MCLU Blasts New REAL ID Regulations

[asteroid2003QQ47]

MCLU Blasts New REAL ID Regulations
Delaying Implementation to 2017 Doesn’t Fix Privacy Nightmare

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Friday, January 11, 2008
Contact: Shenna Bellows, 207-774-5444 (w) or 207-776-5404 (c)

Portland – The Maine Civil Liberties Union condemns the final regulations for the REAL ID Act, issued by the Department of Homeland Security today. The REAL ID Act passed in 2005. In January of 2007, the Maine State Legislature was the first in the country to reject the REAL ID, passing a resolution calling for its repeal. An Act To Prohibit Maine from Participating in a National Identification Card System was subsequently passed by the legislature and signed into law by Governor John Baldacci. Sixteen other states have followed Maine’s lead in rejecting the REAL ID.*

“These regulations are a weak attempt to put a pretty face on an ugly, dangerous law,” said MCLU Legal Director Zach Heiden. “REAL ID is still a real nightmare for Mainers privacy, freedoms and pocketbooks.”
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http://www.mclu.org/News/PressReleases/01_11_08_realid.html

As descriptive, "ugly" and "dangerous" works for me!

[asteroid2003QQ47]

1. They Really Are Watching You

Published on Wednesday, May 18, 2005 by the San Francisco Chronicle

Ready for your own all-new, sinister ID card, courtesy of Homeland Security? Shudder

by Mark Morford

Congress just passed it and Dubya has promised to sign it and the Homeland Security Department is giddier than Mel Gibson in a nail factory over it and marketers nationwide are salivating at the groin at the prospect of it, and the next big step toward America becoming an even more delightfully paranoid and draconian Big Brother wonderland has now officially been taken.

It's called Real ID. It is, in short, a new and genetically mutated type of driver's license for all Americans, replacing your current license and replacing your Social Security card and replacing your sense of well being and privacy and humanity and part of a new, uniform, deeply sinister, national uniform card system whereby every person living and breathing in these paranoid and tense times shall henceforth be much more traceable and watchable given how we will all soon be required by law to carry this super-deluxe computerized ID card with us at all times, packed as it will be with more personal, digitized info about you than even your mother knows.
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http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0518-27.htm

Twenty views to date and NO response, everyone here is cool with Real ID?

[Shorebound]

2. Defintely not cool

Raises images from old World War II movies : "Papers please" in a heavy German accent.

[asteroid2003QQ47]

3. "first-ever national identity card system"

New rules on licenses pit states against feds

WASHINGTON (AP) --

The American Civil Liberties Union has fiercely objected to the effort, particularly the sharing of personal data among government agencies. The DHS and other officials say the only way to ensure an ID is safe is to check it against secure government data; critics such as the ACLU say that creates a system that is more likely to be infiltrated and have its personal data pilfered.



In its written objection to the law, the ACLU claims REAL ID amounts to the "first-ever national identity card system," which "would irreparably damage the fabric of American life."

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/01/11/real.id.ap/index.html

Monday, 5:22 AM = 48 viewers

re: "first-ever national identity card system" --at DU Maine--46 FOR--2 AGAINST

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In Germany, they came first for the Communists, And I didn’t speak up because I
wasn’t a Communist;

And then they came for the trade unionists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a
trade unionist;

And then they came for the Jews, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew;

And then . . . they came for me . . . And by that time there was no one left to speak up."
--Pastor Martin Niemöller