Michael Chertoff, secretary of homeland security, has been busy trying to sell the virtues of the REAL ID Act of 2005 to the American people. A REAL ID-compliant driver's license is promoted as the ultimate proof of your identity. All you need to do to get one is to prove who you are. Sounds a little circular, doesn't it?

The gold standard for such proof has long been a birth certificate, on which driver's licenses and passports are based. What proof of identity is needed to get a birth certificate? Swear you are who you say you are. The security of REAL ID seems to be based on Homeland Security's confidence that terrorists won't lie.

In California, birth records are available on the Internet for every California birth from 1905 to 2000. These records provide the information needed to apply for an authorized certified copy of an individual's birth certificate, provided you claim to be that individual or a parent, child, grandparent, grandchild, sibling, spouse or domestic partner of that individual. In Ventura County, a birth certificate can be obtained from the County Recorder for less than $15 in person, via mail or via the Internet.

Chertoff claims a REAL ID driver's license, valid for four years, will cost about $8. For this sum, the DMV is required to take your photograph and compare it to two large national databases of photographs to ensure you have neither been rejected for a REAL ID card nor already been issued one elsewhere; to verify that the birth certificate and other documentation you provide is valid, presumably by contacting the appropriate county recorder; and provide you with a plastic card with an imbedded radio-frequency identification chip.

Presumably this $8 does not include county costs to verify a birth certificate for every U.S. citizen who wishes a driver's license or identity card. Any genealogist can confirm that many counties do not have digital records, requiring a manual search for birth records.

REAL ID may protect your identity from being used by others to board an aircraft or enter a federal building, but it will do little to protect your credit rating from thieves. To the contrary, the embedded RFID chip will contain identifying information of use to thieves who need only pass within a few feet of you with a relatively inexpensive RFID reader.

Although the goals of REAL ID have merit, providing the desired level of security will require a more serious effort involving biometrics and probably DNA. REAL ID is far too expensive for what it provides, and it assumes a federal authority to spend state and county budgets.

— Nick Fotheringham lives in Thousand Oaks.