Having tried to fly with the TSA TWIC card - which ironically is issued by TSA and required endless hoop jumping to get including biometrics, TSA denied it as a valid ID. I had to use my regular DL.
I've always wondered if the agent was clueless or just govt as a whole - why issue these worthless IDs if your own agency can't use them.
On problem - the software / template they used was so unprofessional looking I wouldn't be suprised if a fake version looked better than the real thing.
Oregon does not even have REAL ID compliant driver's licenses. In theory, "Oregon will begin issuing Real ID cards on July 6, 2020.": https://www.oregon.gov/ODOT/DMV/Pages/Real_ID.aspx. But I suspect that with the DMV being mostly unavailable for nearly 3 months now, even that will not be happening quickly.
Thus, anyone from Oregon without a passport will not be able to fly?
What annoys me about this is that even the TSA is being coy about things.
> Adult passengers 18 and over must show valid identification at the airport checkpoint in order to travel.
No. What is happening here is "must show proof of residency/citizenship, or definitive exclusionary proof (foreign passport with tourist visa, etc.".
Apropos of the validity of the argument of "should undocumented people/immigrants be required to prove residency to travel domestically", which is and can be a separate debate, couching it behind "some states IDs don't meet federal requirements" is disingenuous.
When traveling (not currently) I started carrying and using my Global Entry card after managing to lose my license between the curb and security a couple years ago. This way I keep my license safe in my wallet and just get a card out at a time when I'm usually tired and juggling stuff that doesn't really matter much if I lose and have a backup in my bag.
In what case would you use the Global Entry ID card over a passport?
EDIT: Thanks for the replies everyone, TIL! Will have to see if TSA can use my GE ID card to lookup my boarding pass (like they can do with a driver's license, passport, or DoD CAC) next time I fly.
Passport is presumably harder to replace if I lose--and hoses any upcoming international trips. You don't really need your Global Entry ID for anything so it's a good card to use for ID while keeping the cards you may really need later in the trip (or even just at the gate) somewhere safe.
The only time you need the Global Entry card is when crossing the land borders with Canada or Mexico where that card will let you use the special lanes while your passport doesn't. But for air travel, it isn't needed.
I always travel with two forms of ID, carried separately, in case one gets lost or damaged. Usually my NEXUS card and (real-id) drivers license. Passports are a bit more awkward to carry and can't go in a wallet (usa has passport cards but I'm not a us passport holder)
The Wikipedia page you linked to disagrees with your assertion that almost every country in the world has it.
"In many countries – especially English-speaking countries such as Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States – there are no government-issued compulsory identity cards for all citizens."
I think the key word there is compulsory - I've lived in a couple of those places and it was pretty easy to get a drivers-license level of ID document without too much trouble (and without having a drivers license of my own).
Considering how many problems they have with SSNs, Equifax, voter disenfranchisement, and the patchwork of pseudo-IDs they have, they badly need a single ID.
And "many" countries is basically the 10 or so English/British-derived countries. Look at the list I linked :-)
You say you "don't understand Americans" but your comments suggest that your goal isn't to understand Americans. Instead you seem aimed to convince them you are right.
As an American who has lived all over the country, i'd say every American subculture has a strange relationship with our government. The prospect of nationalizing, much less requiring, anything causes some cohort of the public to complain of government overreach or the trampling of liberties or that they didn't go far enough.
There is an argument to be made for whether or not a national id constitutes any real harm, and i'm sure our hesitation seems foolish to people in other nations. For me, i consider it to be a healthy, if inefficient, debate. Our government moves very slowly with this stuff. Depending on your personal beliefs, you can thank/blame the general public for that.
From my pre-RealID experiences grannies in wheel chairs will get a reminder to get a State ID and able bodied middle age folks will get the third degree while they grill you with data from some databases (When was the last date you entered the country? On which flight? Etc)
I really hope we can use REAL-ID and make a push for e-ID similar to what Estonia and many other govts have and use it as the cornerstone of online accessible government systems and eventually towards replacing social security numbers
The problem with a single, standardized, nationwide way of identifying citizens and permanent residents vs, well, those who aren't either of those things means that it's a turnkey step to denying basic human rights to free movement and equal application of the law to those in the second group.
Most things don't require ID from a practical standpoint, flying included. The government has mandated it so, and in the process is setting up a framework for discriminating hardcore against anyone who can't obtain the requisite federal identity paperwork.
I thought the whole point of americans not having anything like an identity card, is that they don’t want to be tracked by the government, freedoms, liberties and all that.
In practice, we already suffer all of the surveillance, usability, and identity theft downsides with none of the additional upsides of being able to digitally sign contracts.
There are always tons of Americans who claim they don't want to give the government more "power", but misunderstand that it already has this power. An e-ID would just make the experience of dealing with the government less of a hassle.
This does skip over the fact that the US government is terrible at procurement, so the RFP would likely have bad requirements and the contract would likely be one large waterfall iteration and inevitably be way late and over budget.
There is not much that a national-ID-based cryptographic contract signature provides over a standard "electronic signature" today, other than the ability to discriminate against undocumented immigrants.
> provides over a standard "electronic signature" today
What is that standard, praytell?
Can you use Docusign to buy a house (maybe), pay your taxes (no) and open a banking account (no). There are thousands of IAM silos, not one "standard".
I'm not interested in holding back progress on government efficiency or preventing identity theft in an increasingly online world because the two big political parties have irreconcilable differences about a wedge issue.
Sure, but when you have a Facebook page, a drivers license, a passport, and a bunch of records that mean the government can identify you pretty easily anyways why not just get over it and get the benefits of having an e-ID
Voter ID isn't necessarily a bad idea on its own. But the context of its recent history in the US is important. All of the recent voter ID efforts in the US have been using it as the cornerstone of a transparent effort to disenfranchise eligible voters, and its proponents are consistently dishonest about their motives and the effects that voter ID would have.
Those despicable efforts have thoroughly tainted the entire idea of voter ID, for years to come. There's no innocent way to bring it up. Anyone who proposes or supports voter ID in the US these days is immediately suspect, and should be regarded as either a racist or politically ignorant and tone-deaf, until proven otherwise.
It's really hard to respect the argument that we have to do without verifying who participates in our most fundamental democratic process, because we can't seem to get our shit together to get everyone the proper ID. Many other countries (including the more "advanced" ones) make voting contingent on ID. It's not an unreasonable idea.
I would respect much more an effort to make ID as easy to get as possible, blanket cover everyone to make sure they have an ID, and be done with that argument once and for all.
I would love for these "voting IDs are necessary" people to actually spell out the 'attack' that they envision without voter IDs.
You have to be registered to vote in the US, so the thought is that they could show up to a voting precinct and pretend to be someone else and vote since you won't have an ID checked? It's not like the people there would let you do that more than once.. and they cross off people who have already voted, so you could only fraudulently vote for people who won't ever show up.. and you would have to drive to other precincts and know the names of people registered to vote but who won't vote that day for it to scale at all..
It seems you only have to get to the polls before the registered voter to carry out an effective attack against that vote.
If someone gets to the polls before me and votes under my name, what happens when the real me shows up? They surely can’t go fish “the other me’s” ballot out of the box, because it’s not tied to my name.
Where I vote, it would be trivial to do this, as the rolls of voters are openly published and it’s often the case that the poll worker asks you to help find your name and it’s clear which names have been ticked off. Couple that with week-plus early voting and it would be easy to attack an individual vote. Now, I don’t think it’s likely to affect elections because it’s extremely rare for a small number of votes to decide anything but pretending that we have a secure system without ID is fanciful IMO.
To be clear, I’m fine with the current setup and appreciate/support the week-plus of early voting.
What happens is that it becomes immediately obvious that voter fraud has happened, and a criminal investigation begins before the results of the election can be certified.
In addition to being basically impossible to scale up to an effective volume, this form of election fraud is also extremely difficult to pull off without getting caught. So it's really more of a (hypothetical) public nuisance leading to election do-overs, than an effective way to subvert the outcome of an election.
Exactly, and each one of the fraudulent votes would consist of a separate felony. So you'd have to wrangle enough people into your conspiracy and convince them all to commit several felonies without having any idea how close the election was going to be.
It's not a coincidence that it's an extremely effective way to target "specific" voters in order to depress turnout either.
First I want to say voter ID laws are in practice intended to disenfranchise voters. Which makes them unethical.
I have also never seen any evidence that it's an actual problem on any significant scale. But, in theory, I think the threat model is there.
Here in Texas, you can get a list of everyone who is registered to vote. Most states make these lists available; in Texas, it's available to anyone. So that takes care of one of the steps of identity theft, which this is a form of.
In my county, we also allow people to vote at any polling place (so you can vote on your lunch hour, etc.), so you wouldn't need to drive to anyone's precinct. You could just visit which ever polling place(s) are convenient.
I agree it won't work if the person has already voted. But you're in a race with the voter, and you've got a 50% shot at winning that race.
And voter turnout isn't 100%; it's more like 50-60%. If that voter is one of the 40% who don't vote, then you win that race by default. If they're one of the 60% who does, then you've got a 50/50 shot. That adds up to 70% odds of success at stealing their vote.
You can even optimize that further by looking at demographic data about voter turnout. Young people, for example, have low turnout and old people have high turnout, and the voter rolls include date of birth.
You're not in a race with the voter since if you guess wrong and the person you were counting on to not vote, shows up to vote after you (or even before you, it doesn't matter) -- then the game is up and there will be an investigation into the felony you just committed when two identical names show up.
You have to be certain that there won't be two votes cast by the same person, so you can see how your probability of not being found out rapidly goes to 0. Even if you rely on the 60% turnout figure, after 3 fraudulent votes you're at a ~6% chance of not being caught.
How voter disenfranchisement works is like this. One party (usually the Republicans) looks at a map of areas they're losing in. Then they send a bunch of canvassers over to find out who moved without changing their address, who was sent to jail, technicalities, etc. and request those names be removed from the voter registration list.
There's no effort to update the list, it's all removals. And the canvassers don't disclose their actual party or motivation for showing up at your house.
It seems entirely "fair play" (and even desirable) to me to exclude from the voting rolls anyone who is not actually eligible to vote per the election rules.
While I'd prefer the election commission do this investigative work to keep the lists clean, I'm fine with anyone who goes and does it. (I am unaffiliated with either major party.)
Is there a genuine public interest served by not performing this data cleansing and allowing ineligible voters to cast ballots?
That's only ever fair if you have instant registration with provisional ballots - many jurisdictions combine these attacks on the vote with long lead times for voter registration so you go to the polls to find out you aren't registered and are left with no recourse. Of course they use dirty lists to begin with that remove thousands of properly registered voters, which I'm sure is accidental and not at all hostile to democracy.[1]
I'm so tired of groups actively suppressing vote and people insisting it's all well and good since hypothetically it's preventing some type of fraud that has never been shown to happen in practice.
When Stephanie Hofeller published her father's files, all pretense was dropped. Just naked, racist, partisan bullshit.[2]
Flying is considered a privilege in the USA, but voting is an inalienable right.
I would personally love if the government issued an ID card to every single person with minimal friction, but that's not what happens in practice. Requiring a specific government-issued ID has become politicized and there are enough people who can not reasonably jump through the hurdles of proving who they are (eg. birth certificate gone when their house was destroyed, no permanent residence, students move to a new state in September and are not able to get their new state ID by early November).
> and implement this
Also, it's worth mentioning that even if REAL ID were not extended this year, it would still be over a decade and a half behind schedule. The USA government isn't capable of doing much these days.
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