REAL ID requirements get further delayed
People pass through Salt Lake City International Airport Wednesday, Jan. 11, 2023, in Salt Lake City. The world's largest aircraft fleet was grounded for hours by a cascading outage in a government system that delayed or canceled thousands of flights across the U.S. Rick Bowmer/AP
More than three million people are expected to fly over the coming holiday weekend, according to AAA. What those passengers won’t need to have to fly domestically is a REAL ID – a state driver’s license or ID card that is also a federally accepted form of identification. The requirement to have one to board domestic flights was supposed to go into effect just weeks ago, but back in December, the federal government extended the deadline out to May 2025. It’s far from the first delay for a program that was originally passed into law in 2005.
To talk more about REAL IDs, what they are, and what purpose they’re meant to serve, The 21st was joined by a professor of computer science who's won awards for his research on airport security.
GUEST:
Sheldon H. Jacobson
Founder Professor of Computer Science, Grainger College of Engineering, UIUC
Prepared for web by Owen Henderson
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