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Showing this was not about security at all.
It never was
Well, it’s never been about security, it’s about surveillance. But it is reasonable to assume that REAL ID is their most efficient way to track travelers, and if you make them use their less efficient methods of tracking, they’ll offset the difference by charging you directly.
One could argue surveillance and tracking is about security. They’d be wrong. But they could argue that.
That’s absolutely about security. Just not yours. There’s a lot of people whose financial security is at risk if they can’t sell that data.
So is this just legal way to bribe the TSA
without a REAL ID or passport
Title leaves out “or passport.”
In a push to get you to think you must have a Real ID, I’ve noticed the media constantly leaves out or minimizes the fact that a passport is sufficient to get you through an airport or any other place a Real ID is required.
So no extra fee of you have a passport.
Both Real IDs and passports are the premium options, you pay extra to have them.
I never got one because my license expired during covid and i didn’t have a recent bill/bank statement (and I had no intention of walking into a DMV at that time) fortunately i do have a passport that i plan to renew as soon as it expires, but my passport is supposed to be for international travel, not domestic.
it wasn’t that long ago that you only needed a birth certificate to travel to the caribbean or a border country. this is getting out of hand.
A passport is a really good thing to have, and lasts much longer than a Real ID state license. It ends up costing like $13/yr and it opens up the whole world to you. It blows my mind that on;y 50% of US citizens ever bother getting one.
Many citizens don’t leave their state. Plenty of them are hand to mouth and can’t afford groceries. Even local travel is a luxury to some, so I can understand why they might not have the desire to go through the process and pay for the passport, not to mention that many people don’t know their SSN or have their birth certificates.
Don’t forget that transgender Americans can’t get passports with the correct gender, either.
I looked it up, my understanding is US passports are currently issued with your “assigned sex at birth”, i.e. not your gender or biological sex.
Basically, the passport isn’t showing your gender.
We still need to go through the process to make sure that we verify who you are
As long as I don’t have any weapons it shouldn’t matter.
but how else will we track where everyone is all the time
Unless you are using a fake ID and fake credit card then they already have that data?
They know John Smith who lives at 123 Main Street in Bumbfuck, WI and who paid with credit card 1234567890123456 is flying from MSN to LAX on December 1st, 2025 and returning via the same route on December 3rd, 2025.
The RealID requirements are to, theoretically, streamline the process of matching person to face with more standardized ID requirements. Like all ID related legislature there is good and bad there.
But if your focus is on The Man tracking you? This changes nothing unless you are already actively committing fraud at MANY levels.
neat. there is no reason they even need an id. do you need one to gain access to the highways?
Most highways are publicly accessible (and still log you with a Flock™ camera anyway…). But if you want to use the priority lane in states like Colorado? Yeah, they need to scan your pass and they very much do.
The ID still matches the face/body to the Person. Its no different than checking if you are the person with a reservation at a hotel. That said, you can bet there is work in place to not actually need it through a mix of facial ID and profiling.
that’s my point. outside of a thin lane or three, which is probably considerable “private” - public infra should be accessible. Last I checked (abt six months ago) I did not need to show ID to hop on the brewster line into grand central.
it’s all just a cash grab and control theater / normalization at airports. there is nothing special about flying compared to trains, except of course: profit.
I did not need to show ID to hop on the brewster line into grand central.
Because those are public roads. Not high priority roads you pay for access to. Just like fully government funded buses and the like don’t care if you have a ticket or not. Whereas those that are only subsidized tend to still require a pass/ticket/payment.
Also I’ll just point out: Your car has a license plate. It is trivial to read those with an overhead camera. And, depending on the road/day, you can bet a cop will gladly run you down if they spot you have no license plate or decide they care about the polarized screen you put on top of it. At which point you can bet they’ll want to see your ID and won’t take “I am a sovereign citizen and this is a public road” as an answer.
there is nothing special about flying compared to trains
And you need to tie your body to your ticket when you get on a train. We tend to not care anywhere near as much about security with trains (because everyone knows bombs and box cutters only work if you are at least 100 feet above the ground!), but you can be damned sure the ticket machine where you inserted your cash took a picture of your face to go with it.
I genuinely don’t care about what kind of libertarian nonsense you are on about hating the concept of IDs at all. My point was simply that if you think the RealID requirement has ANY bearing on The Man knowing where you are and where you are going then… you don’t actually understand what your exposure is.
And the VIP lane on the highway is a private road?
Whats next, HOV Lane brought to you by Carl’s Jr.?
Stop normalizing the surveillance state. It’s not a good look.
While this is ridiculous. The original requirement date for a real id was 2008. It has been 20 years since real id was passed. You have had 20 years to get one.
Dude it was hard enough for my wife to get a new ID (not REAL) when we moved from RI to MA.
I do all the bills and handle all the finances. My credit was better (now we are about equal) and so all the utilities and most the credit cards are in my name. Not to mention most of them are paperless.
At the time, I think she was also still on a cell phone plan with her siblings.
So, like, absolutely no official-enough mail coming to our house to her name. And they need 2.
What, exactly, is the purpose of an ID, and why does it need my SSN and two pieces of mail? How does that identify me, as a person, any more than a supporting document like an existing US Passport? If I qualified for a US Passport, why the hell do I need so much more on top of that for just a state issued ID.
The whole thing is a scam to bully minorities and put an additional burden on traveling for low-income families. I wonder how many people are missing flights to some important and unexpected event (i.e. a funeral) because they never fly and never had a reason to get a REAL ID.
For that matter, I’d really like to know what TSA gets out of a REAL ID that they don’t get out of a regular license, for domestic travel? They don’t care about my proof of residence, they only care that the name matches the boarding pass and the face, and isn’t Islamic or otherwise off-white.
How long until they require it to vote so it shuts out a majority of the voters from participating in elections?
I mean, at this point we’ve known it was coming for like 20 years now - really no excuse to not have one.
My excuse was I didn’t want a federal ID card. Not under a democrat and especially not under Trump.
Real ID is still a state issued ID. It just now complies with a federal standard.
Passport is a Federal ID.
you mean that?
There’s really something wrong with people if they think the government can’t track you down with all the paper trail that comes with being a contributing member of society. People that want to live in a bubble thinking they are anonymous are delusional. Full stop, if you own property, you are no longer an anonymous citizen. The only way to be even close to anonymous in this world we live in today is to have a burner prepaid cellphone with zero online services logged in, be homeless (or live with family), have zero credit, no car, no credit cards, no bank account, and be jobless.
If you’re reading this and think that you’d be happy with that lifestyle, you need help.
