9/11 Commission, Homeland Security, and Intelligence Reform

Two thousand, nine-hundred ninety-six American lives perished in a hail of fire, molten steel, and concrete on September 11th, 2001. Nearly 3,000 parents, spouses, siblings and children unknowingly left their homes for the last time that day, never saying their final goodbyes and never to return. According to Constitutional Law expert Steven J. Heyman of Harvard University, “the first duty of government is to protect its citizens”.

A government commission was founded to determine the causes, and it provided extremely simple instructions to strengthen national security. Dutifully, a bipartisan Congress passed laws to enforce the commission’s findings. Oklahoma has not only failed to comply but has actually, until recently, had a state law forbidding compliance.

As a proud native of Oklahoma and an American citizen, I have in my possession a Birth Certificate, a Social Security Number, a Voter’s Registration card, a State of Oklahoma Driver’s license, three credit cards, and a library card, all of which possess and track my personal information, but I couldn’t request a Real ID if I wanted one due to the actions of the Oklahoma State Legislature.

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By October 2019, Oklahomans will no longer be permitted to board a plane, enter a military installation, or do business in any federal building unless action is taken today to make our state identification cards compliant. In failing to comply with the Real ID Act of 2005, Oklahoma is failing its citizens of the first duty of government, and it’s time for the state to face reality and comply or risk we citizens of Oklahoma becoming second-class citizens of the United States of America.

The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, also known as the 9/11 Commission, was founded November 27th, 2002 to compile the most complete, authoritative narrative of the events that took place on and preceding September 11th, 2001.

The commission’s findings were published on June 22, 2004 under the title “Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States,” colloquially known as “The 9/11 Commission Report.” Within its findings was the shocking revelation that the United States has no means to validate citizenship through the current driver’s license system.

Mohamed Atta, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, had simply forged a state driver’s license to gain entry into the United States for flying lessons, and without any means to verify citizenship, he was permitted to gain a passport and visa permitting him into the country (160). A 20th hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui, was able to enter and attain flight lessons at Airman Flight School in Norman, Oklahoma after forging documents stating he was in the United States on business for a company based in Malaysia.

Based on these, and more, circumstances, 20 foreign nationals with intent to do harm to Americans were granted entry into the United States. The 9/11 Commission proposed a national identification standard within a single, searchable database, to determine if persons seeking to gain entry into the United States were truly who they stated they were.

This became the Real ID Act of 2005. The recommendations set forth by the 9/11 Commission are clear in their intent, and the laws that stemmed from their conclusions served to further restrict their scope in order to provide added security while protecting civil liberties.

There are no fewer than six pages of the report dedicated to outlining civil liberty protections while the government consolidates the sharing of information between far-flung agencies and the standardizing of acceptable national security identification card standards.

The report even goes as far as recommending an appointed position, overseen by the executive branch of government, whose sole responsibility is to observe and report on the appropriateness of governmental action in regards to protecting citizen privacy.

The resulting law, The Real ID Act of 2005, is not a takeover of the state’s drivers license system, but instead, it connects them to each other, sets national standards for what information is presented and provides a minimum set of fraud prevention practices to make forgeries much less likely.

Regardless of the narrow scope and intent of the Real ID Act of 2005, the notion of a national identification card system has always attracted controversy. Sensationalist author James Bennett recalls a meeting with President Ronald Reagan wherein a national identification card was being discussed in 1981: “All we have to do is tattoo an identification number inside everyone’s arm” to which President Reagan jokingly responded, “Maybe we should just brand all the babies”.

Drawing comparisons to Jewish prisoners under the Nazi regime and the “Mark of the Beast” from Revelations, in the times prior to the Terrorist Attacks of 9/11 the very thought of being able to track American citizens through identification was nearly universally repudiated. For a bipartisan Congress to have enacted the Real ID Act of 2005, the issue had transcended political ideology and escalated to a pressing national security concern grounded in evidence with a cautionary example of what could happen without it.

In spite of the civil liberty safeguards of the 9/11 Commission Report and the narrow scope of the actual law, many traditionalists continue to sound alarms signaling that the Real ID Act is nothing more than the first step in creating a “police state,” with representative Paul Ryan chiding that information could be added to the database to include “gun ownership, health records, purchasing habits, religious beliefs – virtually anything you could dream up”.

The reality is that the law itself prevents such information from being tracked. The Real ID Act mandates that only seven essential pieces of information be made universal to state drivers licenses: full name, signature, date of birth, gender, unique identifying number, principal residence address, and a front-facing photograph.

Additional requirements must be authorized by law, and in the case of collecting information that infringes on civil liberties, citizens are protected both by the cabinet member authorized to oversee the implementation as well as the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution and the judicial system.

Another purported barrier to adoption cited frequently by states that refuse to implement Real ID is the cost. In addition to standardizing specific components among identification cards, the Act also sets minimum standards to prevent against fraud and forgeries.

Such components include having staff certified to handle private information securely, creating a standard list of authorized identity documents that can be used to verify residence and citizenship, and compiling all collected information and photographs into a secure database that can be linked to the national system.

A grant of $300 million dollars was allocated to supplement state’s existing identification card budgets to begin the transition. When the high cost of creating unified, secure databases was estimated to reach over $30 billion dollars over a decade, Oracle founder Larry Ellison offered to provide the database infrastructure for free.

“The American suspicion of government tyranny,” he stated, “has made it impossible for the government to protect us”. Such altruism from one of the nation’s wealthiest men is but one example of the greater social understanding that security and privacy need not be mutually exclusive, and there is a genuine public concern that must be alleviated to strengthen our national self-interest.

In addition to the collective cost of implementation, some are concerned that requiring official documents may increase the individual expense and effort involved in attaining official identification. This is of greatest concern to the most vulnerable in society, as the homeless often do not have Social Security cards, birth certificates, or official residences to be used to verify and validate citizenship.

Gregory Markus, a community organizer and Professor Emeritus from the University of Michigan, calls the Real ID Act “an unjust public policy” on the basis that it “has made it difficult, and in some cases impossible, for millions of impoverished citizens and legal residents to acquire state identification cards or drivers licenses” . He goes on to state that without such identification those citizens are “unable to rent an apartment, become employed, or even vote”.

There are no provisions in the Real ID Act granting any such authorization or requirement that it be used for any such purpose. Again, we are faced with opposition in regards to what it could become, rather than what it is in reality. Such barriers hold true for the current drivers license system, Social Security system, banking, and innumerous social structures independent of Real ID.

It is, however, a common adage that holds just as true for Real ID as any other form of identification, that in the United States “You need ID to get ID.” This is a social issue much greater than what Real ID was intended to address, and it will require solutions above and beyond what the Act is capable of resolving.

Immigration reform has been a contentious area for legislation throughout our nation’s history. The stated mission of the Real ID Act has much less to do with tracking American citizen’s activities than it does to address loopholes in the United States Visa program and collecting information regarding potential immigrants and visitors from foreign countries.

Jared Hatch of the Brigham Young Law Review states that “a nexus is necessary to define and determine what constitutes a terroristic threat prior to an individual being permitted to enter the country”. Determining the intersection of potential immigrants and terrorists is not possible unless a visitor’s identity can be validated utilizing the type of information sharing proposed in the Real ID Act.

Additional provisions in the Act aim to strengthen American borders to ensure incoming and outgoing migration is monitored appropriately toward those same goals. Barriers to constructing border walls and fencing sufficient to funnel incoming migration through the appropriate waypoints are diminished by additional provisions within the Act by granting “the DHS Secretary authorization to waive all legal requirements in order to expedite the construction of border barriers”.

The Homeland Security Act prescribed by the 9/11 Commission is dependent upon the full, and immediate, implementation of Real ID in order to be successful. The logical conclusion of analyzing these common criticisms of the Real ID Act is that each of them contain more bluster than substance.

Political ideologies pertaining to state’s rights versus federal mandates; concerns over a future all-powerful police state; and increasing the burdens upon the poor and down-trodden are all practical considerations on paper, but with even a cursory glance through the official language of the 9/11 Commission Report and the Real ID Act of 2005, one would conclude that each concern has been considered and addressed thoroughly.

What remains to prevent the immediate and complete adoption of Real ID in the state of Oklahoma amounts to no more than political posturing. In this instance, the game of politics teeters dangerously close to living in a society vulnerable to the next terrorist attack and a state government that continues to fail its citizens of its first and most important duty owed its citizens.

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