What is "REAL ID?"

[Wingsprint]

I originally got on Forums hoping to get Ron Paul elected President.....Where would we be now....if that had happened....

The Jean Jaurès of our time...

[counterintelligence]

Real id does nothing to hold our government accountable for an inside job.

[counterintelligence]

https://youtube.com/watch?v=zedJ5DmWdWA

[Oldcynic]

https://youtube.com/watch?v=zedJ5DmWdWA

[counterintelligence]

from r/tsa

Maybe my library card will suffice

[counterintelligence]

TSA quietly scraps 20-year rule in abrupt change impacting all travelers immediately

https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/ts...r-AA1I87hU


'The sweeping policy will pertain to all US airports and passengers who possess Real-ID-compliant documents...'

there it is

so you get some freedoms for complying.
and ppl will cheer.

[counterintelligence]

https://www.paul.senate.gov/chairman-ran...t-of-2025/

https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-cong...-bill/2769

Heck. Let's just repeal the Patriot Act.

[counterintelligence]

from r/privacy

In case it gets rEDITted:

I've been seeing a ton of dangerous misinformation on this subreddit recently, and wanted to share some objective facts about the airport, TSA, biometrics, and travel privacy in general.

First and foremost: there is no privacy at the airport, of any kind.

When you book a plane ticket, you are surrendering a full set of your PII to the US government. First, to be checked against the DHS no-fly list. Second, if you believe well-sourced reporting, your info is also then sold directly to the US Government for use in the surveillance dragnet.

So, right off the bat you have surrendered all of the following information, before you even head to the airport:

Full legal name

Date of Birth

Associated payment instrument (e.g. card #)

Origin airport

Destination airport

travel dates/times

Second: the United States Government already has your photo.

If you hold any form of photo identification, the US government knows what you look like. Full stop. Passport, RealID driver's license, or non RealID driver's license, it doesn't matter. If the government wants to know what your face looks like, they have access to that information.

Third: there is no "opting out" of biometric surveillance at the airport. You can only opt out of biometric programs used for convenience, not mass surveillance.

The airport security perimeter in 2025 extends FAR PAST the security checkpoint. The moment you set foot on an airport grounds in the United States, there are CCTV cameras capturing your face. Those CCTV cameras are leveraging 1:N biometric matching to search for hits against known facial biometrics templates of threat actors and wanted criminals. You cannot "opt out" of this surveillance.

A recent post in this subreddit focused very closely on the TSA Confirm.ID program. And was filled with misinformation about what the program is, but also what you're able to opt out of as a traveller.

TSA Confirm.ID is not a biometric surveillance program. It is attempting to remove human judgement from the task of confirming "does this face on this ID match the person who is standing here at the security checkpoint". That's it, and that's all.

Whether you believe that the TSA is deleting the photos immediately after performing the matching is irrelevant. Because the US Government already knows what your face looks like (see point 1 above). They are the ones who issued you the photo ID being matched against for christ sakes!

When you "opt out" of Confirm.ID or any other TSA gate or security checkpoint-level biometrics, you are simply opting out of a convenience program. You are not preventing DHS or the FBI or any other government agency from collecting or utilizing your facial biometric template. Because you cannot opt out of those surveillance programs! All you can opt out of is this extremely narrow scope of a single use case. This is a really important distinction.

Fourth: the United States government already has your facial biometric template.

We are operating on the assumption that the US Government has access to the photo from your driver's license and/or passport (see #2 above). If someone has a clear photo of your face, they can extract a workable facial biometric template from it sufficient for 1:N biometric matching.

To clarify, 1:N biometric matching is the concept of taking a target face and searching for that same face among thousands and thousands of other faces to find a match. There are all sorts of use cases for this technology, but a primary use case is "dragnet" style surveillance. E.g., point a 1:N biometric engine at a CCTV feed and generate an alert any time someone on my target list walks past a camera.

To generate a highly-accurate facial biometric template sufficient for 1:N matching only requires a single clear photo of your face.NIST runs ongoing testing of the latest 1:N biometric matching engines and publishes the results openly.



The latest 1:N testing report shows that with the testing data set taken from Visa photographs and Mugshots, top commercially available 1:N matching engines achieve a false match rate of <.1%. The photographs in the NIST testing data are exactly the same quality/resolution as Passport or DMV photos.

Why does NIST only use Visa photos and Mugshots in its testing data sets? Foreign tourists and prisoners don't have standing to exercise privacy rights and demand removal of their photographs.

You can "opt out" of the TSA programs discussed above until you're blue in the face. None of that prevents DHS/FBI/NSA/CIA or whatever other agency you fear from templating your face biometrically. All it takes is a single photo of your ID.

[Oldcynic]

from r/privacy

In case it gets rEDITted:

I've been seeing a ton of dangerous misinformation on this subreddit recently, and wanted to share some objective facts about the airport, TSA, biometrics, and travel privacy in general.

First and foremost: there is no privacy at the airport, of any kind.

When you book a plane ticket, you are surrendering a full set of your PII to the US government. First, to be checked against the DHS no-fly list. Second, if you believe well-sourced reporting, your info is also then sold directly to the US Government for use in the surveillance dragnet.

So, right off the bat you have surrendered all of the following information, before you even head to the airport:

Full legal name

Date of Birth

Associated payment instrument (e.g. card #)

Origin airport

Destination airport

travel dates/times

Second: the United States Government already has your photo.

If you hold any form of photo identification, the US government knows what you look like. Full stop. Passport, RealID driver's license, or non RealID driver's license, it doesn't matter. If the government wants to know what your face looks like, they have access to that information.

Third: there is no "opting out" of biometric surveillance at the airport. You can only opt out of biometric programs used for convenience, not mass surveillance.

The airport security perimeter in 2025 extends FAR PAST the security checkpoint. The moment you set foot on an airport grounds in the United States, there are CCTV cameras capturing your face. Those CCTV cameras are leveraging 1:N biometric matching to search for hits against known facial biometrics templates of threat actors and wanted criminals. You cannot "opt out" of this surveillance.

A recent post in this subreddit focused very closely on the TSA Confirm.ID program. And was filled with misinformation about what the program is, but also what you're able to opt out of as a traveller.

TSA Confirm.ID is not a biometric surveillance program. It is attempting to remove human judgement from the task of confirming "does this face on this ID match the person who is standing here at the security checkpoint". That's it, and that's all.

Whether you believe that the TSA is deleting the photos immediately after performing the matching is irrelevant. Because the US Government already knows what your face looks like (see point 1 above). They are the ones who issued you the photo ID being matched against for christ sakes!

When you "opt out" of Confirm.ID or any other TSA gate or security checkpoint-level biometrics, you are simply opting out of a convenience program. You are not preventing DHS or the FBI or any other government agency from collecting or utilizing your facial biometric template. Because you cannot opt out of those surveillance programs! All you can opt out of is this extremely narrow scope of a single use case. This is a really important distinction.

Fourth: the United States government already has your facial biometric template.

We are operating on the assumption that the US Government has access to the photo from your driver's license and/or passport (see #2 above). If someone has a clear photo of your face, they can extract a workable facial biometric template from it sufficient for 1:N biometric matching.

To clarify, 1:N biometric matching is the concept of taking a target face and searching for that same face among thousands and thousands of other faces to find a match. There are all sorts of use cases for this technology, but a primary use case is "dragnet" style surveillance. E.g., point a 1:N biometric engine at a CCTV feed and generate an alert any time someone on my target list walks past a camera.

To generate a highly-accurate facial biometric template sufficient for 1:N matching only requires a single clear photo of your face.NIST runs ongoing testing of the latest 1:N biometric matching engines and publishes the results openly.



The latest 1:N testing report shows that with the testing data set taken from Visa photographs and Mugshots, top commercially available 1:N matching engines achieve a false match rate of <.1%. The photographs in the NIST testing data are exactly the same quality/resolution as Passport or DMV photos.

Why does NIST only use Visa photos and Mugshots in its testing data sets? Foreign tourists and prisoners don't have standing to exercise privacy rights and demand removal of their photographs.

You can "opt out" of the TSA programs discussed above until you're blue in the face. None of that prevents DHS/FBI/NSA/CIA or whatever other agency you fear from templating your face biometrically. All it takes is a single photo of your ID.

Did George Orwell assist in the creation of this system of personal intrusion? 

I no longer want to "see the world."  I'll wait out the autumn of my life here in the jungle, thank you very much.  Muslims in Stockholm, Islam in France and the U.K..  No, I don't want to experience that.

[counterintelligence]