SAN FRANCISCO, April 17 (UPI) -- State motor vehicle agencies are working on a plan to create a national driver's license by using state agreements -- possibly backed by federal law -- that could end-run civil rights and political opponents, and foes said Wednesday that the project would be a defacto national identity system.
State agreements or "compacts" could be the avenue for setting up a nationally coordinated driver's license system according, to a motor vehicle association executive.
The system would have nationally linked databases of standardized information and strong tests for license holders to prove their identity. The system could end up containing dossiers on an estimated 250 million American and Canadian adults -- whether they drive or not -- since Departments of Motor Vehicles also issue non-driver identification.
The plan of the state DMVs was described at the 12th annual Conference on Computers Freedom and Privacy, the premier national privacy association. Jay Maxwell, executive director, of the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, described the scheme.
The issues of ensuring that drivers' licenses that accurately identify the owner and keep people from circumventing laws by getting licenses from different states gained major government and public interest after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 when several terrorist were found to have obtained Virginia driver's permits.
Part of the problem in the current DMV system has been a lack of uniformity establishing identity or checking the validity of documents. Some documents can be easily counterfeited, and few are standard. There are, for example, 6,000 different types of birth certificates, Maxwell said.
The proposal for the system, and other similar ideas, have alarmed privacy advocates and politicians of wide-ranging persuasions who see it as a de facto national identification card and a tool for extensive invasions of privacy.
Deirdre K. Mulligan, director of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic of Boalt Law School, delivered a report for the National Science Foundation that found the debate on a national identity systems has failed to establish its objectives and whether it would be of any value in preventing terrorists from entering the country.
"Given the potential economic costs, significant design and implementation challenges, and risks to both security and privacy," the report noted "there should be broad agreement on what problems a nationwide identity system would address."
The costs and effort of screening the identities and establishing a thorough national identity system appear astronomical, according to a report by Andrew Schulman prepared for the Privacy Foundation.
Schulman studied a border-crossing card now used on the Mexican border in a very limited way by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. To establish identities and other facts about a card applicant takes INS 15 minutes per person in this process. Even if the fast rate of these interviews were taken as a model, Schulman said, "about 3,000 employees would need to work for ten years, just to conduct the interviews," for the U.S. national population.
"Similarly a September 1997 Social Security Administration report estimated it would cost $10 billion and take ten years to issue tamper-proof Social Security cards with pictures, fingerprints, work history and earnings for the 270,000 Social Security accounts," the report said.
For $4 billion, the agency said it could use simpler cards that resemble credit cards.
The driver's license is not a national ID card, Maxwell told the audience. Unlike a national ID card, having a driver's license is not mandatory, he told United Press International, pointing out that the card could be taken away by a policeman or the state for driving violations. The card is also used only for the driving public, who must past a test to carry it, and those who seek non-driving IDs. Carrying it at all times would not be mandatory unlike the expected requirement that a national ID card that would have to be carried by every citizen all the time.
Privacy expert Robert Ellis, publisher of the Privacy Journal, agreed that the license scheme was not a national ID card --- largely because it was not a card that every person would be required to carry. He told UPI that he thought the presence of such a driver's license would soften people into accepting a true national idea card in the future.
Maxwell told UPI that the compacts might not work without federal backing. Several compacts exist now. One such compact, between 46 states, has been in place for 40 years. Through this agreement, states are supposed to notify each other if, for example, a visiting driver gets a speeding ticket. But there is there is no enforcement in such compacts and states often fail to follow through.
What might overcome this, Maxwell suggested, is a "hybrid where the government steps in and says you must have a compact and here are some penalties."
He said Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., was looking at incorporating a compact as part of legislation supporting a DMV-based system. Maxwell said it would take five years to put a coordinated system in place.
Rep. James Moran, D-Va., also might introduce legislation mandating drivers' license be able to be used for other than driver's identification.
Many commercial interests and some government officials are interested in having the card also be usable for other activities such as voting, credit card purchasing, travel reservations and even toll collection and checking out library books.
The AAMVA is not in favor of that, said Maxwell, as it creates a problem with who owns the license and its use for driving enforcement. What would happen, said Maxwell if a policeman had to take your driver's license and it was also your ATM and credit card.
