The real story of REAL ID

Starting May 7, you will have to have a REAL ID to board a U.S. domestic flight. But so much has changed in the 20 years since Real ID was first proposed, is REAL ID 20 years out-of-date?

Magdalena Krajewska, professor of political Science at Wingate University. Author of Documenting Americans: A Political History of National ID Card Proposals in the United States.

Jim Harper, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) where he focuses on privacy issues, and legal and constitutional law issues. Last May, he wrote the Atlantic article The Real ID Deadline Will Never Arrive.

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI:  On the morning of September 11th, 2001, flight attendant Betty Ong was working American Airlines Flight 11. Barely 15 minutes after the aircraft left Boston Logan airport, Ong alerted ground-based authorities that something was very, very wrong.

BETTY ONG: The cockpit's not answering. Somebody's stabbed in business class and - I think there's mace - that we can't breathe. I don't know, I think we're getting hijacked.

CHAKRABARTI: It’s been almost a quarter century, and Ong’s brave calm still gives me chills. Shortly after Ong’s alert, someone from the cockpit began communicating with Boston ground control.

GROUND CONTROL: Is that American 11 trying to call? 

MOHAMED ATTA: We have some planes. Just stay quiet, and you'll be O.K. We are returning to the airport.

GROUND CONTROL: And who is trying to call me? American 11, are you trying to call? 

ATTA: Nobody move. Everything will be OK. If you try to make any moves, you'll endanger yourself and the airplane. Just stay quiet.

CHAKRABARTI: That is the voice of Mohamed Atta. One of the Al Qaeda terrorists who hijacked not just American Airlines Flight 11, but four total passenger aircraft that morning. They crashed the planes into the World Trade Center, and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.

The fourth one, due to bravery from the passengers aboard that aircraft went down in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. After that devastating day, the federal government established the independent non-partisan 9/11 Commission to investigate not only the attacks, but the failures that led up to them.

The commission found that many of the terrorist actions prior to stepping on the planes were facilitated through the use of false identification. That's one of the major findings of the many findings from the 9/11 Commission. And regarding the false IDs, the Al Qaeda terrorists had some 30 IDs between them, according to the commission's final report.

And the commission noted in the pages of that report, that those actions, the use of false identification were cause enough for a new national ID project. The commissioners wrote, quote, secure identification should begin in the United States. The federal government should set standards for the issuance of birth certificates and sources of identification such as driver's licenses.

Fraud in identification documents is no longer just a problem of theft. At many entry points to vulnerable facilities, including gates for boarding aircraft, sources of identification are the last opportunity to ensure that people are who they say they are and to check whether they are terrorists. End quote.

So that's really important background because soon thereafter, the REAL ID Act was introduced in the House in 2005 by representative Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin. He told NPR that year that the new requirements would increase safety in institutions where federal IDs were required.

JIM SENSENBRENNER: My feeling is that since we all use driver's licenses as a form of ID, we ought to make sure that they mean something.

And what the bill does is it says that the states are perfectly free to issue driver's licenses to whomever they want to. But if those driver's licenses are to be used for federal ID purposes, then they have to meet certain standards.

CHAKRABARTI: The bill passed both the House and the Senate by April of that year.

However, almost immediately some people raised concerns about how major changes in identification requirements, and information sharing with the federal government could impact personal privacy. Here's then Florida Republican representative John Mica, taking a question from a C-SPAN viewer in 2004.

VIEWER: There is no way you can prevent someone with two sticks of dynamite getting on the New York, Chicago, and Washington Subways. There's no way you can prevent that. Be realistic. Tell us the truth. Shameful.

HOST: And what should the country do, sir?

VIEWER: We can do what we can do. I lived in England when the IRA was planting bombs. I was a block away from where they almost blew up the Prime Minister. There's nothing you can do about it. You have to be preventive but realistic.

MICA: But you also have to have information about who bad people are. If you look at the instances in which we could have stopped the September 11th, if we'd had information when they first issued Visas for them, if we had that information at the border and knew that was Muhammad Ida, if we had information when they were stopped by law enforcement, if we'd had that information ... at an airline.

CHAKRABARTI: Information sharing and the REAL ID project continued on the Department of Homeland Security, published the initial deadline for REAL ID compliance on May 11th, 2008, but very few states had a plan to meet that deadline in July of the following year. Then Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, spoke at a hearing on the implementation of the REAL ID Act.

She did not mince words.

JANET NAPOLITANO: Real ID, in a way, is DOA, it's just not being done.

CHAKRABARTI: DOA. Just four years after the original legislation had been passed, yet supporters of REAL ID continued to insist on its necessity as a means to ensure national security. Jessica Zuckerman was a Homeland Security researcher with the Heritage Foundation, and she spoke as a part of a panel on the REAL ID Act in 2013.

ZUCKERMAN: Sources of identification are the last opportunity to ensure that people are who they say they are and help to halt terrorist travel and terrorist activity. But the REAL ID Act is not just an important tool for halting terrorist activity and security. It's also an important tool for helping to combat fraud and identity theft.

CHAKRABARTI: It's been 20 years since the Real ID Act was passed. The can kept getting kicked down the road year after year, but tomorrow, finally, in some sense, the deadline for REAL ID compliance when traveling domestically in United States airports will be enforced for the first time. So what took so long? Are all the states ready and 20 years later is the idea of some federal standards for state issued forms of identification still actually needed at all?

Joining us today is Magdalena Krajewska. She's a professor of political science at Wingate University and author of Documenting Americans: a Political History of National ID Card Proposals in the United States. Professor Krajewska, welcome to On Point.

MAGDALENA KRAJEWSKA: Hello, Meghna. Thank you for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so can you just remind us specifically, originally, what were the things that REAL ID was meant to accomplish?

Like what kind of changes are in the actual ID that give it some sort of standardization by the federal government?

KRAJEWSKA: Okay, so the REAL ID establishes standards for state issued driver's licenses and also state ID cards issued to non-drivers. And then stipulates that those standards, cards without those standards will not be accepted for kind of federal purposes. For instance, when individuals try to board commercial aircraft, access certain federal facilities, enter nuclear power plants or military bases. And so what the act does is it lists a whole set of features, security features that those drivers' licenses have to have.

In order to be considered more secure. And it also talks about the processes that DMVs have to follow to issue licenses that are more secure. And so that's a really important part of the act.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, we'll get to that in a second. But the actual security features, I'm not sure how much detail do we know about what those security features are supposed to be.

KRAJEWSKA: So there's, I'm obviously not an expert on the technology of things, but there's multiple features that would just physically make those cards more secure. And those are both features that are like visible on the card and things that are like not visible kind of to the naked eye.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So then you wanted to talk more about the process and why that's important. So go ahead and elaborate.

KRAJEWSKA: Absolutely. So it has to do, to a large extent, with the types of documents that applicants have to bring to the departments of motor vehicles in their respective states in order to obtain a REAL ID compliant license.

So applicants would have to bring a birth certificate, an original birth certificate. They would have to bring a passport; they would have to bring their social security card or social security identification. They have to bring information about their residence, so they have to bring those specific documents.

And then DMVs actually have to verify that those documents are in fact real. They have to check with certain other issuing agencies to verify those documents. And so that's a really important component. And that, of course is something that, you know, what most people going into DMVs care about, do I have the right documents?

Will I be issued this REAL ID compliant license? But there's a second part to this process too, which most people don't necessarily pay attention to, right? Which is that DMVs themselves have to make sure that people who actually issue those licenses, that they themselves have been verified and vetted.

Long story short, is that there are no kind of bad actors issuing those ID cards, and the system is not penetrated by bad actors.

CHAKRABARTI: So the idea is that with this process standardization, ideally, that no matter what state you got your driver's license or form of identification issued from.

That the federal government could rest assured that that person brought the same types of identification to prove who they are. And that there was no variation in the system. And that's what makes REAL ID sort, ostensibly, so powerful.

KRAJEWSKA: That is exactly true, Meghna.

So the REAL ID establishes really this set of minimum standards that states have to follow. So you're absolutely correct. There is now more of that certainty that wherever you're gonna go, whichever state you're gonna go to, those REAL ID compliant license will be more secure. And they will still look different from state to state.

Even the way that you identify just with a naked eye, whether the document that you have is a REAL ID compliant document. That little star in the upper right-hand corner of the license, even that will look a little bit. Different from state to state. In most states, it'll look like a star, again, in that upper right-hand corner.

In California there's a bear, and then the star is in the middle of a bear.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Professor, on the face of it, the concept of REAL ID seems to make sense and be rather straightforward, but if memory serves, it wasn't until what, around 2020, that every single U.S. state finally got on board and agreed to be participating in the REAL ID program. Do I have that right or correct me if I'm wrong?

KRAJEWSKA: No, you are absolutely correct. It took a really long time to get to that point.

CHAKRABARTI: And why? What were the state's objections?

KRAJEWSKA: So there were several reasons why the act has been delayed for such a long time. There were two main reasons, really. One is because simply changing driver's license processes was simply too big of a task to be done. In that initial three-year timeframe envisioned by the law, Congress simply set an unrealistic timeframe when it expected enforcement to take place in 2008. And DHS officials quickly realized that it would take a lot longer than three years for states to change their processes.

So that was the practical side of things. But then, and this speaks more directly to your question, simply it needs to be said, many state officials were very opposed to the law, and there were many reasons for that opposition. Partly it had to do with concerns about the cost of changing driver's license processes, partly because of concerns about federal overreach and the view that this was not the job of the federal government to set standards for state licenses, and partly because of philosophical concerns about privacy, about requiring people to produce more documents and storing data from these documents in state databases as the law required.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. It's funny you should say that because we actually have a clip from Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, Wisconsin Republican. He was a major proponent of the REAL ID Act. We mentioned his name a little bit before. And here he is in 2005, talking specifically about that sort of information storage concern that states had.

SENSENBRENNER: There are now 50 state databases, but they've got to be compatible, so that if someone is suspected of applying for a driver's license in multiple states, there can be an electronic verification, presumably while the applicant is still standing in the DMV office. We also have got some provisions in there that require states to keep their databases in buildings that are much more secure than in the past.

CHAKRABARTI: By the way, let me be more clear. Representative Sensenbrenner wasn't just a supporter. He introduced the bill in the House, the REAL ID Act. Professor, you wanna respond to that?

KRAJEWSKA: Yes. So it's very important, as you said and as was quoted in this clip, for states to basically be able to talk to each other and make sure that the person coming into their DMV does not already have a driver's license from another state, right?

That was again, one of the findings of the 9/11 Commission, as you said at the beginning of the program, that of those 19 hijackers, they had at least 30 driver's licenses between them, in some cases from multiple states. And the idea was that a person should have one driver's license.

It should be issued in accordance with all those procedures, and states should be able to check with another state whether a driver's license has already been issued to an applicant.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay so just to be clear, the idea is that, okay, the states would be able to retain their own databases, but check across the country for --

KRAJEWSKA: Yes.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay.

KRAJEWSKA: Yes. And this is a very important point, Meghna, so I'm so glad you put it this way. States, and this is just absolutely crucial to understand. States are still completely in charge of issuing their driver's licenses. And those state ID cards issued to non-drivers. States are still completely in charge of that.

Each state still sets a lot of their own rules about who can get a license, how it's issued, how long it's valid for, how much does it cost, right? But the REAL ID establishes this kind of minimum set of standards for those licenses to be accepted for federal purposes. And then the part, component, an important component of that is that states can check with databases in other states to make sure that the person does not already have that REAL ID compliant license in another state.

And by the way, regarding the cost, I think as early as 2007, it was estimated that it would cost the states more than $10 billion to create systems that were REAL ID compliant. So it was a lot of money.

CHAKRABARTI: But so professor, in a sense, just to be clear, an American who does not want a REAL ID doesn't actually have to get one for as long as they don't want to get on board a domestic U.S. flight, go into a federal building or approach a nuclear facility. Is that correct? You could still actually drive with your old license?

KRAJEWSKA: Absolutely. That is really crucial to understand. No one is required to get a REAL ID license. Your regular state driver's license will still be completely fine for driving.

So this is a very important point to make. A REAL ID license is helpful if you fly a lot and you go for those TSA checkpoints, having it in your wallet right is obviously much more convenient than carrying a different type of identification document such as a passport, which is larger and more bulky.

So there's that element to it, but it's also the case that a lot of people don't fly, right? If you don't fly regularly, if all you need your driver's license for is driving, you absolutely do not need a REAL ID compliant license. And then a very important point also, is that if, let's say, you do fly, there's a whole number of other documents that you can use for that same purpose.

I've already mentioned the passport or a passport card. Which is a lot less bulky to have, and you have that in your wallet. But it's also a number of other identification documents. Maybe a Green card maybe a military ID, a veteran ID, a tribal identification card. One of those like global entry cards, there's a whole number of added documents that you can use.

There are people in some of the northern states in the U.S., five states issued the enhanced driver's licenses. Those are also REAL ID compliant. So that's an important thing for people in those states, such as Michigan, to know. And so yes, there are many other documents that people can use, but yes, very importantly, you do not actually need one.

It is not required for you to have one, your regular driver's license is still fine for most of those purposes we use driver's licenses today.

CHAKRABARTI: So I know I have to let you go. I have one more question, and it was really interesting that all the other forms of ID that you mentioned are essentially federally issued, right?

It's the driver's license or the state identification, that's the only one that emerges from the 50 individual states, and that is like the heart of the matter here. I just wanted you to step back for this last question with me professor, because you've written this history of national ID card proposals in this country.

Is there some sort of like ingrained philosophical American objection to the idea of a national form of ID, other than military ID or a passport that you talked about and does the debate over REAL ID touch on that?

KRAJEWSKA: Yes, absolutely. So first of all, let me say two things.

One is this REAL ID license is not a national identification document. I know this is what many people say, this is what many people fear. But there are multiple differences between what a national identification card is and what this REAL ID compliant license is.

Again, as you said, I study this. I wrote a whole book about this. Out of the 200 countries around the world, 170 of them have national ID cards. The United States does not. To your question, yes, there absolutely is a lot of opposition in the United States to this concept of national ID cards. People in the United States associate them with authoritarianism, with surveillance.

Now, interestingly, if you look at many other countries, I come from Poland. And in Poland they're completely non-controversial. Everyone just believes that they are just the most normal document in the world. But in the United States, a lot of people have those concerns. And what I would say, what I discovered over the course of my research for the book, is that while there is this very significant opposition in the United States, I have also discovered that there are also many people who wouldn't actually object to having a national ID card. If you actually look at public opinion data over the last 100 years, you actually discovered that the conventional wisdom, in a way, is wrong on this topic.

In the sense that many people actually are not as opposed to it as conventional wisdom would have us believe. And then the second point is, and this is what I talk about in the book, is that national ID cards were actually proposed at various points over the course of the last 100 years. They were rejected at every single moment.

And I talk about this in the book, but they actually were proposed, and they were proposed by officials from across the political spectrum. And what's really fascinating about this topic, Meghna, is that both in terms of supporters and people who oppose national ID cards, that support and that opposition really runs across the political spectrum.

So you can find people from both major political parties and from various kind of ideological standpoints, opposing the idea of a national ID card. And you also find people from both major political parties and across the political standpoint of the society supporting the idea of national ID cards.

CHAKRABARTI: Magdalena Krajewska is a professor of political science at Wingate University, an author of Documenting Americans: a Political History of National ID card proposals. In the United States, Professor Krajewska, actually, have you had, do you have your REAL ID compliant ID? Do you?

KRAJEWSKA: I do.

CHAKRABARTI: (LAUGHS)

KRAJEWSKA: I would not feel comfortable researching this and not having one. So I already got mine a few years ago. And so yes. Thank you for asking about that.

CHAKRABARTI: Good. Thank you so much for joining us.

KRAJEWSKA: Thank you for having me Meghna. It was a pleasure.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. We are definitely gonna dive now into more of the nitty gritty of the concerns over REAL ID. And also just this big overarching question that in the year 2025, when technology has taken such great leaps forward, is REAL ID even actually the most secure way for identifying Americans?

But before we do that, not every American, by far, objects to the idea of REAL ID. Here's Ben Wilson. We caught up with him in Auburn, Maine, and he was in line just yesterday on Monday at the local Bureau of Motor Vehicles to renew his driver's license and make sure it was REAL ID compliant. And he says he is not concerned with REAL ID compromising his privacy.

BEN WILSON: The government has asked us for a social security number and our taxes forever, and if you're over the age of 18, you've had to give this information up already. So I really don't see an issue with it. They're the government. They're gonna get the same information I give 'em already.

It's just gonna go in a different database. I'm more worried about the federal government taking information and doing foolish things with it.

CHAKRABARTI: It's Ben Wilson in Auburn, Maine.

Jim Harper joins us now. He's a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute where he focuses on privacy and legal and constitutional issues.

He was a founding member of the Department of Homeland Securities Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee, and a year ago he wrote an article in The Atlantic headlined The Real ID Deadline Will Never Arrive. Jim Harper, welcome to On Point.

JIM HARPER: Nice to be with you, Meghna.

CHAKRABARTI: And alas, the REAL ID deadline is in fact here.

So let me just get to that big question. Do we even need it anymore?

HARPER: Let me dispute the premise that the REAL ID deadline is here.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay.

HARPER: Because what has actually happened is that the DHS and TSA are violating the law in trying to establish the deadline that they purport to have happening.

REAL ID has the Department of Homeland Security decide whether or not states are compliant, and if a state is compliant, the IDs from that state are acceptable, and if a state is not compliant, the IDs from that state are not acceptable. What DHS and TSA are doing is deciding that they're going to pick out people who have IDs from compliant states.

And if the IDs are not federal IDs, they're going to refuse those. It's a narrow technical point, but the DHS only has power to refuse entire states. It doesn't have power to refuse individual IDs, and so if it turns people away at the airport tomorrow, which is not, it may happen in a few isolated cases, that will be actually not something that's sanctioned by the law.

So it gives people an opportunity, if they're interested, to file a lawsuit against the TSA and DHS for doing that. So has the deadline arrived? In an illegal sense, yes. But it actually isn't here.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So this is, I wanna be sure that I and all listeners understand this correctly, like most many states still allow you to have a non-REAL ID compliant ID. So are you saying that that's totally fine, we've already established that, but that also that ID cannot be refused at the airport starting tomorrow?

HARPER: It's a curious twist in a very bizarre and poorly written law, which is that the law specifies that states can issue non-federal IDs, and those non-federal IDs are supposed to indicate that they're not for federal purposes, but the power that the law gives to the agencies, the agency is only to refuse IDs from states that are not compliant.

If the DHS certifies that a state is compliant and it has certified all as compliant, as far as I can tell. Then travelers from those states get to travel using their state IDs, no matter what type of ID they have. Again, it's a curious law, poorly written, or maybe it's written that way because the federal government actually isn't supposed to be able to commandeer state processes like driver licensing and identification.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Interesting. We did reach out to the federal government. The TSA said they would try to get back to us with a statement or further information or a person. But as of the broadcast of this program today, they have not done so. Which is unfortunate, because you say this is a tiny little technical detail, Jim, but it seems to be actually quite a big deal to me.

HARPER: And I'll share some information that TSA has put out. And this is actually moment to moment. As we're talking, as of today, when I checked on the TSA website, it has a little a little paragraph that says, if you don't have an acceptable ID, a TSA officer may ask you to complete an identity verification process, which includes collecting information such as your name and your current address to confirm your identity.

If your identity is confirmed, you'll be allowed to enter the screening checkpoint where you may be subject to additional screening. People are going to go through without federal IDs tomorrow.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Jim, I actually quite enjoy it when guests bring things to the table that put a twist on where I intended to take this program. So this is one of those moments. Can you help me dive in a little bit more into this tension that you raised about what can DHS actually regulate?

You're saying that they can regulate whether states are or not compliant regarding REAL ID, but they can't directly deny people from boarding airplanes, perhaps. Does that, how does that work when an actual, specifically airport, there's this interesting space where there's both state and federal jurisdiction.

I'm actually quite confused by this.

HARPER: I would think about it a little more broadly. The Constitution created a Union of States, the United States, but left states as independent sovereigns. And the Supreme Court has held for many years now that the federal government can't regulate states directly, can't tell 'em what to do.

So the REAL ID Act was written in, with cognizance of that, and instead of saying, here's how states have to issue licenses, it says, the federal government won't accept licenses that don't follow these rules. That creates all these weird eddies and twists and currents. And factually, it doesn't say in that statute that the federal government won't accept federally compliant federal IDs.

It just says, we're gonna turn down the states that aren't compliant. Now, another twist is that given the huge load of requirements in the act. Almost no state is actually legally precisely compliant. But the DHS has gone and said that they are, there's this game that's been played over years where they issued, the DHS issued a thing called compliance factors, which they would consider when deciding whether states were compliant or not.

That isn't full compliance. It's the compliance factors that DHS used in rewriting the statute. And that's what's happening, is that it has been rewriting the statute and we have a Supreme Court currently that's actually pretty interested in what statutes actually say, rather than what Congress may have intended.

So there are all kinds of whirls and eddies in this area, but you have this rule that states that are not compliant, get their IDs refused. States that are compliant, are allowed to, those IDs can go through. The law doesn't require the agencies to refuse non-federal IDs.

CHAKRABARTI: Is this one of the reasons why here we are, 20 years later, and only now, at the point where at least we're talking as if REAL ID has finally arrived, that it's actually been very difficult for states to, even when they wanted to fully comply.

HARPER: It's a 20 year long game of chicken where the Department of Homeland Security threatens these deadlines.

We get close to the deadline. Traditionally, what it has done is four months out or six months out, it said okay, we're gonna move the deadline down another two years. The broad politics are what drive that. THE DHS, TSA, they know that if they turn away too many grandmas who are going to visit their new grandbaby.

But through enforcement of REAL ID, they're gonna take heat, Congress is gonna take heat, they're gonna hear from members of Congress, what on earth are you doing? So in that broad political sense. They've pushed this deadline back further and further. The new thing is no deadline.

No deadline change. They're just gonna decide on enforcement on the fly. None of it is actually legal, but we're in an environment here where with such a badly written law, and with the sort of dense administrative processes that are available to agencies, they've done a good job of in this round of chicken, of convincing people that they have to have a federally compliant license to travel.

We'll just see what happens over coming days.

CHAKRABARTI: I'm seeing that at one point in time, at least around 2015, there were, what, at least 100 different things that went into full REAL ID compliance, that states had to do like everything from how they stored both digital and paper copies of the documentation that went into issuing the REAL ID, right?

Or how they maintained records of name changes, how they would store photo images. Things like, they had to have multi-layered anti-fraud features on the cards themselves. Does that sound right in terms of the entire suite of things that are required to be compliant?

HARPER: You spoke earlier about the cost consequences of REAL ID. And the states were very keenly aware of that when the early deadlines came around. But yes, the storage, digital storage of what they call breeder documents, copies of your birth certificate, copies of your social security card, and so on and so forth.

Those mandates are substantial and there are many like that. They also create serious privacy and data security concerns, to have those stored in databases at DMVs, which are not paragons of technical security necessarily. There are lots of privacy and security issues to get into that are additional, non-monetary costs of REAL ID.

But before REAL ID passed, a lot of states were moving to over-the-counter issuance of driver's licenses. They were working on trying to get those DMV lines shorter. REAL ID has consistently lengthened those lines and continues to do, and contrary to what states want to do with their driver licensing processes, which is make it quick and easy.

REAL ID is making it into a national ID card, which it is. And requiring people to prove their citizenship in order to drive, which is an interesting policy.

CHAKRABARTI: You heard Professor Krajewska say earlier that she does not think it's a national ID card because it's still issued in part, because it's still issued through the states, and you don't even have to have one.

HARPER: Yeah, I've written a book in this area as well, identity crisis, how identification is overused and misunderstood, and in the course of debates over a year. So I don't think anybody has a formal definition, but I think a national ID is a system that is national. REAL ID is, it's for identifying people.

REAL ID is, and it's practically or legally required. And in America, the driver's licenses, there are a few exceptions of people who live in large cities or San Francisco's Chinatown may not have to have a driver's license, but most people do. So I call it practically required. If everybody has a REAL ID, with the compliant machine readable zone that has all the information on it, watch for scanning of your ID to become more and more common. Not just at airports, but when you go to enter a building that has security protocols, when you go to pick up a prescription, and so on and so forth.

And so some of the privacy issues really start to come forward when you imagine the day, some years hence, I still think, when everyone can expect, every business can expect every American to be carrying this ID with an easily swipeable machine-readable zone, will really suffer some privacy consequences then.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. This is really interesting. So let's just jump back in time here for a second and listen to Stewart Baker, who was the first assistant secretary for policy at DHS and this was in the administration of President George W. Bush. And Baker testified in 2008 regarding issues of identity theft, safety, and illegal immigration, and he said they were all intertwined issues that could be addressed through REAL ID.

STEWART BAKER: Many of us have been victims of identity theft, which is often made possible by forged identity documents, and the same criminal networks that helped illegal workers obtain fraudulent identity cards, so that they could use them to obtain jobs. That same network also aided the terrorists who attacked us on September 11.

18 of the 19 hijackers carried government issued IDs. Many of them were obtained fraudulently. This led the 9/11 commission to conclude that for terrorists, travel documents are like weapons, and the commission made two important recommendations. That the federal government should set standards for the issuance of sources of identification, such as driver's licenses. And that it should ensure that people crossing the border are not exempt from carrying secure identification.

CHAKRABARTI: Jim Harper, can you respond to that? This idea that travel documents, as Baker said, are like weapons.

HARPER: It's a nice, it's a neat line and Stewart Baker was always good with writing a neat line.

I remember that testimony and I remember the shift in explanation for REAL ID. Okay. We're not actually making a good case that this is a counter-terrorism security measure. Let's talk about identity fraud. It doesn't make sense to me, because what it does is it puts all the eggs in one basket.

Let's collect all of those basic identity documents at DMVs and they're going to have digital copies of them and every DMV in the country is going to be able to communicate with every other DMV in the country and perhaps share those identity documents. So if you get your ID in California, someone in Louisiana might be able to pull it up using the background network that's required by the REAL ID Act.

Is that a more secure environment than one that's distributed? I don't think so. So the identity fraud explanation for REAL ID is pretty poor. But the government has shifted through explanations over years. I think an identity card doesn't work. 2020 hindsight might make people believe that it would work to prevent a 9/11, but even if REAL ID had been in place at that time, I don't think it would've had much more than a minor inconvenient effect on those unfortunate attacks.

CHAKRABARTI: To be clear, amongst the requirements for a state to be REAL ID compliant that I'm looking at, some of them here, the state, the DMV has to resolve any issues arising from social security number verification or document verification. That's seems to be a very large basket of things.

And then as you noted, Jim. The state has to be able to confirm with other appropriate states or jurisdictions that any prior out-of-state licenses have been terminated and make a reasonable effort to ensure that the applicant does not hold a license in another jurisdiction under a different name.

Just two of the many bullet points required for compliance, but that rests upon this idea that the network of databases that would have to support this kind of information sharing is A, secure, and B, even exists. Is it in place in the United States?

HARPER: No. And it never will be. As a security tool, identity is subject to two different kinds of avoidance.

One is physical avoidance. Just go to a place where identity is not required. In your early setup piece, you had that one collar into C-SPAN who said, Hey, you're not gonna keep someone who sticks a dynamite off of the subway in Washington, D.C., New York, or other places, that's physical avoidance. Go to someplace where identity checks are not available.

So terrorism is not essentially thwarted by identity. Then there's logical avoidance, that is going ahead and getting the ID that you need. The 9/11 hijackers identified themselves accurately. They said who they were. The 9/11 commission report said no one was looking for them, and that's the failure.

2020 hindsight also suggests that we should have been on top of that, but 2020 hindsight is much, isn't much help going forward. So it's not a useful identity security measure. People get a lot of times standing in line at TSA to think about it and I think they share the judgment that this is not actually a useful tool.

I do think that people oppose a national ID, and the few Americans that insist on showing a non-federal ID will help make sure that a national ID doesn't come into place in the United States.

CHAKRABARTI: I can't help thinking that to many of our listeners who were born after 2001 and who are old enough to drive, are laughing at all of this, because they've grown up in a world where they're completely at ease giving their thumbprint to multinational corporations. They're completely at ease with their faces being recognized by facial recognition systems on every corner of the streets they live in, let alone the one that's in their pockets.

The sort of technological ease at which most Americans, by which most Americans feel. Or sorry, excuse me, that they're at, regarding giving away biometric information, makes the idea of going through this process of REAL ID seem totally moot. Isn't even just airport security itself separate from when you stand in front of the TSA agent and hand them your driver's license?

Hasn't that actually gotten so much farther because of technological advancements? Jim?

HARPER: It's an interesting question because I think there isn't much security to be gotten from ID checking. You could get it if you asked terrorists to register themselves as such when they went to get their driver's licenses.

That's about the only way to do it.

CHAKRABARTI: There is a question that you have to say yes or no to about that though.

HARPER: I'm fond of a quote from a computer security expert whose thoughts extend broadly, it is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state.

That's a guy named Bruce Schneier, who I admire greatly. Sure people's privacy preferences are changing, relative to us old folks, the kids are crazy these days. But we still need to, as a matter of civic hygiene, work to make sure that we aren't putting ourselves into the soup in some future where a full bore, total totalitarian regime has control of this data and has required us to carry ID cards with us.

I fight this battle for a future that's uncertain and it's always going to be uncertain. And the past is riddled with examples where national ID systems were used to administer horror. I don't want that to happen here.

CHAKRABARTI: Point taken. And I think this is why the United States, as you noted earlier, is the outlier in just having no problem with having to quote-unquote carry your papers around wherever you go.

That to be an American supposedly to feel comfortable on the soil of your own home country. But Jim, there's still this overarching question of national security and identification. Do you think there's a way, or what alternative method would you advise to use that resolves the tension between the federal government and the states when it comes to knowing who people are?

HARPER: Identity provides security in familiar environments. If you steal my pencil, I know who you are. I can come chase you down and take my pencil back, or I can tarnish your reputation as a pencil stealer, and in those familiar environments, where we have ongoing interactions, identity works. And that's maybe why people think that intuitively, it works in all situations, but it doesn't work against sophisticated attackers. Who will use that logical avoidance, get the ID that's needed. It doesn't work against people who have impulse control, for example, a crazy person, you might know everything about them.

And they might still do you a lot of damage. And then there of course the sophisticated the folks that are not interested in worldly justice, and that's who we met with on September 11th, 2001, ID checks had no effect on them and would not have, if REAL ID was in place then.

CHAKRABARTI: And I think many people are probably thinking by now that ID checks have done nothing to stop mass shootings in the United States.

For example, another form of terrorism. But domestically. Jim Harper, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Identity Crisis: How Identification is Overused and Misunderstood. Thank you so much.