ON THE morning of Sept. 11, 2001, there were probably few people that could fathom the magnitude of what had happened to us. With the exception of those in New York City and Washington, D.C., most of us watched our television screens faithfully, trying to decipher the multitude of emotions that were overwhelming us. Appropriately, few of us stopped to consider the long-term impacts of that morning on civil liberties. The time to do that wasn't on Sept. 11. The time to do that wasn't in the months to follow. The time to do that is now. Although most of the civil liberties grievances orbit around peculiar sections of the PATRIOT Acts, it would be simply naïve and uninformed to accept that the debate ends there. Most pertinent to us in-state kids is the Virginia legislature's continued efforts to pass a hollow piece of legislation, more formally known as the Driver's License Modernization Act.
The Driver's License Modernization Act would embed computer chips into Virginia driver's licenses. These chips, or Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chips as technophiles would label them, have more commonly been used in toll-booth speed passes, tracking merchandise and even casino chips. Capable of transmitting stored information several feet, the technology could admittedly be useful in verifying identification legitimacy.
This legislation, unsurprisingly, is rooted in the events of that fateful September day. According to the Washington Times, "Seven of the 19 hijackers in the September 11 terrorist attacks had illegally obtained driver's licenses in Virginia."
Simple enough? Not so much. Unfortunately, the Virginia state legislature aren't the most technical folk in the country. As Chris Calabrese, Program Counsel of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Project, pointed out, "A driver's license or RFID chip will only display the information placed on them by the Department of Motor Vehicles... But if an individual uses a false birth certificate or other 'feeder document' to gain a driver's license, that will simply be reflected in the RFID." Translation: This will have no effect on halting the kinds of identity fraud tactics employed by the hijackers.
On top of doing absolutely nothing to deter or prevent future identity fraud, the proposition is naïve and the technology misunderstood. According to ACLU technical experts, RFID chips "would bring a number of unresolved security problems, require construction of a costly infrastructure for reading the chips, and would not likely be effective in improving the security of driver's licenses." Basically, the system required to effectively sustain the technology would be difficult to create, probably equally difficult to manage, with results more disappointing than the U.S. Olympic basketball team.
While the fact that this is an infringement on civil liberties is rather obvious, there are some more subtle arguments. Most importantly, the technology required to pick up the radio signals on an RFID chip is not very difficult. This means our driver's licenses will ironically become helpful tools to identify thefts and stalkers by facilitating access to our personal information, and allowing our licenses to become tracking devices. This law is thus effectively the equivalent of asking citizens to carry a tracking device along with our driver's licenses, which is a particularly scary thought. Maybe next they will pass a law requiring that we give up our homes to British redcoats.
As the act was introduced on a bipartisan basis (by Rep. James P. Moran, Virginia Democrat, and Rep. Thomas M. Davis III, Republican), one cannot make party accusations here. The issue is not about being a Democrat or a Republican. The issue is about being a freedom-loving American. The issue is about a state-enforced requirement to carry tracking devices in our wallets. While we all understand restrictions on liberties in extreme situations, this attempt raises the question, how deeply can liberties be infringed upon under the misnomer of security? The tradition of perhaps the best state in the country, Virginia, is a tradition of liberty. Virginia's spirit once witnessed Hanover County's Patrick Henry speak passionately against the infringement of liberties, valuing them higher than his life. With the recent threats against liberty, I have to wonder -- where is the spirit of Patrick Henry today?
Sina Kian's column appears Thursdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at skian@cavalierdaily.com.
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