This month Arizona joined 13 other states that have passed laws prohibiting state compliance with the 2005 federal Real ID law. Little news was reported when Gov. Janet Napolitano signed it into law. If the federal law is enforced – which is not a certainty given the rebellion of a respectable number of states – it is said the consequences could be real for the residents of Arizona and the other 13 states.

The Real ID law requires states to adopt new procedures by 2010 for making driver’s licenses more secure. Opponents say the new licenses will become de facto national identity cards. They will contain unique identifier numbers which may be used in place of the Social Security number, a number that has been thoroughly debauched.

The cost of implementing the requirements of Real ID are about $3.9 billion nationwide. The federal government will provide some of the funds necessary but not nearly all. So it will be yet another federal burden on the states.

The effect of not complying is that Arizonans will not be able to use their driver’s license to board commercial aircraft or enter a federal building unless they have other acceptable identification, like a passport. The federal government is using the threat of terrorism as an excuse for implementing far more onerous identification requirements than we might otherwise tolerate. Its enforcing agency of choice is the Department of Homeland Security.

The Real ID card will start out innocuously enough with only a low power radio transponder chip in it. Federal officials hasten to assure us the card could be read only within about 20 feet. That would be a circle roughly 40 feet across. That is enough space for someone to lose himself in a crowd, activate your chip, and steal the information on the card. It will not be powerful enough to track by satellite. Not now. But technology is always making the impossible possible.

The law will not authorize creating a single huge database for all Real ID information. It will require each state to check the databases of the other states, which amounts to the same thing only with more work.

Documents could not be accepted on their face. All documents such as birth certificates would have to be verified with the issuing agency. What a job that would prove to be since many of the records still in use were created before digitization and would have to be handled manually. Some will have been issued in foreign countries. I don’t even want to think about how they would be handled.

Of course biometric identifiers would be integrated into the cards. That would include eye scans and possibly even fingerprints.

In practice, it would be a most intrusive piece of identification. And it would only get more intrusive as technology and bureaucratic hubris expand. By golly I may just have to forego the pleasure of entering federal buildings. "I’m sorry, Mr. IRS agent, but I don’t have clearance to enter your building to meet with you. Maybe you could come down and we could meet with the smokers out in the rain."

I can’t see them hiring guards to check ID of all persons entering a post office. If e-mail doesn’t destroy the post offices, this requirement surely would. Fortunately, there are private mail processing stores all over the country performing most of the functions of post offices.

Privacy would be sacrificed as the cards would allow access to your medical records (another reason the feds insist that doctors keep all records electronically). Eventually, your entire life would be encapsulated into the card or accessible with it. Identification theft, already a huge problem, will grow even bigger, as will counterfeiting of the cards. There is no such thing as a counterfeit-proof ID. What a government agency can create, motivated private persons or their governments can, too.

"Your papers, please!"

E-mail comments for publication to editor@azbiz.com. Contact Lionel Waxman at territorial@waxmanmedia.com. Waxman’s Flashpoint commentaries are published in The Daily Territorial.