SNAKE OIL & DRIVER’S LICENSES

The Department of Homeland Security is coming to Detroit to push their new "Enhanced Drivers License" (EDL) program on Tuesday as a way to make Michigan licenses compliant with the federal Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI). If you don't pay to enhance your license, you'll need a passport in order to continue going across the Canadian and Mexican borders in June (you'll still need a passport to fly).

The most common sense way to address this is to have the federal government make getting passports affordable. At over $100, the Governmental Accounting Office has said that the price of passports is unnecessarily high. But after they passed WHTI they rejected this idea and actually made passports more expensive.

Instead, they're offering to "enhance" our license by having a security interview, paying more, and then getting a wireless RFID chip in your license. While the first two requirements seem reasonable, if the part about the wireless RFID chip has you scratching your head, you're not the only one. We already wisely don't issue licenses to illegal aliens, but with the enhanced license you have to be able to not just prove your citizenship, but prove it via a wireless chip. Everyone who applies will have a new unique federal ID number assigned to them in addition to their current Social Security Number. The wireless chip then carries that new number, which can be wirelessly scanned by common readers up to 30 feet away, even while it's still in your wallet.

In theory this will get you through the border faster, but then you are left with an unencrypted chip in your license for the other 12 hours a day you carry it. There is currently nothing in the law prohibiting the government from using this to track people away from the border, and also nothing in the law that would prohibit banks, hospitals, hotels, or others from linking you with the number and using it for their own marketing purposes or selling it. They mandate RFID identification like this in China, but EDLs would represent the biggest rollout to date for governmental use in the United States.

I have advocated first for the federal government to lower the cost of passports. But at the very least they need to offer enhanced licenses in two varieties, one that has RFID and one that doesn't, and then let taxpayers decide which they want to choose. DHS has instead chosen a take it or leave it approach that bullies taxpayers with fiscal coercion and a one-size-fits-all policy that doesn't allow Michigan to use more secure forms of RFID or to skip the chips altogether. Since an EDL will also technically be a limited passport, how the biometric data on the computer system gets shared with the governments of Canada and Mexico is also important.

Expect the Department of Homeland Security to tell you what a great thing they are doing by allowing you the ability to buy these RFID licenses. They create the problem, provide a solution that is the cheapest for them and most risky for you, and then expect you to like it. But RFID is not mandated by Congress, and if enough states stand up for themselves the policy will be changed. Michigan needs to say no and do just that.