One State’s REAL IDs Keep Failing at the Checkpoint

Tennessee is handing out free replacement driver’s licences after travellers reported that their REAL ID cards will not read at TSA checkpoints. The state’s Department of Safety and Homeland Security has acknowledged the problem publicly, describing it as affecting a small number of Tennesseans. Affected travellers can visit a local driver services centre and get a replacement at no cost. Some flyers who have hit the problem repeatedly are sceptical that the number is as small as the state suggests, which is the sort of dispute that tends to be resolved only when enough people complain.

The failure point appears to be the machine rather than the card’s underlying data. TSA’s second-generation Credential Authentication Technology, the CAT-2 units now standing between passengers and the queue at most large airports, reads the document and compares the photo to the traveller in front of it. A TSA officer in Houston told one affected traveller that the issue stems from photographs printed too lightly on some Tennessee cards, and reportedly on some Kentucky cards as well, leaving the scanner unable to resolve the image. The credential is valid; the reader simply cannot see it.

What that means in a security line is a manual identity check rather than a refusal. Officers can verify a passenger by other means, and nobody is being turned away for holding a valid REAL ID. But the manual path takes time, it happens at the front of a queue with a hundred people behind you, and it happens every single trip until the card is replaced. Travellers who fly frequently out of Nashville, Memphis or Knoxville and have hit this once should assume it will recur.

The workaround is the one that has always existed. A valid US passport clears the checkpoint regardless of what the driver’s licence reader thinks, and a passport card does the same job in a wallet-sized format for domestic flying. The broader lesson is worth noting as REAL ID enforcement matures: the standard covers what data a card must carry and how it must be issued, but the physical print quality of the card is a state manufacturing question, and a scanner that cannot read a compliant card is nobody’s fault at the checkpoint.

Sources: WSMV Nashville, USA Today via AOL