MOTB [Mark of the Beast] update: The Real ID Act

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The Real ID Act (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REAL_ID_Act) has been the topic of several AM talk radio programs as an assault on personal liberty and privacy, it has also been the topic on Bible prophesy shows as another step to the MOTB.

It will become the law of the land on May 11, 2008.



The most high-profile provision of REAL ID would mandate that applicants for state drivers' licenses must prove they are in the U.S. legally, in order to get identification that may be used at federal facilities (airports, national parks, government offices, and so on.).

Rep. Sensenbrenner and other supporters of REAL ID say that the Act will make the U.S. safer from terrorists. For example, in support of the drivers' license/legal immigrant provision, Sensenbrenner has pointed out that 18 of the 19 9/11 hijackers used drivers' licenses or other types of state identification cards to gain access to the airplanes.


But opponents point out that the drivers' license provisions may only force those who are illegal aliens underground, and thus make the roads more dangerous. They also warn that these provisions will likely be an unfunded mandate to states - one that financially-strapped states will be forced to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to administer.


According to a recent statement from Sensenbrenner, REAL ID will tighten the asylum system by "weeding out fraudulent asylum applications made by people lying through their teeth." It will shut down "Smuggler's Gulch" along our borders, and protect us from "terrorists, drug smugglers, alien gangs and violent criminals."




The REAL ID Act: How It Violates U.S. Treaty Obligations, Insults International Law, Undermines Our Security, and Betrays Eleanor Roosevelt's Legacy (http://writ.news.findlaw.com/leavitt/20050509.html)`

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One day we will all happily be implanted with microchips, and our every move will be monitored. The technology exists; the only barrier is society's resistance to the loss of privacy


From this point forward, microchips will become progressively smaller, less invasive, and easier to deploy. Thus, any realistic barrier to the wholesale "chipping" of Western citizens is not technological but cultural. It relies upon the visceral reaction against the prospect of being personally marked as one component in a massive human inventory.

Today we might strongly hold such beliefs, but sensibilities can, and probably will, change. How this remarkable attitudinal transformation is likely to occur is clear to anyone who has paid attention to privacy issues over the past quarter-century. There will be no 3 a.m. knock on the door by storm troopers come to force implants into our bodies.

The process will be more subtle and cumulative, couched in the unassailable language of progress and social betterment, and mimicking many of the processes that have contributed to the expansion of closed-circuit television cameras and the corporate market in personal data.

Now, therefore, is the time to contemplate the unprecedented dangers of this scenario. The most serious of these concern how even comparatively stable modern societies will, in times of fear, embrace treacherous promises.

How would the prejudices of a Joe McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover, or of southern Klansmen — all of whom were deeply integrated into the American political establishment — have manifest themselves in such a world? What might Hitler, Mao or Milosevic have accomplished if their citizens were chipped, coded, and remotely monitored?



A generation is all they need (http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1165705809111&call_pageid=968867495754)