

I have tried not to be Chicken Little about it, but it's starting to look like the sky might really be falling.

A few incidents from the last few weeks have led to less-than-enjoyable contact with government agencies. First, we're planning to trek around in Mexico for a few days this summer. It's been more than five years, since the last trip, so my children need new passports. The amount of red tape involved in getting a passport is somewhere between inconvenient and infuriating. The photos are subject to approval by the person who accepts the application from your hands; the child must appear with one or preferably both parents, and the cost is a mere $97. Since the federal government changed the laws about identification, it now takes 10 weeks to get a passport. We don't have 10 weeks, so add $60 each so that we can actually go when we planned to go. Expensive. Irritating.

The children's passports will most likely have RFID chips in them, which "will enable  them to move through properly-equipped screening stations quickly." The chances of our seeing one of these properly-equipped screening stations in Mexico are about as good as seeing a duck-billed platypus. It will also allow machines to biometrically identify them. Don't you wish you could be identified by a machine? I know I do. It also means, government claims to the contrary notwithstanding, that my children's passports can be read at a distance without their or my knowledge or consent.

Second, I lost my driver's license. Words cannot convey my regret at having done such a bone-headed thing. The losing of this document is considered a criminal offense here, punishable by torture and interrment at the state driver's license office. In order to get the form to apply for a duplicate license, one must stand in line and produce the correct documentation. Then, and only then, is the varmint issued a number. When called, he or she must produce identification again,  have both thumbprints scanned and picture taken. Every time. Every single time. No exceptions.

Third, our local high school has a new computerized visitor-registration system that scans driver's licenses and checks them against state sex-offender records and restraining orders. 

Maybe I'm paranoid, but I feel violated. They cannot and will not use my perfectly good picture from six months ago (that was s.o.p. then). They are checking my thumbprint against their records every time I show up to be sure I'm me. The Real ID law from 3 years ago is the source of all this monkey business. What is going on here?

My first thought was, This reminds me of Nazi Germany. I did a little research. The Germans of the Third Reich not only used cutting-edge identification technology, they pushed the envelope and drove the development of mechanized data manipulation. Without that technology, the Holocaust would have been considerably less devastating, because the perpetrators would have been considerably less efficient. Part of the gruesomeness of it all was that people were reduced to mere numbers in datasets.

Which brings me back to the present. There no longer seems to be a right to anonymity in this country. I have to present identification to a state trooper when asked. To refuse to produce identification can get me in serious trouble. In fact, if a Texas State Trooper tells me to drop and give him 20, I will do so. (They grow 'em mean down here.) I am no longer an individual, but a set of databits.

There is no wiggle room in the requirement to have identification that proves unequivocally who you are to whoever demands it. Objections ellicit the enlightening lecture about how people like the person objecting were the cause of 9/11.

If I'm not doing anything wrong, why do I care? The same data manipulations that separated Germans, Poles and Slavs based on physical characteristics for use in deciding who lived or died in 1939 is applicable to Americans in the 21st century. They won't be registering the texture of my hair, the size of my nose, or straightness of my backbone this time, but they can easily track my politics by what I've written and published on the Internet. I'm afraid I don't have enough faith in the politicians of our generation to refrain from making my life difficult in the future if it suits them.

Information for this article was gleaned from  The Nazi Census by G. Aly and K.H. Roth.