“Bären füttern verboten!”
Thinking of driving over Tioga Pass, cruising the Blue Ridge Parkway, or checking out Old Faithful?
Take your passport.
From CNN:
Americans may need passports to board domestic flights or to picnic in a national park next year if they live in one of the states defying the federal Real ID Act.
The act, signed in 2005 as part of an emergency military spending and tsunami relief bill, aims to weave driver’s licenses and state ID cards into a sort of national identification system by May 2008. The law sets baseline criteria for how driver’s licenses will be issued and what information they must contain.
The [newly mandated federal ID] would be mandatory for all “federal purposes,” which include boarding an airplane or walking into a federal building, nuclear facility or national park, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told the National Conference of State Legislatures last week. Citizens in states that don’t comply with the new rules will have to use passports for federal purposes.
One begins to wonder why they don’t just barcode us and be done with it.
Hat Tip: Making Light.
*cough* Cross-posting possibilities?
That said, I heard that GW Bush didn’t have a passport until he became President.
“Don’t feed the bears.”?
As close as I could figure it with Altavista’s help, Barry, yes.
Do not give to the bears food. Sucks the German of you does.
You lot would be welcome to move up to Canuckistan. We like Islamohippieenvirofascist surrender monkeys here.
Always the faultpointouter, Rob, and never the helpwithtranslationgiver you are.
[Update. Thanks to a helpful commenter at Pandagon, who is not Rob G, the correct and idiomatic Deutsch translation is now in place.]
I’ve long been in the habit of carrying my passport around with me, but it’s always been out of a vague feeling that it’d be convenient if I had the desire to fly out of the country on a whim. This is just ghastly.
I’m very much hoping that I can stretch my current passport out until after 2008; I am suspicious of how the Patriot Act may have affected the surveilance aspect of these documents.
(Didn’t they want to have RFI technology embedded in them at one point? If so, I’m investing in a nice little lead-lined pouch…)
it also occurs to me that the grounds for state-based secession are growing stronger every day - given that the states unwilling to comply with the Act are already in defiance of federal law (as defined by this administration) wouldn’t requiring their inhabitants to have passports to visit federal facilities be, in effect, treating them as if they were foreign nationals?
One of the benefits of being a citizen is not having to use papers to travel internally; if the feds are going to treat the members of individual states as if they were non-citizens, where’s the incentive for those states to continue participating in this democratic republic? (Especially states like California, which could function independently if it made arrangements for water supplies, or Vermont, which feels half-way to secession a lot of the time anyway.)
I actually have to hunt my passport down (which, in this 30’ trailer, is actually a major feat) as I realized that my name on my driver’s license is different from the one I gave on my LSAT registration. No, not a “maiden” versus “married” thang (my spouse took my name, thankyouverymuch), but freakin’ Maine doesn’t recognize dual first names if the two are both capitalized. Thus, my Mary Beth, became, Mary B., and, despite the fact that I have a wholly separate middle name (Anne) and even a Confirmation name (Catherine) (yes, I was raised Catholic, why do you ask?), Maine, Puritan relic and anti-papist, anti-Quebequois, anti-Indian abode that it is, did not properly affix my name to my driver’s license. So, now, I have to hope that at least the feds got it right. Because, you know, I could have hunted down a brilliant LSAT guru with the name Mary B. Williams to take my test for me. Happens every day, you know. In a few years, they could easily be the next Attorney General of the USofA, and then, where would we be, our top law enforcement officer a complete fraud and liar and all….
I changed my name when I was living in California. I’ve been “Hank” for about 30 years. But I don’t have any paperwork on it—in California, you can change your name through the courts or through what’s called the “usage method,” which means you just start using the name ... like a married woman would, or a divorced woman deciding to go back to her maiden name.
So now, if I send off for my birth certificate, I’ll have a certificate (if I can even get it) that says one name, and a driver’s license that says another.
I foresee some troubled moments ahead with the federalgovernmentfeckinggestapo.
Oh, man ... I’d rather meet grizzlies on angel dust on the trail than have to deal with a small person with power.
Rana: sad to say, I believe the RFID in US passports is in fact being adopted (according to this State Dept. site at least).
However, you might like to know that tinfoil blocks RFID signals just as well as lead and is quite a bit lighter/cheaper.
The concern is what happens when you’ve got it out and open at hotels or other non-governmental locations.
tinfoil blocks RFID signals just as well as lead and is quite a bit lighter/cheaper.
Plus, it matches my hat!
I’ve had my passport since February, and it is indeed RFID-tacular. I see a bright side, though… this way, if I get lost in a national forest, they can find me!
oh, man. at least i got my driver’s license renewed this year, and i never changed my name since birth. but maybe the passport i haven’t used for 18 years needs some renewal, just in case….
too late, i know. but one never knows when one might need to go to a federal park.
I’m just waiting for some neocon to suggest RFID tagging the citizenry, rather like we do cats these days.
Actually I’m sure someone’s suggested it, just not publicly enough for me to notice.
This article talks a bit about implantable RFIDs. There are also people who’ve tagged themselves just for the fun of it, so they can unlock doors etc. with a swipe of their hand.