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Comment by yostrovs | Hacker News Reader

What is the big security improvement of the new id's? The article makes no mention of that.

I tried to figure out the same, it seems to me that the issue is that US drivers licenses have historically been kinda shitty, with very little validation done to ensure the identity of the person that the licens is issued to. There's also some requirement about the drivers database being available across states, which apparently it wasn't previously.

Without knowing, my take is that it's one of those cases where each state has behaved more like individual countries, rather than a subdivision of a larger nation. So you drivers licens isn't really worth much out of state, at least not for validating your actual identity.

I could be wrong, it seems very unclear what Real ID actually is.

I suspect it became more standardized than it used to be. My original PA drivers license was a bit of index stock with no photo. Things have obviously changed but states, as I understand it? Still had significantly different verification requirement and varying degrees of information sharing. RealID isn’t quite a backdoor to an (unacceptable to most)national ID but it probably comes close.

It's trying to solve a bunch of different, slightly overlapping problems. Some examples:

* provide an identity document that's hard to forge. Some states, Hawaii famously, had IDs that were ridiculously easy to forge.

* reduce expiration times so that identifying details aren't decades out of date. Some states (e.g. Arizona) issued IDs with 50+ years of validity.

* require actual verification of identity at issuance

* include SSN details. I have no idea why this was a thing and it's since been removed from the actual federal requirements, but most states require original social security documents to be provided during application.

* to establish residency at a particular address.

If it were just identity and residency, states would accept things like voter registration as sufficient. Yet many states (e.g. California) do not.

The SSN details weren’t true in MA. My card was lost at some point in college and I never bothered to replace. Probably should one of these years.

Not sure what proof of voter registration would look like here though. Proof of resident address can actually be non-trivial for a lot of even housed people. I probably have some online bills and statements but would have to dig them up.

The state level variability is fun. I know it's required for CA from personal experience, and checked TX, FL before posting. Also checked NY (talk about bad documentation). All require it currently.

Some states also don't like accepting online bills. That's the reason I wasn't able to ever get one in CA.

Well you probably have some national suppliers like Verizon or Xfinity but I’d mostly have to login and print out a bill assuming it had my address.

This is the typical US confusion of a license and an ID. Licenses were not originally intended to be ID.

Until someone decided that only people over 21 could drink, and that we needed strong controls over ID. And most people had drivers licenses, so that is what they said they would need for a document

Real ID is more about standardization of the minimum bar than a specific new improvement. What the actual changes are from before depends on the state/territory you look at and what they used to do. You can read about the specific checks required here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_ID_Act#Provisions

The main difference is that the record is added to a federal database. The actual ID is pretty much the same. There is some effort to make all the states' IDs look similar in terms of layout. At low-traffic airports if you're from a low-population state the person looking at your ID might not have seen one today.

It's not necessarily a "big" security improvement but there are somewhat more stringent requirements for identity verification.

https://www.dhs.gov/real-id/real-id-faqs

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