Another one of Bush's Orwellian moves.

AGAINST!!!!

What tin foil? This is real. Russo is right, we don't need to be a pawn in the governments plan for a police state. If we all just resist getting "the mark of the beast," we can cripple corporate power and get our power back. 

This post is not a reply to any person specifically, but rather addresses some general themes that I see in the thread so far. I am not an expert in this subject, so please do not take this as me saying anything with authority. By the way, I usually make it a personal goal to not address concerns outside of technology and religion, because I usually show my weakness by straying from things that I know well, but this topic seemed interesting to me, and hopefully I will learn from your feedback.

I agree for the most part that our privacy is already easily violated, although Real ID is not just about privacy (i.e. tracking). It is about gradually changing the structure of our government in a way that does not upset the complacent. I am not sure if RFID is a requirement for Real ID, but if it were, I am fairly sure that they would make it illegal to tamper (i.e. destroy) with the RIFD chip.

The good thing about cell phones is that they are optional. I choose not to carry one, mainly because I do not have a need for them and they are too expensive. Perhaps someday we will have open source cell phone software where communities of developers control the code and cell phone companies just provide the service and maybe the hardware. I think this is unlikely, but within the realm of possibility. Anyway, if that were the case, those cell phones would not be easily turned into "bugs." When hardware becomes cheaper to design and produce by small companies, the odds of this happening will increase.

Bugging cell phones one by one is inconvenient. So it is currently the exception, not the rule. And that is a good thing if you are concerned about privacy. Passing new legislation to create new privacy-invading scenarios will make privacy invasion more of a rule than a exception, and that is significant. Just because the data is out there does not mean making the data more accessible or mandatory where it was previously avoidable or took work to access is a significant step.

My opinion about the distribution of the power of government is fairly simple. As a general rule, states should deal with governing the people, not the federal government. It is one of the controls that our founding fathers put in place to keep power in check. As we continue to stray from this philosophy of checks and balances with distributed power to a more centralized government, our system of government will become increasingly vulnerable to abuse. As anyone can see with the Bush administration, that abuse comes with a huge cost against the people. The problem is not just who is in charge, but how much power they have access to and who keeps them in check.

This change in the structure of government would never happen over night or the vast majority of people would respond. It requires decades of gradual change so that the majority of people who are fairly complacent on issues that are perceived as minor do not react. In some ways, doom-and-gloom is the only way to get peoples attention in a largely complacent society. This is unfortunate because the arguments used to propagate a response to issues such as Real ID are not always accurate. But maybe it will at least attract attention to those with good reasons.

I do not blame complacency for all of this. Ignorance plays a large role too. I think the root cause for this gradual change is due a cycle that I see a lot in history. As a society, when something really bad happens, we correct it. Sometimes, decades later when generations die out, new blood does not understand why those corrections were made; and if those corrections are inconvenient to those with influence, those corrections are undone. When that happens, the cycle tends to repeat. Our regulation of monopolies and the consolidation of AT&T is a perfect example of this.

Effectively correcting this is a topic which requires a lot of text to be written that will only further stray from the original post's concerns. But at least I covered what I thought about Real ID and only slightly strayed from that.

By the way Pile, thank you for running bsalert.com.

As far as your "get a job without a SSN", where have you been? Ever hear of cash jobs? Illegal immigrants come to mind, they don't have a SSN yet they still find work, not all companies care about citizenship if their profits increase.

As far as "paranoid rantings about government mind control", you've been groomed since day one to think a certain way. Maybe you should watch "Outfoxed", if you think there isn't a group out there wanting you to think a certain way.

  And finally, categorizing people as "tin-foil hat" nuts isn't much different than a theist calling me a "godless fuck". Neither rely on evidence of the topic, just flat out name calling (an attempt to discredit the other's opinion by trying to discredit their character first, Bill O'Reilly does this often).

Or gradual conditioning. We are at a point now in this country that when news gets out, to a small number of newscasts I might add, about the suspension of habeus corpus, hardly anyone blinks an eye.

As for privacy and security, I don't want to have to worry about what I say in public and to whom. If I want to critize my government in public, I should be able to do that without worrying about being monitored by some electronic device. Also, my credit card number was stolen recently and I've always been careful about purchases--where, and to whom, and so forth. As another poster mentioned, what's to stop theives from stealing your identity quickly and easily with these new chips?