Pensieri di un lunatico minore

All hail Maine

Today, comes word that some sanity might be showing in the state legislatures:

Maine overwhelmingly rejected federal requirements for national identification cards on Thursday, marking the first formal state opposition to controversial legislation scheduled to go in effect for Americans next year.

Both chambers of the Maine legislature approved a resolution saying the state flatly “refuses” to force its citizens to use driver’s licenses that comply with digital ID standards, which were established under the 2005 Real ID Act. It asks the U.S. Congress to repeal the law.

For those who think this is partisan:

The votes in Maine on the resolution were nonpartisan. It was approved by a 34-to-0 vote in the state Senate and by a 137-to-4 vote in the House of Representatives.

Real ID is nothing but a sham, and security theater. Bruce Schneier has written about it before, but it’s just delusional. The only thing it will guarantee is a sky-rocketing amount of identity theft by many people¹ who are not in-the-least terrorist risks.

You must address the actual risk, not some tangential vector. This might be “easy,” and it might sound good in a 5 second sound bite, but it will do absolutely nothing to improve security, and it may, in reality, substantially reduce it by placing an inappropriate trust in an ID.

¹ You know, like the people who pick your strawberries and mow your lawn. We put too much faith in identification, which means very little. Even this will be trivially forgeable.