Homeland Security Expansion

By Matthew L. Wald
THE NEW YORK TIMES

WASHINGTON - The intelligence agency overhaul given final approval on Wednesday by the Senate also reorganizes the way the states grant driver's licenses, a change that civil liberties advocates and some security experts say could have far-reaching consequences.

The Senate vote, 89-2, sent the intelligence reform bill to President Bush, who has promised to sign it, and ended a congressional debate that began in earnest last summer with the release of the final report of the independent Sept. 11 commission.

Issuing driver's licenses has always been mostly a state function, but the new law requires the federal Department of Homeland Security to issue regulations on what documentation a state must require before it can grant a license. It also requires that the licenses be "machine readable," which will probably be accomplished through a magnetic stripe or a bar code or both.

"We're really looking at a national ID system," said James C. Plummer Jr., a policy analyst at Consumer Alert. "Basically, each state might have the name of the state written in a different font on the front, but there will be a magnetic stripe on the back containing virtually identical information."

The printed format of the piece of plastic will still be under state control. But to a person equipped with a reader, that will make little difference, because Washington will set the minimum national requirements for the machine-readable data.

The federal government will gain control through airport checkpoints and other places where federal agencies demand identification. After a phase-in period, the government will refuse to accept licenses that do not comply with the standard. The same rules will apply to photo identification issued by states to nondrivers.

The new law requires digital photographs, meaning that the photos will be easily maintained in linked databases, he added.

Some motor vehicle administrators say national standards are needed. Until July 1, for example, Vermont issued licenses with no photographs. Now, new licenses in Vermont have photos, but people with old ones can still renew them without photos.

At the American Civil Liberties Union, Greg Nojeim, associate director of the Washington legislative office, said, "Licenses that purport to meet the federal standard will become the gold standard."

But Nojeim and others say they may not be nearly as secure as some people assume, because the "source documents," including birth certificates and Social Security numbers, are so easily faked.

Some security advocates also complained that the requirements on source documents were not strong enough. Rep. Candice S. Miller, a Republican who is a former Michigan secretary of state, where she oversaw driver's licenses, was the author of the House language.

She said that she believed that the rules on sources might not be strong enough and that she would introduce legislation in the new Congress to standardize the process further, a spokesman said.

There are millions more Social Security numbers in circulation than there are living people eligible to hold them, according to experts, and birth certificates for fraudulent purposes, which do not have photos or other biometric identifiers, are freely available in some states.

Nojeim of the ACLU said making the licenses machine readable in a common format would allow any commercial entity that asks to see a license - ostensibly to back up the validity of a check or a credit card, for example - to be conveniently privy to a variety of information about the person.

Most licenses are already machine readable, but the formats differ, along with the stored information.

The final bill does not satisfy all lawmakers. Rep. James Sensenbrenner, the Wisconsin Republican who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee, promised new bills that would provide "real driver's license reform." Among the changes, Sensenbrenner said, would be to require that if states issue licenses to people who are in the country legally for a limited period, that those licenses expire when the visas do.

Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, when asked whether there should be a single national standard under which states issue driver's licenses, said, "We need to consult closely with the states."

At the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, Jason King, a spokesman, said that the solution was "better training for examiners at the front counter, so they know how to spot a counterfeit document."

The association sees a simpler benefit in stronger license rules, an improvement in highway safety. Of the 43,000 people killed on American roads in an average year, King said, about a fifth, or 8,600, die in crashes involving a driver who is "improperly licensed."