Lots of stuff going on today about a bill coming to a vote in the Senate tomorrow called the REAL ID act. A number of geeky outlets are carrying information about the bill and their reasoning as to why this bill is a bad idea. The gist of the bill is to create common standards for driver’s licenses across all states. The bill proposes a number of things, including common machine readable formats on the cards, uniform issuing standards, and some data sharing requirements. The effect of this, according to folks like the EFF and EPIC, would be a de-facto national ID card.
Someone has set up a site where you can fax your Senators. Read more about this at that site, or read this very good rundown of the bill by Bruce Schneier, a security expert and author of some of the standard texts on cryptography and security. This is a pretty important bill. For one thing, it foists costs onto the states without funding them. More importantly, it offers little to nothing in the way of safeguards for folks like you and I. Already, commercial companies copy and keep some parallel databases of license data (what you enter in forms when renting a car, for example). With a common format, they can now build/buy card readers that can grab it all. A security breach now leaks that much more data.
