[amluto]

> A national database linking all driver’s licenses would effectively impose something alien to our system of civil liberties: a national ID card.

This whole premise is a bit bizarre. We have national databases. We have the IRS’s tax database, social security, and Medicare. We have the selective service database. We have whatever database CBP uses to track anyone who has ever been known to cross a border.

We also have the databases operated by Experian and its competitors, which are worse, because they give out data to basically anyone and are accountable to no one. And they violate people’s’ civil liberties in egregious ways that the government would have trouble getting away with.

Frankly, an actual well-managed national ID database seems like an improvement in all respects. Of course, Real ID is no such thing.

[goodSteveramos]

if we tied the creation of a national database to the abolishment of the private ones congress would abandon the national one immediately

[scotty79]

Isn't it what happening right now? USA unlike any other first world (or even second world) country doesn't have national ID.

When USA differs in any aspect from the rest of the civilized world there's usually money involved. Heaps of it.

[inferiorhuman]

  USA unlike any other first world (or even second world) country doesn't have national ID.

England, and I believe the whole of the UK, hasn't had a national ID card since 2011, two years after they were introduced in an opt-in basis. Mostly it's commonwealth countries that don't have ID cards (Australia, Bahamas, Canada, New Zealand). However, Japan's in the kinda but not really category.

[goodSteveramos]

Absolutely not. The National ID system is not replacing Experian and other privately owned and highly invasive databases on Americans.

[scotty79]

But it couldn't diminish their profitablity and we can't have that.

[goodSteveramos]

Corporate power is used for political purposes. Making money is just a nice to have. The intelligence value of the data these private international companies are allowed to collect on American citizens is unfathomable.