"T.S.A. Moves Closer to Rejecting Some State Driver"s Licenses for Travel"

I’m quoted in an article today in the New York Times about the Federal government’s efforts to use the threat of denial of air travel to scare state legislators into connecting their state drivers license and ID databases to the distributed national “REAL-ID” database through the REAL-ID “hub” operated by the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA).

I’m described in the Times as a “privacy advocate” with the Identity Project (PapersPlease.org), which is accurate. But I prefer to think of that work as a civil liberties and human rights project, not one limited to, or defined primarily by, concerns for privacy.

I welcome the Times’ coverage of this question. But some readers might be misled by the Times’ headline, “T.S.A. Moves Closer to Rejecting Some State Driver”s Licenses for Travel”.

As I discussed in detail in this presentation earlier this year at the Cato Institute in Washington, the most important thing you need to know about this issue is that you do not — and you will not, regardless of how or when the TSA “implements” the REAL-ID Act — need to show any ID to fly. People fly, legally, every day, without showing any ID, and that will continue to be the case. You have a legal right to fly, and the REAL-ID Act does not and cannot deprive you of that right.

The TSA often lies in its public statements, including on its website and on signs at airports, and claims that airline passengers “must” or are “required” to have and to show government-issued photo ID. But the consistent official position of the TSA in court has been that no law, no TSA regulation, and no policy or practice of the TSA — not even the secret TSA “Standard Operating Procedures” (SOPs) and other secret TSA orders to its checkpoint staff and contractors — requires anyone to show any ID to pass through TSA checkpoints and travel by air.

Read more at PapersPlease.org: “You don’t have to show any ID to fly.”