Papers!!!!

For those of you still burdened with the quaint notion that we live in a free country, take a look at this:

WASHINGTON -- Congressional negotiators have agreed on a sweeping new system that would nationalize standards for driver's licenses and state identification cards, requiring states to verify the authenticity of every document that people use to prove their identity and show their legal residency.

If the House and Senate both pass the bill next week as expected, by May 2008 every state will be required to contact the issuers of birth certificates, mortgage statements, utility bills, Social Security cards, and immigration papers before granting a driver's license. States will also have to keep copies of those documents for seven years.

Touted as an antiterrorism measure, the Real ID Act would effectively erase laws in nine states that allow undocumented immigrants to obtain standard driver's licenses, which are widely accepted as official identification for boarding airplanes, opening bank accounts, and entering federal courthouses.

It's a good thing we don't have a problem with fake ID's in this country, otherwise this statute wouldn't mean a thing! I mean, you never hear about college students making fake ID's on their home computers, and you never see books on how to make fake ID's sold in bookstores, or suspected terrorists bribing officials to get driver's licenses or anything like that.

In fact, this Real ID Act would only make that problem worse, since getting a driver's license would be so much tougher, once you presented a reasonably good-looking fake, it would be unquestioned. Not to mention the fact that everyone living in California knows someone who got hit by an uninsured motorist who didn't have it because he couldn't get a driver's license.

Fortunately, this bill has been stripped of its most odious provision:

After a week of conference negotiations, Republicans from both chambers reached a compromise that leaves most of the bill intact. Among the notable changes, the House backed away from its demand that every state submit its driver information into a single national database that would be shared with Mexico and Canada.

Civil libertarians objected to the national database, saying a shared pool of information would be vulnerable to identity thieves and would effectively create a national ID card. That provision was changed so that each state will maintain its own database. Sensenbrenner said the interstate links would be used only to make sure an applicant does not have a license elsewhere.

Or was it?

But Tim Sparapani of the ACLU said the language of the bill does not include restrictions on how the linked state databases can be used; theoretically, every driver's personal information may still be available for unlimited access.

''They have created a national identification card and an interlinked set of databases whereby every driver's most sensitive personal information can be viewed by potentially thousands of employees and bureaucrats around the country," he said.

Either way, it's just another step in the mission creep to Total Information Awareness, where somebody in the government knows who you are, where you live, how much money you make, what Interenet sites you visited today, what you had for breakfast, where you like to shop, and so on and so on and so on. The ostensible reason is terrorism, but don't delude yourself. This is for marketing. These databases will be sold to big business a thousand times over. And the politicians can talk about making you safe when they're actually being made rich to spy on you.

We have (or is it had?) individual freedom in this country at one point. That the Republicans are using fear to co-opt that is distasteful.