If you fly regularly, you’ve probably seen signs saying that the Real ID Act will soon go into full effect. When that happens, all domestic travelers using a driver’s license at TSA checkpoints will have to show a federally compliant one—or be turned away. On May 7, exactly a year ahead of the latest purported enforcement date, a USA Today story bore the headline “The 2025 Real ID Deadline for New Licenses Is Really Real This Time, DHS Says.” Maybe the Department of Homeland Security needs to pinkie-swear to make the 2025 date really, really real, because those airport signs and travel stories have been telling us about a final deadline for more than 15 years. And yet, that deadline has never arrived. If past extensions are any indication, it probably never will.
The 2005 Real ID law created a national system for sharing driver information, set more onerous documentation standards for driver’s licenses than states had previously used, and added security rules that pushed states to mail licenses to applicants rather than issuing them on the spot. During the years of collective panic that followed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, lawmakers and executive-branch agencies pushed through a raft of measures—common-sense ones, such as fortified cockpit doors, but also more controversial ones, such as expanded data surveillance and airport body-scanning machines. To this day, recorded airport announcements still warn passengers about “heightened security measures” that have been in place for more than a decade and might well remain heightened in perpetuity.
Originally meant to take full effect in 2008, Real ID now looks like a particularly misguided bit of post-9/11 security theater. The measure survives in public policy despite, or perhaps precisely because of, its lack of urgency.
The deadline has been delayed again and again. The initial holdup was that many states bristled at federal encroachment on their turf and at the cost of revamping their license systems to meet the new standards. More recently, Homeland Security has cited the slow uptake of Real ID cards—the department estimated last year that 44 percent of the population did not have a compliant license—and administrative backlogs related to the coronavirus pandemic.
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If requiring a Real ID license for every airline passenger were essential to preventing another 9/11-style attack, this would have become clear years ago. As my 2006 book, Identity Crisis, pointed out, supporters of Real ID could not plausibly claim that the policy would thwart foreign terrorists, who can travel within the United States using passports.
Perhaps that’s why supporters pivoted after the Real ID Act’s passage to touting the policy as protection against identity fraud and illegal immigration. These assertions don’t hold up either. Identity fraud typically involves hacking into victims’ financial accounts, or starting new ones, under circumstances in which banks and merchants don’t check ID.
Controlling illegal immigration through an identification system would require something much further-reaching than Real ID: registering all Americans from birth and all lawful newcomers from the moment of entry, using a strong biometric identifier. Then, checking people against a centrally managed database when they applied for a job, sought health care, or made a credit-card payment would trip up the people who aren’t in it. Many people, including me, intuitively oppose such a system because it would be intrusive on its own terms and because of how it might be used to track and control people’s activities. Whether you are worried about access to ammunition or access to reproductive services, you can reasonably harbor doubts about the potential uses and abuses of any national ID system.
Real ID is a peculiar hybrid—the closest thing to a national ID that was politically viable at the time of the act’s passage. But the marginal security gains are not worth even the short-term costs: burdensome document demands, longer lines at motor-vehicle departments, slower license issuance.
Applying cost-benefit analysis and other rigorous tools to policy making was difficult in the post-9/11 era and remains so today. Remote risks, such as novel attacks on transportation, must be weighed against inconveniences to hundreds of millions of travelers. Even today, the invocation of terrorism activates many people’s “lizard brain,” in which the fight-or-flight instinct overwhelms rational thinking about security. Knowing this, politicians and security-agency administrators fear being blamed for any future attack with at least notional connections to fraudulent state identification cards. Now that most states are at least partially compliant with federal standards, the percentage of Americans with a Real ID license is likely to tick upward over time. And with the help of technology, the U.S. government is steadily expanding its role in identity verification. The TSA is rolling out its ostensibly voluntary facial-scanning system at more and more airports.
In December 2020, Congress passed legislation allowing for digital driver’s licenses, carried on smartphones and smartwatches, that would comply with Real ID requirements. This nominal upgrade to the licensing regime may make identity checking far more common and data gathering easier; it also expands Homeland Security’s influence over the configuration of licenses. A digital driver’s license is not like a paper one without the bulk. As the ACLU’s Jay Stanley warned in a 2021 report, its functions could include “phoning home” to central databases, revealing when and where you present it, and allowing tracking by businesses and government institutions that check it. Because of these and other dangers, the American public should think carefully before adopting digital licenses in the name of convenience in coming years.
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In the meantime, Americans who travel frequently will be barraged with exhortations to adopt 2005’s state-of-the-art license technology, Real ID. Fortunately, the threat of being denied boarding without a compliant license is hollow. If every Real ID holdout decided to get a compliant license between now and May 2025, states probably wouldn’t be able to handle the administrative burden. Under any likely scenario, the political costs of turning Americans away at airports in May 2025 will be too high.
Here’s my prediction: Well before next May, the Real ID compliance deadline will be rolled back again. The only uncertainty is the reason the federal government will give us.
theatlantic.com