The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) states that it will no longer be able to accept the Texas driver’s license as valid ID until the end of the year. Texans would need to present some other form of identification, such as a passport, if they wanted to fly within United States borders.
However, privacy experts like Edward Hasbrouck say this is not true. Hasbrouck is the director of the Identity Project and the founder of Papersplease.ORG. He says the courts have ruled that under the First Amendment’s freedom to assemble the TSA, there is no right to require ID to board an airplane.
According to Hasbrouck, the TSA is urging states like Texas to meet the standards of the REAL ID Act, a federal law passed in 2005. Texas is one of a group of about 30 states and US territories that have broken actual federal act.
Hasbrouck and others oppose the REAL ID Act to create a “national identity card”. They also criticized this as a further erosion of people’s national freedoms. And there would be another way that the Department of Homeland Security could collect, sift, and store vast amounts of information about law-abiding Americans.
