>> The choice is between law enforcement actually doing their job, or invasive and ineffectual laws like this.
I'm on guard for overreah all the time, but I'm OK with showing ID to buy alcohol, drive a car, fly on a plane, sell items that should rarely be done in bulk outside of rare conditions, like a bunch of catalytic converters.
So now, the government keeps track of what and how much booze I buy. Ugh.
This is beyond stupid, as people stopped thinking I might be under 21 back when the buffalo roamed.
Locally, a large (100+) chain (Plaid Pantry) of convenience stores also is scanning licenses. Saw somebody with an Olde English 40 and a passport.
It's not the law in Oregon (or Washington) but the article says it is in Tennessee. Also says you can ask them to type in the digits of your birthdate.
The few other states I could easily find online that had a similar law typically require that retailers either don’t store the data or that they delete it within X days.
But I already said government too much. This is all non-senses. Transactions should not be monitored.
I took a flight today. I had to show my ID once at the start of the security line where they did NOT check my boarding pass.
Then at the gate they only wanted to see my boarding pass and not my ID.
So basically nobody actually cares about ID when flying. It would have been trivial to buy the ticket in a false name or "borrow" someone else's name without asking.
To be clear, this failing is all on the gate procedure. If security wanted to check boarding pass or if they have to hooked up on the computer there, a simple bypass would be to buy a cheap ticket in your real name and the ticket you intend to fly in some other name.
To get through TSA as a member of the general public, you have to have a ticket (or a non-traveler gate pass) in your real name (matching your ID, soon to be real ID requirement) for a flight leaving in the next N hours. International flights check your passport at the boarding gate. For domestic, sure, you could swap to another boarding pass purchased under a different name, but what's the threat model there? You've already been screened.
Say you've done a crime that will be discovered in a few days. You buy a ticket to Detroit and next week the fbi will be wasting its time looking for you in Michigan and trying to convince Canada to search for you in Ontario.
In reality you hopped on a flight to El Paso under a fake name and you are deep into Mexico by now.
Though totally agree you could fly on a different flight under a fake name assuming that the airlines don’t sync up their records with the IDs the TSA scans at the checkpoints.
I suspect there’s other less visible signals that would make this harder. For example your flight under a fake name might be flagged for being an unknown name/person. Also if you’re on the run it’s hard to buy a flight under a fake name anonymously without a paper trail back to yourself.
you should probably re-evaluate your ideas about personal ID with regards to travel if you're interested in over-reach. These laws are routinely used as an anti-immigration method by ICE and equivalents, and there is very little proof that they do much to make the world any safer.