With President Donald Trump back in the White House and the final rollout of federal REAL ID requirements set to take effect in May, many of the loudest privacy advocates in Washington have been largely silent.
While privacy-minded lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have spent years blasting voter-ID laws and TSA facial recognition tools, among other measures, few are raising alarms over the Trump administration’s looming implementation of the REAL ID Act — a law passed in 2005 that critics describe as a national identification system.
Some of the privacy-hawk lawmakers remaining silent on REAL ID were very vocal when another expansion of the national security surveillance apparatus came about – the Patriot Act of 2001 – but not so when the U.S. is only days away from REAL ID implementation.
Sens. Edward Markey, D-Mass., Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., were all in Congress when the Patriot Act faced ultimately-successful renewal in 2010s and when the 2020 bill amending and reauthorizing the related Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court came up for a vote.
‘Congress has a duty to safeguard Americans’ privacy, but the USA Freedom Reauthorization Act fails to adequately limit the types of information that the government can collect about Americans, and it fails to adequately limit how long the government can keep the information it collects about us,’ Markey said in a 2020 statement objecting to the FISA renewal.
‘I am unwilling to grant any president surveillance tools that pose such a high risk to Americans’ civil liberties,’ he said.
In 2011, Merkley was one of eight senators who voted to prevent the Patriot Act renewal from even coming to the floor for debate, according to Oregon Live.
His Beaver State colleague, Wyden, ultimately voted to allow debate, but said on the Senate floor during such discourse that it needs to be potentially reconsidered.
‘The Patriot Act was passed a decade ago during a period of understandable fear,’ Wyden said at the time.
‘Now is the time to revisit this… and ensure that a better job is done of striking that balance between fighting terror and protecting individual liberty.’
Merkley expressed concern at the time about the Patriot Act’s ability to let law enforcement collect many types of personal data like emails and phone records.
In order to get a REAL ID, licensees must provide their Social Security number and other documentation.
While the REAL ID implementation was delayed 20 years by several factors including COVID-19, Merkley cast a ‘protest vote’ at the time of the Patriot Act renewal that a four-year extension of the post-9/11 act was being put forth without sufficient time for debate.
In 2005, Wyden also gave a Senate floor speech opposing the first reauthorization of the Patriot Act.
Markey did not respond to multiple requests for comment, left at his Washington and Boston offices. Merkley also did not respond to a request for comment.
