Starting in 2016, traveling by air in the United States became more complicated.
In 2005, Congress passed the Real ID Act as a counter-terrorism measure. Its goal was to set security standards for government-issued IDs.
The Act started to be introduced in late 2013. Now in the last phase of its implementation, its enforcers have decided that some states haven’t complied with its requirements.
As a result, driver’s licenses from those states will no longer suffice to pass through airport security. And that includes domestic flights as well as international ones.
Those states: New York, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Louisiana and American Samoa.
The reason: Licenses issued by those states don’t contain enough identifying information to pass muster with the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA).
So how are residents of these states supposed to cope? The Federal Government is advising them to get a passport.
Your old New York driver’s license may make it harder for you to fly in 2016 | syracuse.com
And this, in turn, carries an illogic all its own. As one soon-to-be affected New York traveler outlined:
“To get a passport I’ll first need to get a certified copy of my birth certifcate.
“And to get a copy of my birth certificate I need only to submit a copy of my driver’s license. A copy, no face-to-face, is-that-really you?
“So a New York driver’s license isn’t good enough for flying but it is good enough to get a birth certificate, whch gets me a passport, which allows me to fly.”
Got all that?
Sample state ID card that’s acceptable under the Real ID Act
And while TSA is beefing up security at the back door, the Obama administration is casting aside the front door.
On September 10, 2015, the administration announced that it would accept at least 10,000 displaced Syrians over the next year.
That is in addition to the 2,000 Islamic refugees the United States has already accepted.
According to U.S. Census data, America welcomes about 100,000 Muslim immigrants legally each year. This represents the fastest growing segment of immigrants coming to the United States.
The Pew Research Center estimates there are 2.5 million Islamics in the United States. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) puts the figure at seven million.
The Troubling Math of Muslim Migration | National Review Online
And while all this is happening, the FBI is being overwhelmed by the demands of countering Islamic terrorism against the United States.
On July 8, 2015, FBI director James Comey testified before Congress about the increasing burdens his agency faces in combating terrorism.
“We are stopping these things [Islamic terror plots] so far through tremendous hard work, the use of sources, the use of online undercovers.
“But it is incredibly difficult. I cannot see my stopping these indefinitely.”
Consider the math: The FBI has only 35,000 agents and analysts–against seven million potential suspects.
And only a portion of those agents and analysts are charged with investigating terrorism.
How did all of this come to be?
To start at the beginning: On March 15, 2011, protests broke out in Syria, with demonstrators demanding political reforms and the ouster of dictator Bashar al-Assad.
These protests, met with government repression, continued to grow into a wholesale civil war. Since then, more than 470,000 Syrians people have been killed.
Put another way: More than 470,000 potential or actual Islamic terrorists will never again pose a threat to the United States or Western Europe.
But European nations and the United States have chosen to see this truth as a negative, not a positive.
More than a million Islamic migrants and refugees crossed into Europe in 2015.
And all it took to make this happen was a photo that’s been seen the world over: A photo of a three-year old Syrian boy named Alan Kurdi, lying dead on a Turkish beach.
A cartoon parody of this picture showed a group of wealthy Arab rulers looking on indifferently at Kurdi’s body.
It also highlighted a Politically Incorrect truth:
While European nations are being swamped by hundreds of thousands of these uninvited “guests,” the Arab world’s wealthiest nations are doing almost nothing for Syria’s refugees.
According to Amnesty International, the “six Gulf countries–Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain–have offered zero resettlement places to Syrian refugees.”
These nations are far closer to Syria than are Europe and the United States. And they contain some of the Arab world’s largest military budgets and its highest standards of living.
Note the contradiction: Democratic, non-Islamic countries are exposing themselves to increasing numbers of potential–if not actual–Islamic terrorists. Meanwhile, the Arab world has closed its own doors to Syrian refugees
* * * * *
During the 1980s, the United States government considered Islamic acts of anti-American terrorism as simply crimes, and not acts of war.
The September 11, 2001 terror attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center changed that. For almost 15 years, the United States military has actively fought Islamics in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya.
To be admitting huge numbers of a population with which the United States is now waging all-out war is worse than stupid. It is a guarantee of national suicide.
Bureaucracybuster's Blog 
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SECURITY THEATER IS NOT SECURITY
In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Self-Help, Social commentary on August 19, 2016 at 12:08 amStarting in 2016, traveling by air in the United States got more complicated. But not necessarily safer.
In 2005, Congress passed the Real ID Act as a counter-terrorism measure. Its goal was to set security standards for government-issued IDs.
The Act started to be introduced in late 2013. Now in the last phase of its implementation, its enforcers have decided that some states haven’t complied with its requirements.
As a result, driver’s licenses from those states will no longer suffice to pass through airport security. And that includes domestic flights as well as international ones.
Those states: New York, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Louisiana and American Samoa.
The reason: Licenses issued by those states don’t contain enough identifying information to pass muster with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).
So how are residents of these states supposed to cope? The Federal Government is advising them to get a passport.
Your old New York driver’s license may make it harder for you to fly in 2016 | syracuse.com
And this, in turn, carries an illogic all its own. As one soon-to-be affected New York traveler outlined:
“To get a passport I’ll first need to get a certified copy of my birth certificate.
“And to get a copy of my birth certificate I need only to submit a copy of my driver’s license. A copy, no face-to-face, is-that-really you?
“So a New York driver’s license isn’t good enough for flying but it is good enough to get a birth certificate, which gets me a passport, which allows me to fly.”
Got all that?
Sample state ID card that’s acceptable under the Real ID Act
So much of what passes for security is actually security theater. It doesn’t actually make us safer, but it makes us feel safer.
And it makes us feel the government is keeping us safe, even when it isn’t.
For example: In the months after 9/11, National Guard troops were stationed in American airports. They certainly looked impressive.
But passengers would have felt far less reassured had they known the assault rifles they carried had no bullets.
Or take the checking of photo IDs that has become routine to enter State and Federal office buildings.
What exactly does this tell the security guard?
If you’re John Dillinger or Osama bin Laden, it tells him: “This is a very wanted man.”
But if you’re John Q. Public, who’s not notorious as a bank robber or terrorist, showing him your ID tells him nothing.
But people watching the guard performing this ritual assume: “The security guard must know what he’s looking for. So we have to be safer for his checking those IDs.”
In fact, most security guards have little training and even less experience. Many of them don’t carry firearms and lack self-defense skills.
According to Salary.com: The median annual Security Guard salary is $29,204, as of July 29, 2016, with a range usually between $25,857 and $33,522.
Repeated showings of security theater can be seen every weekday at the San Francisco Federal Building, at 450 Golden Gate Avenue.
To enter, you must show a driver’s license or State ID card.
Then you must remove
All of these must be placed in one or more large plastic containers, which are run through an x-ray scanner.
Finally, assuming you avoid setting off any alarm system, you’re allowed to enter.
Now, suppose you want to report a crime to the San Francisco field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
You take an elevator to the 13th floor and walk into a large room filled with several comfortable chairs that sit close to the floor. You approach a window such as you find in a bank–made of thick, presumably bulletproof glass.
A secretary on the opposite side greets you, and asks why you’ve come.
You offer your reason for wanting to speak with an agent. Assuming the secretary thinks you have a legitimate reason, she says you must first show her your driver’s license or State ID card.
You slide these through the bottom part of the glass window. Then she makes a xerox of this and hands the card back.
Then, as if that isn’t enough, you have to fill out a single-page form, which requires you to provide your:
Of course, you can refuse to fill out the form. But then the secretary will refuse to let you meet with an FBI agent.
The FBI has always encouraged Americans to report anything they consider a threat to national security or a violation of Federal law.
But this demand for so much private information is almost certain to sharply decrease the number of people willing to report knowledge of a crime.
At a time when Federal law enforcement agencies need all the cooperation they can get, this is not a matter to be taken lightly.
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