We've had plenty of discussions about the Real ID Act here on Politech, including these: http://www.politechbot.com/2007/02/09/california-officials-like/ http://www.politechbot.com/2007/01/25/maine-becomes-first/ http://www.politechbot.com/2005/03/24/john-gilmore-on/ But so far it's been difficult to figure out how bad the bloody law will be in practice. That's because the Department of Homeland Security has remarkably broad power to come up with regulations, which they finally did in draft form: http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/nprm_realid.pdf Here's a summary I wrote trying to put this in perspective: http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-6163509.html Among the outstanding unanswered questions: Will the final rules include an RFID tag? Will all drivers licenses have a standard design dictated by Homeland Security? Will the information that has to be stored on the nationalized licenses (in the form of a 2D barcode) be encrypted? The deadline extension by Homeland Security was cunning. It's almost certainly intended to fragment opposition in state capitals. If the federalized ID card doesn't have to be complete until 2013 -- the earlier date was 2008 -- state DMVs won't be as alarmed right now and voters won't be either. Here's some more background: http://www.epic.org/privacy/id_cards/ http://www.realnightmare.org/ -Declan _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/) ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]