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Showing this was not about security at all.
One could argue surveillance and tracking is about security. They’d be wrong. But they could argue that.
It never was
We still need to go through the process to make sure that we verify who you are
As long as I don’t have any weapons it shouldn’t matter.
but how else will we track where everyone is all the time
Unless you are using a fake ID and fake credit card then they already have that data?
They know John Smith who lives at 123 Main Street in Bumbfuck, WI and who paid with credit card 1234567890123456 is flying from MSN to LAX on December 1st, 2025 and returning via the same route on December 3rd, 2025.
The RealID requirements are to, theoretically, streamline the process of matching person to face with more standardized ID requirements. Like all ID related legislature there is good and bad there.
But if your focus is on The Man tracking you? This changes nothing unless you are already actively committing fraud at MANY levels.
neat. there is no reason they even need an id. do you need one to gain access to the highways?
Most highways are publicly accessible (and still log you with a Flock™ camera anyway…). But if you want to use the priority lane in states like Colorado? Yeah, they need to scan your pass and they very much do.
The ID still matches the face/body to the Person. Its no different than checking if you are the person with a reservation at a hotel. That said, you can bet there is work in place to not actually need it through a mix of facial ID and profiling.
that’s my point. outside of a thin lane or three, which is probably considerable “private” - public infra should be accessible. Last I checked (abt six months ago) I did not need to show ID to hop on the brewster line into grand central.
it’s all just a cash grab and control theater / normalization at airports. there is nothing special about flying compared to trains, except of course: profit.
TSA says the fee will cover the administrative and IT costs associated with the ID verification program and ensure the expense is covered by the travelers and not the taxpayers.
Ah, that makes sense. It costs $45 per person to do exactly what they were doing without additional cost up until now.
It’s hard to feel bad for this considering that "Replace your ID with Real ID has been posted in the airport for… 10 years? More? How long does it take to save $20 and get it or pivot to passport?
To be fair, in CA it costs exactly $45 to get a renewal REAL ID drivers license. That is paid by the traveler, not the taxpayer. The difference is that is a one-time fee to get a card that works for either 5 or 10 years, versus a fee every time you fly.
Ok, so there are certainly going to be some administrative and maintenance costs associated with any system, and they are currently paid for by the tax payer. For arguments sake, lets just say that cost should instead be put solely onto people who choose not to take the steps necessary to get a REAL ID, ignoring the many legitimate reasons someone may not wish to or be able to do that.
The follow up question then, is how much does the fee need to be to offset that cost? Well, it will need to be based on the number of those who will not get a REAL ID even after the fee introduction, so it will likely be lower than it is now given the fee as a motivation. Currently 44% of issued id’s in the US are without REAL ID status. Let’s say that the vast majority of those people are motivated by this fee or other factors to finally get a REAL ID in the next year or two. Let’s say a bit over 75% of those currently without it are motivated to get one now (a major over estimation, surely). So only 10% of all US citizens with state issued ids wouldn’t have REAL ID.
Given an average of 2.9 million Americans fly every single day, that’s 290,000 non REAL ID flyers a day. Times $45, that’s $13 million per day, or $4.745 billion per year… to do administration and maintenance on an existing system.
If that is the true cost, that means that 40% of their current congressionally allocated budget of $11.3 billion is spent on maintaining this one system alone. That is simply absurd and anyone with half a lick of sense should know that. So either they are expecting well more than 90% of people to get a REAL ID soon or they are just massively overcharging people and pocketing the difference.
Most states have had real ID for nearly a decade, as they’ve been trying to implement, then delay, then try to implement then delay again due to a few straggler states not having it for their drivers licenses yet.
Most drivers have this already. And have for a long time. It’s those that haven’t had a reason to update an id that might not yet
oh so it was never about security.
Title leaves out “or passport.”
In a push to get you to think you must have a Real ID, I’ve noticed the media constantly leaves out or minimizes the fact that a passport is sufficient to get you through an airport or any other place a Real ID is required.
So no extra fee of you have a passport.
I’ve always just considered a passport to be a Real ID™.
From the U.S. Department of State website: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/News/passports/passports-realid.html
The U.S. passport book and passport card are both REAL ID compliant.
You know some dumb shit TSA is gonna not understand that part.
So is this just legal way to bribe the TSA
A passport is a really good thing to have, and lasts much longer than a Real ID state license. It ends up costing like $13/yr and it opens up the whole world to you. It blows my mind that on;y 50% of US citizens ever bother getting one.
It costs 165 bucks per person or almost $700 for a family of 4. Then they need $3000-$5000 to travel round trip once to a destination in Europe.
Why is europe the only place you’re considering travel to? It’s a big world out there
I guess I figured on an English language online forum most of the folks here are US and Europe
Well over half of us live paycheck to paycheck and traveling is exorbitantly expensive. Especially international travel.
It sucks being broke.
Travel can be done cheap. Don’t go to the exorbitantly expensive shitty fake ass resort where you get food poisoning.
Go be real, in the real world.
It costs thousands of dollars to travel to another country from the US.
For some people in some cases, sure. Myself, I traveled in South America for 3 months last year and overall I saved money vs. expenses in the US, even with airfare included. Also, there’s probably 100 million Americans that live within a single tank of gas of getting to Mexico or Canada. There are plenty of lower-income Americans, Brits, Aussies, and Germans (to name the big groups) who manage to travel extensively for long periods at very low expense. I’ve met many of them, and they could make “thousands of dollars” (let’s say you’re talking about $3,000) last a good three months in many parts of the world. Look for deals, be willing to not get exactly what you want, and be patient, and travel can be (and had been for me) cheaper overall than paying US prices for housing food etc.
What about if you live in the real world? If I fell asleep for three months I’d wake up ten grand poorer. It’s great that you can completely uproot yourself for three months and then comeback and restart life and somehow save money, but that is so incredibly unrealistic. My bills don’t stop because I took a cheap trip to Brazil.
Many citizens don’t leave their state. Plenty of them are hand to mouth and can’t afford groceries. Even local travel is a luxury to some, so I can understand why they might not have the desire to go through the process and pay for the passport, not to mention that many people don’t know their SSN or have their birth certificates.
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I looked it up, my understanding is US passports are currently issued with your “assigned sex at birth”, i.e. not your gender or biological sex.
Basically, the passport isn’t showing your gender.
No, it’s showing what’s in my pants. Or was in my pants at birth if I’ve had an operation. And if my gender presentation doesn’t match someone’s expectations, it means I will potentially get detained or harassed. Or possibly even arrested depending on the country.
So the intent is to hurt the trans community. And being all, ‘well actually’ about it being sex assigned at birth feels like a bad faith take.
Which is why you’re getting downvoted.
It’s weird to live in a world where sex assigned at birth and gender are two vastly different things.
I don’t think so. I think if someone wants to change their gender that’s their business. It’s not something I’d want to do but calling it weird seems kind of judgy.
I paid for a real id license when they were first available in my state, and I’ve paid for a renewal. I disagree with the surveillance society they enable but I’m also a realist who wants to travel conveniently.
But I’ve still never gotten one. When it comes down to it, actually getting a real id license requires taking a day off work and waiting in line at the Registry …… whereas I can renew a standard license online and have a few years left on my passport
One of the many ways RealID has been a fiasco is RMV/DMV’s not staffing up to support it
It would only make sense if it was a one time fee, and you got your ID as a result.
We also know it’s not about security, or you couldn’t fly without one.
We know it’s a cash grab because they’re counting on a “built-in” amount of flyers who won’t have or will refuse to get ID with privacy issues. If, by some anomaly, more or all flyers acquire the ID, then we’d see maintenance fees added and the fee itself increased to maintain revenue certainty - but who are we kidding, those things will eventually happen anyways.
without a REAL ID or passport
Basically extortion to continue the absurd, ineffective security theater.
I never got one because my license expired during covid and i didn’t have a recent bill/bank statement (and I had no intention of walking into a DMV at that time) fortunately i do have a passport that i plan to renew as soon as it expires, but my passport is supposed to be for international travel, not domestic.
it wasn’t that long ago that you only needed a birth certificate to travel to the carribean or a border country. this is getting out of hand.
While this is ridiculous. The original requirement date for a real id was 2008. It has been 20 years since real id was passed. You have had 20 years to get one.
Dude it was hard enough for my wife to get a new ID (not REAL) when we moved from RI to MA.
I do all the bills and handle all the finances. My credit was better (now we are about equal) and so all the utilities and most the credit cards are in my name. Not to mention most of them are paperless.
At the time, I think she was also still on a cell phone plan with her siblings.
So, like, absolutely no official-enough mail coming to our house to her name. And they need 2.
What, exactly, is the purpose of an ID, and why does it need my SSN and two pieces of mail? How does that identify me, as a person, any more than a supporting document like an existing US Passport? If I qualified for a US Passport, why the hell do I need so much more on top of that for just a state issued ID.
The whole thing is a scam to bully minorities and put an additional burden on traveling for low-income families. I wonder how many people are missing flights to some important and unexpected event (i.e. a funeral) because they never fly and never had a reason to get a REAL ID.
For that matter, I’d really like to know what TSA gets out of a REAL ID that they don’t get out of a regular license, for domestic travel? They don’t care about my proof of residence, they only care that the name matches the boarding pass and the face, and isn’t Islamic or otherwise off-white.
The agency warns that even then, there is no guarantee that individuals will be cleared to cross through the security checkpoint.
Bummer, that’s another $45 to re-check until they get it right. I’m guessing this will happen a lot.
I mean that’s obvious. Otherwise you’re just paying $45 to ignore the security checkpoint if you’re guaranteed to get through with payment.
It’s far from obvious these days that the US wouldn’t apply a mandatory straight-up bribe to its government services. It’d just be a smaller-scale version of Trump’s “gold card” visa.
I mean, at this point we’ve known it was coming for like 20 years now - really no excuse to not have one.
My excuse was I didn’t want a federal ID card. Not under a democrat and especially not under Trump.
Real ID is still a state issued ID. It just now complies with a federal standard.
Passport is a Federal ID.
