Why Real ID is about to happen to you

FROM THE EDITOR

"In a database state, citizens are targeted for political oppression and institutional sanctions by their government."

BTC -- Some years ago there was a massive national revolt to regulating US drivers licenses on a universal or international standard. The revolt was very successful. Over 25 states pledged fealty they would not nationalize drivers license documentation, presenting Americans with an option to live without a national ID card. There was even a hearing to consider repealing Real ID for reasons that the program standards were most invasive to privacy, were fiscally irresponsible and the regulations burdensome for most US States.

Flash forward to 2013, Fusion Centers have become national repositories of unintelligible junk that stays on for federal appropriations, as waste, just like Real ID. It has become a monument of an intimate borderless totalitarian infrastructure. National Intelligence agencies seek to hand local police surveillance jurisdiction for everything in mobile phones, but they keep getting blocked. DHS and other National Security agencies want to scrape anything in your cloud services. Until there is a solid rule or law in place they will do what they can until they face criminal charges or a class action civil lawsuit.

So what is their advantage? It appears Americans are being suckered into voluntarily populating their own digital dossier in the private sector. The fight is catastrophically unfair to people who desire privacy, but who rely on first world digital conventions in daily life.

Today’s database state is: Trapwire, Next Gen Identity, NSTIC's digital biometric authentication standards for drivers licenses and passports, continued “cooperations” between corporations like Facebook, Microsoft and the FBI to mine mail programs, a massive National Counter Terrorism Center in the wilds of Utah, StingRay, and live traffic feeds capturing motorists' habits using automatic license plate readers (ALPR). At the end of the day, this is the menace we all truly feared would assault us.  Real ID was the gate to a database state where everything you do is tracked and all unique information leveraged against you by a stranger.

Identity will be demanded from you at every interaction because a faceless digital administrator needs to know you're "not a dog" or a terrorist. More accurately, data miners and brokers cannot successfully collate the little details in your global file under one ID when a national security agency calls for it unless you voluntarily admit it really is you. Or they will bypass it altogether by coordinating your GPS signal to the nearest CCTV feed at the intersection if you're walking around.  Either way, they know it's you, Shonda.  Nice pants, they go well with your biometric record.

The list becomes longer as the US government defines it’s one fiscal priority, national security. DHS and other federal agencies reach for the printed dollar on loan from the Federal Reserve. It becomes a bribe. Surveillance equipment suddenly equates supplemental income or “free money” for local governments living above their means.

Now Anonymous hackers are in jail. US “cyberwar” started with Stuxnet. Bradley Manning and Julian Assange are political prisoners. Aaron Swartz is dead.

Pop culture writers are barely informed of the role national ID data registries played in US genocides. That’s okay. They can go back to trolling tramp stamp pics on Facebook. They’ll probably do whatever they are told when Big Brother takes their phones and laptops at the border or puts their hands down their pants at the airport. They are not dissidents or any kind of threat to Obama’s evolving digital dictatorship. However, any note of dimmed acknowledgement means some patriot evangelist got through the recreational haze. They are clearly uninformed in what is going on all around them.

Are there bigger privacy threats? Sure. The paramilitary dispatch of drones by police is a great new threat level gauge.

So what happened to Real ID? 48 out of 56 American territories are being claimed for a national database and breeder document registry using drivers licenses, according to CIS. Virtually no one noticed, except for the tireless lobbyists seeking to nationalize drivers license standards and those who oppose it.

There won’t be a really good answer why you may be asked to provide a national ID when your State passed a law limiting any regulatory compliance to Real ID years earlier. There won’t be any answer that satisfies why you’re going to pay for it.

The answer I can give is the one where I can puncture a pinhole in a very large dark piece of paper, meant to block everyone’s view of a big picture. I can blame the press for obscuring or marginalizing news of national identity systems. I could blame myself but it wouldn’t be useful. I am one of perhaps 10 -15 people in the nation who worked to expose the public interest conflicts of national ID and the role it will play. In a database state, citizens are targeted for political oppression and institutional sanctions by their government.

So here is our answer: the federal government will fund anything that gives them the right to overpower you and cooperate with astronomically rich lobbies who wish away your natural rights to lower the North American population count, increase economic scarcity and debt. Yes, even the mighty US government has a boss. That boss is someone who will manufacture economic scarcity based on a seemingly impossible level of insecurity.

The reason why you are paying for the U.S. national database state is brought to you in part by a mechanical, analytic force seeking to disconnect the economy from all risk they cannot control as financiers and bankers. There are heated academic justifications for mass analysis, global data coveting as a risk hedge for digital investors jump off start ups to make it look cool. However, without basic freedoms and human rights these institutions believe they can limit Black Swans or a certain ingenuity coming from educated plebeans. The free radical has the power to end their insulated, overprotected and very, very fragile economic system.

As the public notices and cares about the way the government handles their private digital exchanges, how it can be a force of brutality, they have more choices. For now, this atmosphere of choice is obscured by a huge cloud of mental intimidation, government sponsored hacking, militarized police, and divisive messaging through very careful coordinated PR campaigning to impair your idea of national distinction.

As national ID initiatives continue to emerge as digital mass surveillance, I feel less and less connected to my own national identity. I consider myself a patriot. Someone who loves their country enough to feel grief that we have become the very thing we sought to expose and free others from when I was growing up during the Cold War. However, that’s a child’s view of our national character.

Our nation is an emotionally insecure one trying to delay a karmic reckoning for gleefully and mistakenly sliding down corporatism’s slippery slope. Our history comes from Old World Europe. The United States merely modernized government sanctioned pillaging of towns, collecting and importing slaves who later became workers, ushered in a system of both declared property by force and debt leverages to the advantage of people far away, whom we will never see, with taxes to fund wars and torture.

Notions surrounding US national identity or my own citizenship are corrected. The most important way for me to resist the developing surveillance state is to continue to educate citizens of methods for them to govern the government and to prosper. I will do this in spite of failed attempts to lead a legal efficacy and promote awareness using a poorly assembled and financially demotivated national coalition. I join others who could not compete with the amount of dollars required to buy or lawyer my way into truly protecting my own eroding identity rights.

Since we know the cavalry isn’t coming, I admonish you: if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.

Use your dissatisfaction to motivate you to the fullest extent of your personal power to get the results you want during the sunset of America’s free society.

Remember the Alamo.  Congratulations. You get to die fighting.