Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Real ID Act, H.R. 418

So apparently on 5/11/2005 President Bush signed into law a bill requiring some reform of the state issuance of ID cards and Driver's Licenses. Why is this suddenly brought to my attention? Well I saw the below quoted chain letter.

"Everyone the government has passed has already a bill stating that in 2008 every american will have to have a chip in their forehead or in their hand and withouth this chip you will not be able to buy or sell anything....you wont be able to get a job, shop or anything...THIS IS NOT A JOKE! we must band together and get this billed repealed! if you think im just pulling your chain im no, look at the website...NoNationalId.com.

please tell everyone about this...the goverment wants to have a way to control everyone we must not let this happen!if u are registered voter we must band together and vote against this bill!"


So I decided to just that. I went to NoNationalID.com (which won't be hyperlinked so as to not boost their relevancy), and found out there was a mandate being made for Identification. It was not however in the form of implanted microchips (phew), but according to NoNationalID.com it may be "the prophesied 'mark of the beast'".

So I looked further and actually read H.R. 418 here and was shocked to find out that there is going to be a national ID, distributed in the form of a state issued driver's license or ID card. Man, the whole of America is going to thrown in an uproar if this gets out. The idea that states would issue driver's licenses...scary. Well, ok, for some of the issued licenses it is, but that's another topic.

In all seriousness, the bill is basically a federally mandated quasi-standardization of state issued licenses and a linking of databases for more accurately verifying identities. That doesn't sound like such a bad thing to me, in fact, it would probably help to alleviate some (granted not all) identity theft. It might even help to make American immigration more fair by forcing the inflow to use legal channels. That's probably a big might.

The problem I do see with it, is that there is not enough funding being provided by the federal government to help implement these new requirements. That's fairly standard though for any federal program. So overall I think the bill is a good thing and that EndTime ministries is something the public should be warned about in chain forwards. Not mythical, Ayn Rand-style societal impositions. Besides, I'm sure we're all microchipped already anyway. :)