The Smart Card Alliance has a plan for states looking to comply with the Real ID Act: secure technology that would help consumers safely transact. Using their driver's license.

In response to the Department of Homeland Security's final Real ID Act ruling passed down last Friday the Smart Card Alliance - a not-for-profit, multi-industry association group "working to stimulate the understanding, adoption, use and widespread application of smart card technology" - wants the states to take this "golden opportunity" from the federal government to enhance their licenses with a Smart Card chip.

The Smart Card Alliance spoke out against DHS's suggested use of RFID as a mandated, machine-readable technology that states would need to implement to comply with Real ID because of its security flaws. Its argument now, based on a statement released Monday, is that the Smart Card technology - despite being above and beyond the 2D machine-readable technology DHS mandated in its final rule - is the better deal in licenses because it's a secure transaction technology.

"Imagine the impact a state could have on protecting citizens' identities and improving government services if every driver's license they issued was capable of strongly authenticating online and in-person transactions," said Randy Vanderhoof, executive director of the Smart Card Alliance, in a statement. "That opportunity is before states now as they define their REAL ID plan to comply with the federal standard, which includes only minimum technology requirements since it faced significant opposition from some states due to costs."

I haven't had the opportunity yet to speak with Mr. Vanderhoof regarding this statement, but if I am reading it correctly, the concept would be to enable secure transactions. That would mean, as a driver with a state-issued driver's license, my bank account would be connected to my driver's license - to enable secure transactions. Think about the implications there. What's next? Connecting my driver's license - potentially a de facto national identification card given its data is linked to other state's databases which in turn are linked to federal databases - to my health care records? For safety reasons, of course.

According to the Smart Card Alliance Web site, Smart Cards support all of the authentication technologies, storing password files, public key infrastructure certificates, one-time password seed files, and biometric image templates, as well as generating asymmetric key pairs, according to the Alliance's Web site.

Here's how the technology would work with state's licenses:
"States can choose to incorporate such e-government services by chip-enabling its official 'state ID' and combining these services with the REAL ID driver's license," reads the statement released Monday by the Smart Card Alliance."These services can both generate cost savings and establish potentially new revenue sources."

"States have a golden opportunity to leverage the federal funding available for REAL ID implementation and, by adding a few additional dollars per license, both meet the federal guidelines and provide immense benefits to citizens and the state for the future," concluded Vanderhoof, in the statement.

Here's more information if you want to check it out.
http://www.smartcardalliance.org/pages/publications-smart-cards-real-id.