Licensed to ill

This month, the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles has started issuing its newly redesigned driver’s license and identification cards. \nThe cards look quite a bit different from their predecessors because of a slew of security features added to them. Some of the changes include colorful digital watermarks and “ghost portraits” where the person’s picture is copied in a lighter and smaller version at the card’s edge, and a barcode on the back embedded with secure data that, when scanned, should be able to verify the information on the front of the card. They also have a vertical format if the person is under 21 and bands highlighted in red and yellow telling when the person turns 18 and 21. \nAccording to the BMV, these features are meant in large part to prevent minors from purchasing alcohol. Once again, middle-aged government bureaucrats believe that something they haven’t tried can cut down on underage drinking.\nBut not only will the cards’ new features not stop counterfeiting and underage alcohol consumption, they will actually lead to more.\nCounterfeiters might slow down their manufacturing of Indiana cards when they realize they have become too difficult to copy, but that doesn’t mean they will stop counterfeiting altogether. Instead, they will counterfeit cards from other states, the way many of them already do.\nOfficer Travis Thickstun of the Indiana State Excise Police told the IDS in a June 14 article that he’d seen “close to 100 instances” of people changing their birthdays or the date they turn 21 on their IDs, and that the new design would deter people from tampering with their cards.\nMaybe the new highlighted bands will make detecting tampering easier, but at the same time, they are making more room for counterfeiting. If ID checkers know they can determine whether a person is of age simply by looking at the highlighted bands and seeing if the card is in vertical format, they will be less likely to pay attention to the card as a whole. As long as they are horizontal and don’t bear the highlighted bands, even some of the sloppiest fakes will pass by casual ID checkers.\nOf course, more adamant ID checkers such as bouncers would quickly discover these problems. While it will be easier to slip fakes by gas station clerks, the same won’t be true for bars, which are more likely to run black light and barcode tests. \nBut, as anyone who attends IU should know, just because people can’t drink at bars doesn’t mean they won’t drink. Instead of drinking at bars, they go to parties or have of-age friends buy them alcohol. In these situations, they drink even more than they would have at bars because the alcohol is cheaper. \nThis effort on the government’s part to discourage underage drinking, like many before it, is not only futile but ultimately counterproductive. The government can encourage programs that teach responsible drinking, but trying to coerce kids into abstinence only convinces them to find other ways around the law.