Real ID

16 March 2007

It’s been said that no one should underestimate the capacity of mid-east politicians for making a bad situation worse. Humm… Yeah… maybe we ought to be saying the same about US politicians as well. Amid all the rhetoric about national security, terrorist threats, the patriot act, immigration controls and such, public officials, in their never ending zeal to appear to be doing something about terrorism, are now sending us off on a perilous course to a future in which every movement and financial transaction of American citizens is subject to federal monitoring and surveillance. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has announced that American citizens will have until 2013 to be outfitted with new digital ID cards. The announcement offers a five-year extension to the deadline for states to issue the ID cards, and proposes creating a national database that would include details on all 240 million licensed American drivers. Homeland Security is considering standardizing a "unique design or color for Real ID licenses," which would effectively create a uniform national ID card. The states must submit a plan of how they'll comply with the Real ID Act by October 7, 2007. If they don't, their residents will not be able to use picture IDs to board planes or enter federal buildings starting on May 11, 2008.

The “Real ID” cards must include all drivers' home addresses and other personal information printed on the front and in a two-dimensional barcode on the back. The barcode will not be encrypted because of "operational complexity," which means that anyone with access to the card would be capable of scanning and recording the holders personal data. Incorporation of a radio frequency identification (RFID) tag is also under consideration.

This sounds a lot like a new and improved U. S. version of the international drivers license. Again a picture (which never really seems to look like the card holder), his address and his date of birth are listed. Then we start adding things like the holders social security number, sex, driver's license or identification card number, and signature. Physical security features are designed to prevent tampering, counterfeiting, or duplication of the document for fraudulent purposes, and must be include a common machine-readable technology. The details are not spelled out, but left to the whim of the Secretary of Homeland Security, in consultation with the Secretary of Transportation and the individual States.

There is considerable disagreement about whether the Real ID Act institutes a "national identification card" system. Some claim the new law only sets forth national standards, but leaves the issuance of cards and the maintenance of databases in state hands; therefore, it is not a true "national ID" system, and may even forestall the arrival of national ID. Others argue that this is a trivial distinction, and that the new cards are de facto national ID cards, thanks to the uniform standards and the linked databases. The problem is, it doesn't matter how well an ID card works when used by the millions of honest people that would carry it. What matters is how the system will probably fail when used by someone intent on subverting the system, how it fails naturally, how it can be made to fail, and how failures might be exploited. The first problem is the card itself. No matter how secure we make it, it will certainly be counterfeited by someone. And even worse, people will get legitimate cards in fraudulent names. Even if we could guarantee that everyone who issued national ID cards couldn't be bribed, the initial cardholder identity would be determined by other identity documents ... all of which would be easy to forge. Adding to that problem, about 20 percent of all identity documents are lost each year, which will require an entirely separate security system to handle the legitimate issue of replacement Real ID cards.

Additionally, any ID system involves people... people who regularly make mistakes. We’ve all heard stories of bartenders falling for fake IDs, or sloppy ID checks at airports and government buildings. It's not simply a matter of training either; checking IDs is a mind-numbingly boring task, one that is guaranteed to have failures. Biometrics such as thumbprints show some promise here, but also bring with them their own set of exploitable failure modes.

The main problem with any ID system is that it requires the existence of an immense database of private and sensitive information on every American, one widely and instantly accessible from airline check-in stations, police cars, schools, banks, hotels and so on. Such a database would be a hodgepodge of existing systems, databases that are sometimes obsolete, often incompatible, usually full of erroneous data, and generally unreliable. As computer scientists, we do not know how to keep a database of this magnitude secure, whether from outside hackers or common errors by the tens of thousands of insiders authorized to access it. And when the inevitable worms, viruses, or random failures happen, and the computer goes down, what then? Is the entire country supposed to shut down until the system is restored? We’ll also have an inevitable flood of security “identification check points” and the resultant long lines and delays to tolerate, every time we might want to go somewhere.

Proponents of national ID cards want us to assume all these problems, and the tens of billions of dollars such a system would cost… for what reason, the promise of being able to identify someone? Would it have done any good to have known the names of Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber, or the DC snipers before they were arrested? The goal is to stop terrorist acts, and to do that we must know their intentions, even though their identity has very little to do with that… prior to the explosion. There is far more security in alert guards paying attention to subtle clues than in bored minimum-wage guards blindly checking IDs.

And what comes next? Looking into the future we can readily see our paychecks, bank accounts, and credit cards incorporated into a government guaranteed ID card. With that, money becomes obsolete, and everything is handled via computer and plastic. Plastic that can be lost, stolen, or forged. Plastic that can be voided at the whim of a minor computer glitch, and suddenly you find that not only is buying groceries impossible, but that officially you, and/or your bank account, no longer exist. How about our medical records, genetic data, insurance policies, computer passwords and passports? Do you really want your entire life on a plastic card that can suddenly come up missing? Keep in mind that once that first card is foisted upon us, everything else will follow along eventually, for "national security purposes", or the convenience of the government, or the UN, or even “XYZ Corporation”.

Some state governments already have come out against the Real ID Act--a move that effectively dares the federal government to continue when the states refuse to participate. At least eight states so far, including Arizona, Georgia, Maine, and Vermont, have had anti-Real ID bills approved by one or both chambers of the legislature, and hopefully many more states will join that effort. What we have here is little more than another panicky and ill considered federal “anti-terror” mandate, being dumped on the states to fund and implement.