Originally Posted by
Boggie Dog
Not at all. It simply means that it's met significant resistance to its implementation, mostly pushback from the individual state governments who resent the added cost and extended bureaucracy that the RealID Act mandated them to dump into their respective MVAs.
Originally Posted by
Rare
A conspiracy-leaning person might say that it never had anything to do with flying or safety, but was and is a backdoor way to a national ID card.
It never had anything to do with flying or safety, it was all about the feds establishing an identification documentation standard and imposing it on the states. All of which is about mass data gathering.
Originally Posted by
Section 107
you can hope, but that is definitely the way they want it to go - and it will. And access to government services, which are already being rationed in terms of access to government buildings, will not be limited to "immigration benefits." I am okay with a national identity card - scores of other countries, including many with western-style, small-d, representative democracies, have them to no ill effect. I am not okay with the big-brotherism but that ship set sail a long, long time ago. Hopefully we can continue to delay it in getting to its destination, but outside a major apocalypse (aliens/meteor arriving, MCE, super-volcano, etc), there is no chance in completely stopping the inexorable momentum. Technology will not be denied.....
I don't really have a problem with a national ID card. As you said, plenty of other countries have them, and I tend to scoff a little at those who think it's so much worse for the the federal government to have their personal information than it is for the state government to have it, simply because as long as it exists in a government database at any level, it's child's play for the feds to get their paws on it.
The RealID standard is a pain, but I've come to like the idea of a unified national standard for proving who you are before a government agency issues you an ID card. I've never liked that someone could show up somewhere with a Sears credit card, a Blockbuster membership card, or Photon ID card, plus a couple of utility bills, and walk out with a government-issued photo ID that's accepted as iron-clad proof of identity nationwide. RealID, theoretically, sets a much higher bar for identifying yourself when applying for such a government-issued photo ID.