Left, right fight national ID in Pa

John L. Micek | Call Harrisburg Bureau
12:09 PM EST, February 21, 2008

HARRISBURG - In case you'd forgotten, here's a vivid reminder that politics makes for strange bedfellows.

One of the General Assembly's most conservative members and one of its most liberal have teamed up to block the implementation of a federal program that they say would create a new national identity card, putting the personal privacy of millions of Americans at risk.

State Rep. Samuel Rohrer, R-Berks, and Rep. Babette Josephs, D-Philadelphia, are co-sponsoring legislation designed to bar the implementation of the federal REAL ID program in Pennsylvania.

Rohrer is best known as one of the Legislature's most vigilant tax hawks. Josephs, the chairwoman of the House State Government Committee, embraces such social causes as civil unions for same-sex couples.

"Fundamentally, [REAL ID] is a violation of several provisions of the Constitution," Rohrer said this week as the House Intergovernmental Affairs Committee kicked off a pair of hearings on the issue. "The most obvious one is that Congress has no authority to implement anything of this type."

The program is "dreadful," because of its potential costs and the volume of personal information that it will centralize, Josephs said in a brief interview. "Here's something that looks like it was put together to harass the American people," Josephs said, adding that, "there is no evidence whatsoever that this will make us any safer from terrorists."

The House Intergovernmental Affairs Committee held a public hearing on the legislation in Philadelphia today. Another is planned for Pittsburgh on March 13. Passed by Congress in 2005, the federal REAL ID Act sets up nationwide standards for drivers' licenses. The cards are supposed to be tamper-proof so that terrorists can't duplicate them.

But critics fear that the required inclusion of so-called "biometric information" on the cards, and the fact that information on the cards would be shared between states, would lead to the creation of a nationwide database of personal identities.

"It's the use of bio-metric information that's contained in the card," Rohrer said. "It's the equivalent to DNA or a fingerprint."

Rohrer also said he's worried about both the threat to personal privacy of such a database as well as its security. He pointed to a recent incident in the United Kingdom in which the personal details of 600,000 people were put at-risk when a government laptop was stolen.

The program has united critics on both the right and left, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Commonwealth Foundation, a conservative, Harrisburg think-tank.

Officials at the state Department of Transportation are reviewing the financial impact of implementing the program in Pennsylvania, a PennDOT official said at a public hearing in Harrisburg last month.

Critics fear that the cost of implementing the program will run into the millions of dollars. The Bush administration has not included state funding in any of its budgets, and Congress has only appropriated $90 million for the program since 2006, said Jeremy D. Meadows, a policy analyst with the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The federal government has allowed states to use U.S. Homeland Security grant money for REAL ID purposes, but much of that money is "largely already spoken for by other homeland security priorities," Meadows said at that same public hearing.

States have until 2011 to fully comply with federal REAL ID requirements. But people could run into trouble as soon as this May, unless state officials are granted an exception by the Department of Homeland Security to continue studying the program's requirements, PennDOT Deputy Secretary Kurt Myers said.

At that point, only REAL ID licenses will be accepted to board commercial airliners or such federal facilities as nuclear power plants where identification is required. Assuming the state is granted an exception, that requirement wouldn't kick in for Pennsylvania residents until Dec. 31, 2009, Myers said. States would have until 2011 to finally implement the program.

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