Passports within the US

[johnridley]

http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/08/16/real.id/index.html

Apparently there's this idea that if you live in a state that's dared to not jump in bed with the federal government on RealID, you'll need a passport to visit federal areas, possibly including national parks.

I found this very interesting quote in the Slashdot discussion on the matter:

"What happened was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to be governed by surprise, to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believe that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. " ~ an anonymous German Professor from 'They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1939-1945', by Milton Mayer

Comments

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

I rarely have ID on me anymore, but that's because I'm rarely operating a car anymore. I'm not really proving anything either, since I'm also not doing anything like writing checks. I do use my debit card but you don't need an ID for that.

I haven't flown for 9 years now. I don't really look forward to it in the future, and it'll have to be a long trip for me to not drive.

Nobody in our immediate family has ever had a passport. My parents and older brother got them for one trip when my brother was in high school and the choir toured europe. Apart from that, and my dad's time in the army during WWII, neither of them, or as far as I know anyone in my family apart from a cousin who flies for the CIA and the army has ever left the U.S. Not that I wouldn't like to do some travelling, it's just not something my family has ever done.

It would be a shame if the very first time I had to get a passport it was so that I could go to Yellowstone or something. If I got one to go to England or Spain or Australia, that would be pretty cool. If I got my very first passport in order to go somewhere in the U.S., well, that would just be sad.

I'd like to be able to say I'm just not going to fly, not going to do anything that requires a passport within the U.S., not going to visit Disney World if they insist on fingerprints, etc, but I don't know that my foolish idealism is worth denying my family of going to our wonderful natural areas, or forcing them into dozens of hours in the car.

I think I'd also consider such resistances about as useful as voting for a 3rd party candidate. Nobody would even notice (except possibly to laugh at me), and in the end I think we'll be submitting to biometric identification with or without our approval; we're almost there now...

There was a woman on NPR a couple of weeks ago that was working on a system that did iris identification in crowds using high resolution cameras mounted on buildings and posts. "Of course" she said, "it's only to be used for looking for criminals, known terrorists, and the like." Yeah, that's YOUR intention. But once the technology exists, it's a done deal that it'll be used to see who's going to the anti-war rally, who met with that reporter yesterday, etc.

There's technology in the field right now that reads and stores license plates that a cop car drives by, and they say openly that they can use the database to retroactivly scan backwards and see where you were yesterday, last week, last year on June 18.

I just don't think there's any stopping it. I'm all for fighting it, but I don't have much hope that the fighting will, in the long term, be successful.