May 7th, 2025 – Let the Chaos Begin

Real ID, a misguided effort by the feds to make everyone have a less easily fakeable driver’s license (notice I did not say a secure driver’s license) came out of the 9-11 attacks. For the last 20 years the feds have been trying to get the states to implement the law, with many states resisting (only 4 force the issue) and, after 20 years, only about half of the drivers licenses are Real ID compliant.

Unless they change the rules again – and they have done this three times already – on May 7, 2025, everyone is going to need a Real ID compliant license or other Real ID compliant ID (like a passport or Global Entry) in order to fly. While it is possible that the 50 percent of the people who don’t have Real ID compliant licenses do not plan on flying to grandma’s house for Christmas, my guess is that is not the case.

So, you will have a lot of people who don’t understand the rules and causing major noise at TSA checkpoints. The ones who only fly once a year and don’t understand tech.

The government’s solution is to task the TSA with creating a standard and implementing it for a secure digital mobile (aka phone) ID.

This is the same TSA who does NOT detect guns in carry on bags some people say as much as 50 percent of the time.

This is also the same TSA who is responsible for security for the Colonial Pipeline – that worked out well, right?

Note that Congress did NOT ask NIST – who has a digital identity division and a privacy engineering team to spearhead this effort.

TSA, for all of its wonderfulness, says we should adopt some ISO standard that was created in secret, which the US really didn’t play much of a part in and which has some real privacy issues.

Stay tuned. My suggestion is that if you don’t have a passport or global entry, you might want to get one of these before 2025.

Other than that, privacy be damned. One more time.

And even if some approves using the ISO standard, do you really think we can roll it out in 18 months countrywide? Colorado already has a digital driver’s license app, but they say you MUST carry your physical license because the digital one might not be accepted. So why have one? Also, I am not eager to give a cop my unlocked phone – after all, what could possibly go wrong with that?

Credit: Data Breach Today

by