If you need advocacy, don’t wait for someone else to pick up your personal identity fight. The fight is coming to you. So defend your interests.
Believe me. When I got up this morning the last thing I wanted to do was to produce blog copy on Real ID contentions in the States. Unfortunately, AAMVA and DHS are sponsoring their own campaigns under Trump. Resistance is down in States who adopted blocks to the federal legislation. States are moving ahead with flyer regulations they never would have moved on during the Bush Administration. So why now?
DHS bureau heads mistakenly believe Real ID is properly regulated. EPIC expressed concerns in January over TSA’s biometric collection plans. DHS has not provided any further assurances of a long-term plan to store and/or dispose of US identity securely after collection. Now they are moving the saw against US States in a non-compliant posture without providing proof the reforms are necessary or compliant with privacy practices. If these agencies continue to proceed as planned, you may see a new method of resistance from States: a cascade of lawsuits due to DHS' failure to comply with US privacy laws.
As Trump took office, Air Marshalls collected irises of US citizens on international flights and dumped travellers phones at US borders into CBP systems. DHS is now aggressively collecting Visa and passport information couched on his “extreme vetting” campaign policy. Trump may be trying to outdo Obama as a showman of bureau aggressions towards identified people in the United States. What he may not realize is if DHS forges ahead on a policy of arbitrary data grabs, he may face lawsuits. Unless DHS releases a Privacy Impact Assessment on these practices and provide an annual report to Congress he is headed in that direction. The way DHS handled traveller identity was likely illegal under Obama. That liability is now passed on to Trump.
WHAT WENT WRONG?
Privacy and identity are not partisan issues. However, you would never tell the way immigration bait has been twisted through Real ID law. In 2008, the Real ID Act became self-evident as a legislative trojan to move in a US national ID card program. Many States had already had enough of Bush’s aggressions toward constitutionally protected Americans. The law was set in play to placate demand for global identity articles by globalists and militarists in Washington D.C.
A US national ID card program was rationally indefensible for domestic interests because of its known association with checkpoints to curtail freedom of movement and identity persecutions associated with the 3rd Reich. US States' manifest resistance caused adult tantrums amid globalists who want Americans to suffer with a FICO judge following them in every necessary transaction in life. Current Real ID regulations facing States escalate biometric capture of Americans, with or without consent, by DHS.
This policy planning was lobbied in by intellectually protected eugenicists. Global finance leaders, in favor of centralized monetary power, picked up their platform because it would mandate identity as transactional data capital, making all of humanity a currency. Of course, you can’t process people for systematic dehumanization as an object, like a denomination of currency, if you can’t sieze on their identity.
Eugenicists never want any publicity because they want to thin all human populations. Ironically, many of them have very strong operational privacy. They want to protect themselves from angry mobs of people who became institutional targets for economic depression or genocide at their recommendation. Identity mandates, particularly biometric requirements like fingeprinting, have been the center of systemic prison initiation for hundreds of years.
Biometrics-as-global capitalism is now a thing. It is emerging in Africa, Haiti and other underdeveloped parts of the world. Millions of people, who don’t even have toilets or running water, are now enrolled in national biometric data collection programs directly linked to their banking profile. Many of these people are tribes who have sustained resistance to biometric identifiers for over a hundred years. They believed, often rightly, it would be used to deny their humanity rather than promote their way of life in a modernized world.
Trump doesn’t realize it yet, but he’s serving up the American people as a centralized feed line to global capital groups by allowing DHS to proceed on State compliance with Real ID. That really should piss off all the editors at Brietbart. However, we all know it’s easier to blame a Mexican or a Muslim than it is to fight off intellectual forces bitterly aimed at your interests with information and diplomacy skill. Even if racism is a social crime of convenience, it never protected citizen rights when it comes to the impacts of Real ID on US identity. Trump could bill us on a irrationally baited line and still lose every domestic identity right he has today.
US POLITICS AND REAL ID
In 2008-2009, many States and the NCSL came to represent the interests of State and local governments who resisted Real ID. Many adopted legislation or penned their own versions to ban or nullify Real ID. After DHS declared Real ID as Dead-On-Arrival with State implementation, many groups worked together on how to repeal Real ID. Unfortunately, partisan divisions drawn over Affordable Care Act sabotaged most of the moderate and transpartisan work to compel legislators to work together on privacy issues, including Real ID.
After the ACA was passed, work on privacy was hustled through the fractures. Any progress was almost entirely dependent on advocacy groups who could gain the trust of Obama’s partisan workers. In 2012, Obama hardened his posture against domestic privacy by piling on redundant mass surveillance initiatives with an objective to overwhelm citizens and subjugate data aggregation firms. He meant to weaponize commerce information and create a dominant US position in an information arms race. One in which he would inevitably end up on the downside of due to the OPM hack. Towards the end of his administration he discovered important information. The US government had to comply with privacy laws and regulations, similar to the FTC yardstick given corporations. While he moved on this information judiciously, these concessions were too late for many Americans who lost their privacy.
The Real ID Act was not repealed at peak opposition due to chaotic political division in Washington D.C. and disparity in advocacy aims over many groups. Each political party had their chance to represent the interests of the States and the American people. Both had their failures and some successes on privacy and identity representation. It led me to one conclusion. Parties do not solve problems, people do.
I greatly admire the example of survival strength in Maine moderate, Senator Susan Collins. Susan Collins shared her struggles to reach across the aisle politically to get her colleagues to work with her on issues which are essentially non-partisan on Meet The Press. She disclosed that each party would seek to punish the moderate or outlier who tried to create unity in service to the American people. Unfortunately, Maine is now moving on legislation to implement Real ID as one of the initial resistance States. All States suffer similarly due to the lack of working leadership.
For now, the base mark of a reasonable person whom you can work with is they don’t want to punish anyone for efforts to refuse a US national ID card program or an unprotected flyer identity mandate, regardless of party. You don’t have to be best friends or marry their cousin. If you just focus your efforts on the objective dispassionately you can move mountains. Or in this case, repeal Real ID.
DO YOU WANT THIS JOB?
So, if you want to protect your interests from Real ID, your new job is to:
· Show Trump how to win without Real ID law and how to repeal it.
· Arbitrate regulatory due diligence with an embittered and unprofessional bureaucracy embroiled in a fight with an immigration windmill.
· Lobby a guilty obstructionist minority party with a crappy voting record on privacy.
· Lobby a guilty super majority party with a crappy voting record on privacy.
· Defend your right to decentralize any new identity mandate strongholds given to transactional global finance policy interests. Keep it local.
· Support legislative efforts in States to demand privacy assurances. They should expect further resistance from States as response to poorly protected DHS data collection efforts.
· Support national legislative efforts to repeal the Real ID in Washington D.C.
Other duties assigned are:
· Hold bureau actors accountable for their work.
· Recreate threat awareness over the issue with news outlets as a news beat.
· Produce funding to pay yourself, a staff and attorneys whom you will fight with sometimes to do their end of the job and sometimes do their job anyway.
· Compete with other non-profits who squat on advocacy (i.e. collect campaign funding for single issue advocacy and then refuse to move on the issue).
· Work with as many people as you can at all levels in a respectful, focused and consistent manner; which means resisting advocacy trades with other friends in need.
Good luck.