San Francisco Chronicle
Sacramento, California -- Starting in 2008, all 22 million licensed California drivers will be required to go in person to a DMV office and prove their identity and address with three different documents before getting a new, federally approved state license.
The sheer size and scope of that task -- required by a federal law passed in the wake of Sept. 11 -- already has the state Department of Motor Vehicles worried about lines that would make current complaints about the agency's notoriously slow service seem trivial.
The new identification cards will be required in order to fly on airplanes and enter federal buildings.
Implementing the Real ID Act in California is likely to be complicated by the prolonged effort in the state to grant undocumented workers the right to obtain a driver's license.
The Real ID Act requires every state to issue driver's licenses that comply with a national standard. The goal is to prevent fraud and make sure people applying for licenses are who they say they are and do not pose security risks. The perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks had valid licenses, which allowed them to board airplanes.
SIEGEL: According to the FBI, on August 1st, 2001, two of the suspected hijackers had gotten Virginia ID cards from the DMV. They had gone to Arlington, Virginia, found an obliging stranger, an illegal immigrant from El Salvador and paid him $100. In exchange, he took them to a notary public, where he signed a DL 51 form saying that he, a resident of Virginia, knew them to be residents of the state too. They weren't, of course, but he let them use his old address in Falls Church.
The following day, four more of the suspected hijackers got Virginia DMV ID cards. On some of their proof of residency forms, the Virginia residents who vouched for them were their own comrades, who had just gotten their cards the day before. Later in August, another of the suspects got his Virginia ID.
They had all taken advantage of an unusually loose policy which has since been ended. It was a policy that the DMV's own investigators had campaigned unsuccessfully to end before it was linked to at least seven of the men suspected in three of the September 11th hijackings.
real facts not included in this San Francisco Chronicle story
Posted by Richard at July 24, 2006