by Chris Miller
Peace Action Maine’s current priority is the Real Repeal Campaign, whose purpose is to repeal Maine’s first step to Real ID.
A team is traveling the state to distribute petitions, talking points and red-circled STOP! Real ID stickers. Its goal is to find 1000 people willing to volunteer to gather signatures. Each one needs to get 60 signatures by July 17. Real ID will turn your state driver’s license into a national identity card. You’ll be tied to that card biometrically — by fingerprints, DNA, retinal scans or facial recognition technology. Networks like “Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlement” (SAVE) will collect and share data about you. They’ll track you, your activities and your associations. The authorities will employ Real ID and programs like SAVE to allocate resources and services. When gasoline and heating oil cost twice what they do now, when even at that price there is not enough to go around, when obtaining food and warm housing becomes more difficult, how will distribution be allocated? Who will get what? One of Gov. Baldacci’s cabinet said to me, “Shortages will not be solved democratically.”
Real ID is Big Brother. Your driver’s license is only the start. Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff boasts that you’ll need Real ID to get a bank account, any sort of license or service, to get employment, to fly or to enter a federal building. Real ID is your number; programs like SAVE or Basic Pilot will check your number to determine what resources will be allocated to you.
“Such a police force,” Wendell Berry writes, “will be effective precisely to the extent that it oversways the freedom and privacy of the citizens of every nation.”
Maine’s Real ID legislation:
1) violates
individual privacy by sharing state
data;
2) violates State’s Rights by requiring
the state to enforce federal laws over
which the state has no say;
3) is a huge
unfunded mandate — costing $71M, or
about what it would cost for everyone in
Maine to pay for a passport;
4) changes
the presumption of your innocence to
presumption of guilt; you’ll have to
prove your compliance by “showing
your papers.”
The devil is in the details:
1) Privacy: Maine will have to provide to Homeland Security and other military, police, state, foreign and corporate entities the data it collects on its residents — with no restriction or oversight. Not just the usual data revealed in a driver’s license, but your employment, education, services and financial transactions. While the Real ID Act of 2005 starts with driver’s licenses, the Director of Homeland Security is authorized to extend the data he can request about you when and as he wishes.
2) States rights: The Constitution prohibits states from restricting immigration. Maine’s state and local police and agencies are here to serve and protect our local communities, not to enforce laws over which we have no control. State and local police are impeded from doing their jobs when people are afraid to talk to them for fear of their own arrest.
3) Unfunded mandate: Processing drivers’ licenses at near-passport standards will cost Maine $71M over the next few years. The Maine Legislature left proper funding for this measure out of the budget.
4) Presumption of guilt: Pervasive surveillance flips the long-standing, American “presumption of innocence” to a presumption of guilt.
That government authorities cannot fish around in our business without probable cause, and due process is fundamental to our Constitution and Bill of Rights. But in an environment of pervasive surveillance, the authorities automatically fish around to make sure you don’t give money to the wrong cause, phone the wrong people, or buy “suspicious” stuff.
A little history reminds us how regimes employ fear to force people to give up their rights. Krystalnacht. 9/11. Osama, the immigrants, the Others. A little more history reminds us that the people of Maine can create change as we did 25 years ago when Peace Action stopped the testing of cruise missiles over Maine. One thousand people are needed to collect 60 signatures each by July 17. Be one of them. Reclaim Maine. Stop Real ID. Contact Peace Action Maine at 772-0680 to become a volunteer.
