Threatening Your Privacy Through an Unfunded Government Mandate
Signed into law in May 2005 without meaningful debate, the Real ID Act states that drivers licenses will only be accepted for "federal purposes"—like accessing planes, trains, national parks, and court houses—if they conform to certain uniform standards. The law also requires a vast national database linking all of the ID records together.
Once the IDs and database are in place, their uses will inevitably expand to facilitate a wide range of surveillance activities. Remember, the Social Security number started innocuously enough, but it has become a prerequisite for a host of government services and been coopted by private companies to create massive databases of personal information. A national ID poses similar dangers; for example, because "common machine-readable technology" will be required on every ID, the government and businesses will be able to easily read your private information off the cards
clipped from: www.eff.org