Taking License Beyond Driving Panel: Technology Can Prevent Abuse; Critics Call It Invasive

The basic Washington state driver’s license may be headed for the trash heap of history, to be replaced by a high-tech version designed to curb crime.

The aim is to make it harder for larcenous people to use fake IDs to get driver’s licenses that help them steal from stores and banks and fraudulently obtain welfare and other government benefits.

“That license is everything,” said Dale Clark, a fraud investigator for U.S. Bank of Washington. “It’s a passport into a whole new identity.”

Clark is part of a 21-member state task force that is looking for ways to make it harder to abuse driver’s licenses.

The possibilities tend toward new technology: perhaps a computer chip packed with information about you, and maybe a thumbprint or other unique identifier.

“I would predict, no later than four years we should have a different kind of driver’s license,” said Ken Mark, the Licensing Department’s deputy director for driver services. “You could end up with a driver’s license that is also your library card and bus pass and half a dozen other things - all because of that computer chip.”

There were 3.8 million licensed drivers in the state last year, and an additional 288,000 identification cards were issued.

“We have turned the driver’s license into a legitimate identification card,” said state Sen. Brad Owen, D-Shelton. “And everybody has come to depend on it as legitimate. So we need to make it as foolproof as we can.”

But opponents warn the effort smacks of universal identification cards, which have been used to segregate and abuse people in countries such as South Africa and the former Soviet Union. It also would give licensing agents the burden of screening out illegal immigrants, they say.

“The Department of Licensing’s job is to determine whether the person next to me on the highway is competent to steer the vehicle,” said Jerry Sheehan, lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union. “We are a country in which a citizen is not required to ‘show his papers’ at some government official’s whim.”

In another vein, a bill by state Rep. Karen Schmidt, R-Bainbridge Island, would restrict what kinds of identification can be used to obtain a driver’s license. The bill passed the House.

“Many of us don’t believe a Costco card should be an acceptable document to get a license,” Schmidt said.

But the Washington Association of Churches opposes parts of the bill: one provision that would forbid issuing licenses to illegal aliens, and one that would let examiners hold documents used to obtain a license for 60 days to authenticate them.

The churches say that unfairly targets Hispanic and Asian minorities. “We are convinced this is another one of those attempts to take unfair advantage of the most disadvantaged,” said Bishop Calvin McConnell of the United Methodist Church.