The Case for a Secure Drivers License

The driver’s license is an unlikely player in the war against terrorism. To most Americans it is an innocuous document considered only at renewal time.

But for terrorist cells operating in the United States, the driver’s license is a critical tool. It is as important to them as the weapons they would use against us.

Many of us remember when licenses were flimsy paper cards. The ones we dug from our wallets when stopped for speeding or cashing a check at the supermarket. Some of us might even have “doctored” them during our teenage years to get into local bars. With a couple of scratches and a ballpoint pen, we could become “legal” in no time at all. Others may have borrowed someone else’s license, a big brother’s or sister’s, to effect the same thing. Licenses didn’t include photographs in those more innocent days.

But somewhere along the line the nature of driver’s licenses changed. In the absence of an official identity card in this country, the driver’s license became just that, granting holders enormous privileges and access to things creators of the first driver’s licenses never would have imagined.
It happened so gradually, few of us even noticed it. But no one today should be fooled by the misnomer “driver’s license.” That plastic laminated card now in our wallets is far more than that; it arguably is the most powerful document in America.

It is also our Achilles’ heel.

Licenses and the 9/11 Terrorists

For the 9/11 terrorists, the driver’s license was the ID card that gave them access to the improbable weapons they used to strike us: American Airlines Flight 11; United Airlines Flight 175; American Airlines Flight 77, and United Airlines Flight 93. Because they carried driver’s licenses, the 19 terrorists waltzed onto those planes with few questions asked.

But boarding the planes with licenses was only half the story. Well before they hijacked those flights, the 9/11 terrorists were using state-issued driver’s licenses to operate under the radar of law enforcement and to prepare their attacks. And there is clear evidence that other terrorist organizations operating in the United States today—most notably Iran-backed Hezbollah, which has cells in an estimated 10 American cities—have become expert in using fraudulently obtained driver’s licenses to cloak their presence and activities here.

When the 9/11 al Quaeda cell arrived in the United States, they quickly learned that having a driver’s license in today’s America is essential to anyone seeking to operate in this country unlawfully and unnoticed.

Mohammed Atta discovered this abruptly in April 2001—five months before he drove the first plane into the north tower of the World Trade Center—when he was pulled over in Fort Lauderdale during a routine traffic stop and charged with driving without a license.

As PBS Frontline correspondent Hendrick Smith keenly noted in an interview on the terrorists’ tactics leading up to the attacks: “They made mistakes, and what was really stunning about their mistakes is how quick they were to correct them…. Atta … gets caught without a driver’s license, and within 15 days every one of the hijackers in Florida has gotten a driver’s license.”

After Mohamed Atta was issued a bench warrant for his careless transgression (he never showed up for his court appearance), he applied for and received eight driver’s licenses, even though his first request for a Florida license was properly denied. His second and subsequent requests tragically were not.

The other cell members followed suit. And while the exact number of driver’s licenses and non-driver ID’s they ultimately obtained remains unclear, no one disputes that it was in the dozens.

They got them from Florida and other states with lax licensing laws, including Arizona, California, Virginia, and Maryland. Seven of the terrorists obtained their Virginia licenses using false “proof” of state residency. Hamza Alghamdi, one of the UAL Flight 175 hijackers, got his Florida license using a Mailboxes Etc. address.

They were able to get the licenses because these states required minimal identification before issuing licenses. In some cases a utility bill or an easily forged document was enough to do the trick. Applicants did not have to prove definitive legal residency in the state, or in the country for that matter, and some of the states routinely issued multi-year driver’s licenses to foreign visitors, even though their visas would expire within months.
Moreover, some of these state licenses had no biometric identifiers, such as digital photographs, so they could be altered with ease. And their motor vehicle offices had no way of knowing if an applicant was suspected of terrorist activities or of crimes in other states. There was no sharing of databases.

Granting the al Quaeda operatives state-issued driver’s licenses was like handing them the keys to America. It opened all the doors necessary to plan and execute an attack.

Atta and Co. took full advantage. They used their newly minted licenses to rent safe houses and vehicles, open bank accounts for international wire transfers ($100,000 was wired to Atta from the United Arab Emirates), and to attend flight schools to learn how to pilot the jets. Among them was Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called “20th Hijacker,” who ominously told his flight instructors that he didn’t need to learn how to land a plane, just fly one.

Had they not possessed those licenses, they would have had to use their Saudi or Egyptian passports for all these things, which surely would have set off alarm bells, a fact of which they evidently were aware.

Following the 9/11 attacks, it became painfully clear that al Quaeda had cleverly exploited our weak state driver-licensing laws to execute their mission. And attention quickly focused on other vulnerabilities that licenses in the wrong hands could pose.

Driver’s licenses could, for example, provide terrorists access to sensitive government and commercial facilities such as the Capitol Building or the New York Stock Exchange. Terrorists could use licenses to buy guns and ammunition. They could rent vans and small trucks, as another terrorist cell did to bomb the World Trade Center in 1993. Or they could charter small aircraft at our nation’s private airports for additional suicide attacks.
Recognizing this, several states, including Florida, Virginia, New Jersey, and New York, quickly tightened their licensing requirements to safeguard against further terrorist breaches. But remarkably, some legislators in those states and others began considering legislation that would actually make it easier to obtain licenses.

Bills were introduced in Florida, Maryland, Maine, New Mexico, Virginia, Tennessee, Utah, California, Connecticut, and other states to weaken licensing requirements. They were the direct result of pressure from organized coalitions composed of civil liberties activists and advocates for “undocumented” (illegal) immigrants who want states to grant virtually unrestricted access to these documents.

Some of these groups have sued the State of New York to force it to roll back its reforms. That suit is still pending. The governors of Tennessee and Utah caved in to the pressure, implementing dual licenses, one for legal Americans and one for illegal immigrants; the latter document is not supposed to be accepted as state identification but already is.

The 9/11 Commission and the Real ID Act

Fortunately, it was clear to the 9/11 Commission that a federal solution was needed. In its Report to Congress it unequivocally recommended that: “Secure identification should begin in the United States. The federal government should set standards for the issuance of…sources of identification, such as driver’s licenses.”

It was a logical—and obvious—solution. Driver’s licenses clearly had become a national security issue, and individual states could not be relied on to issue them responsibly. The Commission rightly recognized that, with state-issued driver’s licenses, America can only be as strong as its weakest-link state. If just a single state were to continue handing out licenses to people whose identities could not be verified, the entire nation would remain at risk.

This key security recommendation of the 9/11 Commission came to legislative fruition on May 10, 2005, in the Real ID Act. It passed overwhelmingly in Congress despite a concerted, two-year campaign to scuttle it by the “undocumented” immigrant advocates and by alarmists claiming federal big-brotherism.

Real ID gives states three years to meet uniform, secure licensing standards that soon will be issued by the Department of Homeland Security. The states do not have to comply with the law—it is voluntary—but if they don’t, their licenses will not be accepted as a form of federal ID, meaning, among other things, that license holders from those states will not be able to fly on commercial airlines without producing additional documentation.
It is a stark but necessary ultimatum. Every day that a state issues licenses to unknown persons is a dangerous day for Americans. And when one considers the number of illegal immigrants pouring over our southern borders, some of whom come from terror-sponsoring states, the urgency of Real ID becomes palpable. Any terrorist entering the United States illegally today can walk into a motor vehicles office in a half-dozen states and obtain a driver’s license using documents that aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. That is a recipe for disaster.

Real ID will require minimal sacrifice from American drivers. They will have to provide their state motor vehicle administration with a Social Security number, which will be verified against a federal database (a practice already required in 36 states). In addition, a digital photograph will likely be taken, as is done for all U.S. Passports. It may take a few extra minutes to get a license, but these are reasonable inconveniences when one considers the stakes in the ongoing war against terrorism.

Americans already understand this. In an August 2005 national survey commissioned by the Coalition for a Secure Driver’s License, more than two-thirds of Americans said that the provisions of the Real ID Act should be implemented by the states. And 84% said they would be willing to stand on line a little longer or pay a little extra to accomplish that.

Their elected leaders are a different story. Already—before the Department of Homeland Security has even issued its specific recommendations—some state governors and legislators are howling in protest. New Mexico governor Bill Richardson is threatening to file a class action lawsuit on behalf of states to block Real ID from being implemented, and the Montana Legislature passed a resolution saying that they will refuse to comply with the Act, something New Hampshire is now threatening as well.

If any of their efforts succeed, America will remain vulnerable to a terrorist tactic already used against us.

The fight to implement Real ID is just beginning in America. And it’s a fight that must be won in every state. Islamo-fascist terrorists aren’t going away, and American policy-makers must act before licenses are used to strike us here at home again.

Our state legislators must heed the words of the 9/11 Commission: “For terrorists, travel documents are as important as weapons.” Indeed, one is hard pressed to see the difference.

April 2006