The Obama administration is making a last-minute effort to fix the controversial Real ID Act before the program's deadline is reached in December. Changes to the measure, which will be introduced soon in Congress, could add additional privacy safeguards and remove some of the program's most costly requirements.

The Real ID Act, which was passed as a rider on a 2005 military spending bill, aims to create a standardized national ID card and a system of interconnected state identity databases that would be fully accessible by the federal government. The law requires state ID cards to have a machine-readable mechanism that can be used to electronically extract information about the card-holder. The cards would be required in order to gain access to federal buildings and security-sensitive locations, such as airports.

Real ID has faced intense criticism from privacy advocates and state governments. The implementation costs are far exceeding Congressional estimates and states are facing enormous technical challenges as they attempt to boost the interoperability of their legacy identity database systems in order to meet the law's requirements. Not a single state was able to implement the program by the original May 2008 deadline, forcing the government to extend the deadline to the end of 2009.

The new deadline is approaching swiftly and the vast majority of states are still not on track. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, the former governor of Arizona and a vocal critic of Real ID, is said to be drafting a new proposal that will scale back the law's requirements so that it can be reasonably accomplished by states within the allotted time.

The Washington Post reports that the new proposal, which is called Pass ID, could boost the program's privacy safeguards and eliminate the costly national database requirements. The law would still require the identity cards to include a machine-readable mechanism. According to the Post, the Obama administration has been in talks with the National Governors Association for months in an effort to devise a reasonable compromise.

The Republican leadership in Congress, however, is voicing preemptive opposition to the changes. Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), one of the original authors of the Real ID Act, criticized the governors who are struggling to implement the program and argued against weakening the law.

"[If Real ID is weakened] we go right back to where we were on Sept. 10, 2001," Sensenbrenner told the Post. "Maybe governors should have been in the Capitol when we knew a plane was on its way to Washington wanting to kill a few thousand more people."

As no state has been able to implement the Real ID Act, the condition of identity validation in the United States is arguably already exactly the same today as it was roughly ten years ago, so the soundness of Sensenbrenner's criticism is questionable. Shrill invocations of 9/11 aside, the database plan was flawed to begin with and its demise marks a significant improvement.

Update

The Pass ID bill was introduced this morning by a bipartisan coalition of senators. It will be reviewed next month by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

Citing a nationwide survey of state DMV agencies that was conducted in 2006, the supporters of Pass ID say that the original Real ID plan would have cost $11 billion to implement over five years and was not a viable solution. They contend that Pass ID offers a more tenable approach that will improve identification practices without significantly degrading privacy.

"The PASS ID Act does exactly what the 9/11 Commission recommended: it sets strong security standards for the issuance of identification cards and driver's licenses. What it does not do is go far beyond that recommendation by requiring the collection of Americans' personal information and storing it in a centralized repository accessible by any State DMV," said Senator Daniel K. Akaka, a Hawaiian Democrat who backed the new proposal, in a statement. "REAL ID called for all States to store copies of individuals' documents such as birth certificates and their photographs in databases and to provide all other State Departments of Motor Vehicles with access to that information. REAL ID did not require any privacy protection of these State databases, which would contain massive amounts of personal information. These databases could provide one-stop shopping for identity thieves and the backbone for a national identification database. PASS ID addresses those privacy and costs concerns while providing the ID security called for by the 9/11 commission."

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