The privacy afforded to American citizens prior to the events of 9/11, leading up to the "War on Terror", is all but gone. One layer of privacy taken away at a time, all the while the media and the majority of Americans sit idly.
Patriot Act, Total Information Awareness, No-Fly Lists, Patriot Act II, and now a National ID.
Yesterday, the US Senate approved an "emergency" military spending package containing an unpublicized line item called the Real ID Act. The Real ID Act will require a federally approved ID card for travel, opening a bank account, any activity involving the federal government, to name a few.
Primarily pushed by the Bush administration as a means to prevent illegal immigrants from obtaining drivers licenses, it actually affects ALL Americans.
Here's the reasoning behind the Act, directly from the mouth of it's sponsor, Republican James Sensenbrenner:
Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican and Real ID Act sponsor, applauded the Senate vote on Tuesday. "The Real ID is vital to preventing foreign terrorists from hiding in plain sight while conducting their operations and planning attacks," Sensenbrenner said. "By targeting terrorist travel, the Real ID will assist in our war-on-terror efforts to disrupt terrorist operations and help secure our borders."
There are those damn terrorists again! Am I one of the few who realizes how this entire blame-the-terrorists-in-order-to-apply-further-controls-on-American-citizens game is being played out? I sure hope not.
Notice that Representative Sensenbrenner's reason for the Act contradicts what that of the Bush administration which states the Act was primarly to address illegal immigration. I guess it doesn't matter, illegal immigrants, terrorists, take your pick... just don't point out that the target of the investigations should be the Israeli infiltration of the American political system and the compromise of national security at the hands of Israeli spy rings.
You can find answers to FAQs about the Real ID Act here. Here are a few of the highlights (or, more appropriately, lowlights):
- Starting three years from now, if you live or work in the United States, you'll need a federally approved ID card to travel on an airplane, open a bank account, collect Social Security payments, or take advantage of nearly any government service.
- At a minimum: name, birth date, sex, ID number, a digital photograph, address, and a "common machine-readable technology" that Homeland Security will decide on [will be stored on the ID card].
- The card must also sport "physical security features designed to prevent tampering, counterfeiting, or duplication of the document for fraudulent purposes."
- Homeland Security is permitted to add additional requirements--such as a fingerprint or retinal scan--on top of those.
- In exchange for federal cash, states must agree to link up their databases.
Below are some comments from Representative Ron Paul from Texas, one of the more vocal opponents to not only this legislation, but other pieces of legislation that have resulted in an erosion of civil liberties and individual rights:
Terrorism is the excuse given for virtually every new power grab by the federal government, and the national ID is no exception. But federal agencies have tried to create a national ID for years, long before the 9-11 attacks. In fact, a 1996 bill sought to do exactly what the REAL ID Act does: transform state drivers’ licenses into de facto national ID cards. At the time, Congress was flooded with calls by angry constituents and the bill ultimately died.
Proponents of the REAL ID Act continue to make the preposterous claim that the bill does not establish a national ID card. This is dangerous and insulting nonsense. Let’s get the facts straight: The REAL ID Act transforms state motor vehicle departments into agents of the federal government. Nationalizing standards for driver's licenses and birth certificates in a federal bill creates a national ID system, pure and simple. Having the name of your particular state on the ID is meaningless window dressing.
Federally imposed standards for drivers' license and birth certificates make a mockery of federalism and the 10th amendment. While states technically are not forced to accept the federal standards, any refusal to comply would mean their residents could not get a job, receive Social Security, or travel by plane. So rather than imposing a direct mandate on the states, the federal government is blackmailing them into complying with federal dictates.
One overriding point has been forgotten: Criminals don’t obey laws! As with gun control, national ID cards will only affect law-abiding citizens. Do we really believe a terrorist bent on murder is going to dutifully obtain a federal ID card? Do we believe that people who openly flout our immigration laws will nonetheless respect our ID requirements? Any ID card can be forged; any federal agency or state DMV is susceptible to corruption. Criminals can and will obtain national ID cards, or operate without them. National ID cards will be used to track the law-abiding masses, not criminals.
Everyone should be paying close attention to this! Yet, I find no mention of this Act anywhere in mainstream media!
Here are some pieces out of Representative Ron Paul's speech before the House of Representatives in February 2005:
I rise in strong opposition to HR 418, the REAL ID Act. This bill purports to make us safer from terrorists who may sneak into the United States, and from other illegal immigrants. While I agree that these issues are of vital importance, this bill will do very little to make us more secure. It will not address our real vulnerabilities. It will, however, make us much less free. In reality, this bill is a Trojan horse. It pretends to offer desperately needed border control in order to stampede Americans into sacrificing what is uniquely American: our constitutionally protected liberty.
The REAL ID Act establishes a national ID card by mandating that states include certain minimum identification standards on driver’s licenses. It contains no limits on the government’s power to impose additional standards. Indeed, it gives authority to the Secretary of Homeland Security to unilaterally add requirements as he sees fit.
Supporters claim it is not a national ID because it is voluntary. However, any state that opts out will automatically make non-persons out of its citizens. The citizens of that state will be unable to have any dealings with the federal government because their ID will not be accepted. They will not be able to fly or to take a train. In essence, in the eyes of the federal government they will cease to exist. It is absurd to call this voluntary.
This bill could have a chilling effect on the exercise of our constitutionally guaranteed rights. It re-defines "terrorism" in broad new terms that could well include members of firearms rights and anti-abortion groups, or other such groups as determined by whoever is in power at the time. There are no prohibitions against including such information in the database as information about a person’s exercise of First Amendment rights or about a person’s appearance on a registry of firearms owners.
What will all of this mean for us? When this new program is implemented, every time we are required to show our driver’s license we will, in fact, be showing a national identification card. We will be handing over a card that includes our personal and likely biometric information, information which is connected to a national and international database.
H.R. 418 does nothing to solve the growing threat to national security posed by people who are already in the U.S. illegally. Instead, H.R. 418 states what we already know: that certain people here illegally are "deportable." But it does nothing to mandate deportation.
Although Congress funded an additional 2,000 border guards last year, the administration has announced that it will only ask for an additional 210 guards. Why are we not pursuing these avenues as a way of safeguarding our country? Why are we punishing Americans by taking away their freedoms instead of making life more difficult for those who would enter our country illegally?
H.R. 418 does what legislation restricting firearm ownership does. It punishes law-abiding citizens. Criminals will ignore it. H.R. 418 offers us a false sense of greater security at the cost of taking a gigantic step toward making America a police state.
Read it and weep. America, in the not too distant future, will no longer be the land of the free. In order to be truly free, one will have to leave or become an outcast, not living by the rules imposed upon the masses.
I'll finish with a couple of comments from an opinion article I read a while back on the Cassiopaea web site. The title of the article is "America - Who is Responsible?".
Each of us finds ourselves in the position we are in, not as a result of some cruel twist of fate or the "hand of god" but rather as a result of who we are and what we see.
There seems to exist a strong desire (natural or otherwise) within human beings in general to avoid taking responsibility for their actions and their resulting life situation. It could be said that if people were to apply the same, (often considerable) skill for finding something else to point the finger at for their own troubled life situation, to accepting responsibility for and resolving their issues, the world and the people that inhabit it would likely be much happier.
Today, with the wealth of facts and evidence available, many Americans must surely be feeling extreme discomfort as they are forced to resort to increasingly illogical and irrational explanations to allow them to hold on to the idea that they are living in a democracy or that their "elected leaders" are working in their best interests. At some point it becomes too much, and as the mind weighs up the enormous size of that square peg and the pinprick size of the round hole the realisation dawns that it can simply no longer be done.
With all the proof that those in power are making decisions which are definitely NOT in our best interest, why is it that no one is doing anything to prevent the downward slide from continuing?
For a long time we have been able to convince ourselves that our view of the world and our place in it was viable, basically because to some extent, up to now, things were more "open", the future was perhaps more "open" and we could allow ourselves the luxury of "maybe".
No longer it seems.
Denial of the objective reality of this will get us nowhere, leading only to either depression as we, in vain, attempt to shut out the truth staring us in the face; or anger as we subconsciously realise that our sacred cows are ultimately bound for the slaughterhouse anyway. Indeed, it seems that depression and/or anger is the overriding emotion pervading many America cities these days.
The truth, it seems, is that "lock down" is in operation, things are being steered in a very definite direction, and those at the wheel are not really trying very hard anymore to hide the destination.
There exists, however, an opportunity for us all to do something about this decidedly negative situation in which we find ourselves. It has only been by our acceptance of, and support for, this illusory worldview our leaders have presented to us, that they have been able to bring the world to the brink of disaster upon which it now sits.
All of life serves knowledge. Simply by being alive we are learning. It is our choice to seek to learn either Truth, that which IS, or to attempt to force the "truth" to conform to the limited simplistic, beliefs foisted upon us by those men that would have all of reality reflect their own twisted imaginings.
The time will come to decide for those who "see"... serve truth or serve another.
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