By September 30th virtually unaccountable bureaucrats inside the Department of Homeland Security will have made a decision as to whether the new de facto national ID card will broadcast your sensitive identification information wherever you go.

This is a result of the REAL ID Act. REAL ID, signed into law in May, resulted from negotiations over the intelligence-reform bill which was passed last December. The law had been attached to the first “must-pass” bill of 2005 which turned out to be “emergency” spending for the Iraq war. Therefore, a vote against this national ID would have been spun as a vote “against the troops” as well.

REAL ID gives the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) the right to issue “design requirements” for driver’s licenses, and needs only to “consult” state officials and the Department of Transportation. Though the official publication of the design requirements is some months off, it’s expected that, by early fall, the Department of Homeland Security will make an internal decision on one of those requirements in regards “machine-readable technology” standards. And there is a lot of pressure on the Department of Homeland Security from the surveillance-technology industry to make radio-frequency identification (RFID) microchips the required machine-readable technology.

The National Conference of State Legislatures has conservatively estimated compliance costs at up to $750 million initially and $75 million annually thereafter, which is just another expense to be passed on to the taxpayer.

States that refuse to go along with the new standards will find that their citizens cannot use their state driver’s licenses for federal identification, which means the Transportation Security Administration won’t allow U.S. citizens having noncompliant driver’s licenses board airplanes, unless perhaps they have a valid passport, which themselves are scheduled to have RFID soon.

Radio Frequency Identification technology is an ID card consisting of an embedded microchip and antenna that broadcasts identity information, decodable by specially designed readers. On an identification document such as a driver’s license, Radio Frequency Identification is unnecessary and dangerous technology in today’s information-rich world. Radio Frequency Identification-enabled identity cards can broadcast identifying information to people and institutions the license holder’s knowledge or consent. Information, such as a name, birth date, identification number, or even digital photo, could be cross-referenced through commercial and government databases to gain increasingly sensitive identity information on the individual. This type of technology on essential government documents can lead to identity fraud, endangering the victim’s finances, privacy, and even physical safety.

Radio Frequency Identification technology could enable the tracking of individuals, as the chip broadcasts the cardholder’s presence to every reader he passes. No matter how secure the RFID protocols are, broadcasting someone’s presence to a series of readers leaves a record of an individual’s place and time, and that information could wind up being taken by hidden readers just about anywhere a U.S. citizen goes, which could include such things as political meetings, gun shows, places of worship, etc. It is an open invitation to stalkers and thieves, as well as those government agents who look upon constitutional proscriptions regarding search and surveillance as obstacles rather than as American principles.

Advocates of the technology claim RFID can be set to broadcast for only a limited distance, such as a few centimeters. But as one security expert has pointed out, “This is a spectacularly naïve claim. All wireless protocols can work at much longer ranges than specified. In tests, RFID chips have been read by receivers 20 meters away. Improvements in technology are inevitable.”

There is no significant security benefit in ordering that driver’s licenses and/or identification cards carry RFID chips. However, there are great risks to security and privacy. If an RFID reader must theoretically be within a few centimeters of the identification card, there is no reason not to close the security loop and require the card make contact with the reader.

Could the Department of Homeland Security seriously be considering turning state driver’s licenses into national ID cards, essentially internal passports based on UN standards? It does seem they may be headed that way.

As more Americans learn about RFID technology, they are concerned about these dangers. In the state of California, the state Assembly is considering a bill to ban RFID from state identification documents for three years as security questions are studied. The Montana House of Representatives has recently passed a bill declining to implement any nationalized ID standards. Legislators in Montana were concerned such a system endangers the privacy of its citizens. If the Department of Homeland Security adopts mandatory RFID for driver’s licenses, those concerns would be proven valid.

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