DHS estimates that it will take only 44 minutes for a current driver's license holder to get a certified copy of their birth certificate, travel to the DMV and get a new license when it expires. No current driver's license holder will be allowed to renew a license by mail. They estimate the costs to states and individuals over 10 years will be $23 billion.

A couple years ago a friend of mine was arrested, taken to jail, because the name on his social security card did not exactly match the name on his driver's license. DHS had ordered that driver's license databases be correlated with Social Security and simply issued arrest warrants for anyone with a mismatch. Lots of married women got caught up in it. That was the start.

The annoying beaurocractic process mentioned above is the least of my worries in regard to REAL ID.

REAL ID will internationalize criminal records, all the way down to parking tickets. You get a speeding ticket in Holland and it goes against your licence in Georgia. Unpaid parking tickets in California will prevent you from driving in Hong Kong. You will not be able to escape the system...

Unless you want to forgo flying or entering federal buildings or collecting social security... Then if you live in one of the states that will issue drivers licences that are not connected with REAL ID you can get one and live off the grid. This puts conservatives in an interesting catch 22 situation. The reason these alternate drivers licenses exist is that if we're going to have illegal immigrants we'd prefer that they carry liability insurance. Many conservatives would prefer that we didn't have illegal immigrants. But other kinds of conservatives would prefer to have the option of living off the grid. You really have to make that choice right now. If you can live off the grid, so can others. If you need one of these things to drive, you won't be able to live off the grid and drive legally, buy beer or cigarettes, or carry insurance.

A National Healthcare plan might be the final nail the coffin here. It would be a federal program tied to these federal IDs. If you want to see a doctor under national healthcare, you won't be able to live off grid.

The use of these IDs will expand and expand. There really is little reason to have one federal ID and a separate passport, and there will be an interest, over time, in standardizing these on an international basis. The present plan does not require that the IDs be chipped. Thats fortunate, but probably temporary. They'll eventually get chipped.

20 or so years from now it will be possible to enforce things like age restrictions for social networking sites. In order to create an account you'll plug your national ID card into the slot on your laptop. You'll mostly do this because it will fill out all your biographical information for you. Its just more convenient that way. But it will also enable enforcement of restrictions and tracibility.

We don't really need all of this technology to engage in perfect law enforcement. There are other ways. The East Germans had perfect law enforcement. You don't have to have a 4th amendment and if you didn't you'd bust more criminals. At some point it would be nice if we stop and realize that the fact that technology makes something convenient doesn't make it a good idea. We're not going to.

The mainstream nanny state liberals and mainstream cultural conservatives control the government, because the government serves them. Other people don't want government. They do, and the government gives it to them, and it will keep giving it to them until this country is locked down tight as a drum. They'll stand on the other side of it and wonder why we're not particularly good at innovation anymore, but they'll never think that the root cause is the ID chip in their pockets.