CNET has a FAQ on How RealID Will Affect You. It is well written but leaves out a few things (or purposely does not go into them).
At the top of the list is the cost. Frankly, the states are going to pick up the bill for this, just like all the other unfunded mandates to come out of the Bush administration over the last five years and the net result will be higher local level taxes on everything from milk, bread and toilet paper to cell phones and Internet access. And this comes at a time when most state governments are trying to pay for children left behind, road, transit, health care and a mess of other things that have been dumped on the statehouse lawn including environmental impacts, increased funding for first responders, increasing security and immigration enforcement. One might reasonably wonder what the Federal Government is really doing with its time?
Next on the list is security. Security both of the person with the ID card (especially if they go to RFID) and security of the data in the database, who can access it, what it will be used for and what purpose it will be released. As we have seen, the Federal Government, in the form of the State Department, does not understand the issues with RFID - to the point of issuing them as part of the passport procedure. I can see a whole cottage industry springing up to make lined passport cases so that when you are traveling with your homing beacon, the bad guys in downtown Berlin or downtown Baghdad won't scoop you off the street.
And if you think this information, once captured by the states and then transmitted to the Federal government is going to be secure by any definition of the term, you only have to do a quick search of the web for the current IT scorecard to see that the Department of Homeland Security is leading the Federal Government in least secure agency from an IT perspective. This should not come as a surprise to anyone, given the procurement methods employed by the various agencies that purchase IT technology and the methods they use to implement it. And what about the sharing of data between the states? Who is going to mandate that each state have a set of similar guidelines...and then who is going to enforce them? Get in line if you think it is ever going to happen.
Now, let us consider for a moment the average DMV office. A den of inefficiency and confusion if ever there was one and now they are going to be charged with ensuring we have the correct documents to get one of these mystical passes? The states do not have the money now to train the DMV people correctly, let alone expect they are going to be able to functionally be able to negotiate their way through the literally hundreds of existing forms of Federal visas that people can be walking around with. The reference sheet alone will be a small binder of form numbers. How are you going to keep it updated? The INS (or ICE, I guess it is now) can barely keep up with their own forms, let along keep all the states up to speed. You are going to be in a real pickle if you are not a citizen, with permission to be in the country and live in a backwater somewhere (like outside any major metropolitan area) and you are the first on your block to get the newest I-551 (Green Card). DMV is not going to know what to do with it. I predict it will take several trips before you are issued a magic card.
RealID is not the way to do it. If this is so important, then issue the national ID card and pay for it at the national level. Otherwise, move on to more important issues.
3:50:12 PM 
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