California Votes on Driver's Licenses That Allow Government to Stalk You Dana Liebelson - Mother Jones
go to original August 22, 2013

A Border Patrol agent checks cars traveling through a checkpoint along the California-Mexico border. (Laura Embry/SDU-T/ZUMA)

Update: The Assembly Appropriations Committee has placed the bill in the suspense file, where it will stay unless the committee decides to pick it up again.

California's Assembly Appropriations Committee were expected to vote on a bill Wednesday that would give residents the option of getting a "driver license on steroids." The enhanced IDs, which are recommended by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), act as an international E-ZPass - complete with a microchip holding a unique ID number that can be read via radio up to 50 meters away - and can be used to drive across borders between Canada and Mexico.

Drivers who have them don't have to bring their passports and can move through border checkpoints more quickly. (They can also be used in the Caribbean, although the drive-through feature doesn't apply.) But privacy advocates say that there's a dangerous catch: Unlike with passports, which are encrypted, anyone with a simple Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) scanner - like this one available for $37.95 on Amazon - can read the unique number broadcasted by these new IDs, determine if the card's owner is nearby, or even replicate the number to steal the owner's identity.

Additionally, that ID number can be used (by someone with access to the Department of Homeland Security database) to pull up a secure DHS file containing, at minimum, "biographical information, a photo, and the results of terrorist/criminal checks." The bill doesn't provide any caps on whether other information, like that collected by the National Security Agency, can be included in the database as well. Michigan, New York, Vermont, and Washington already offer these insecure IDs - but civil liberties advocates say that the more states that adopt this technology, the more likely it is that they will eventually become mandatory.

Read the rest at Mother Jones

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