States’ rights and privacy-minded groups have been fighting hard against the Bush-era Real ID law — which sets federal standards for state ID’s and establishes new federal identity databases (in other words, it establishes a national ID in all but name). Now homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who opposed Real ID when she was governor of Arizona, wants to scale back and repackage the law as something called “Pass ID.” The Washington Post reports:

The new plan keeps elements of Real ID, such as requiring a digital photograph, signature and machine-readable features such as a bar code. States also will still need to verify applicants’ identities and legal status by checking federal immigration, Social Security and State Department databases.

But it eliminates demands for new databases — linked through a national data hub — that would allow all states to store and cross-check such information, and a requirement that motor vehicle departments verify birth certificates with originating agencies, a bid to fight identity theft.

Needless to say, this is far short of the outright repeal. “We don’t want to end up with National ID Lite,” Chis Calabrese of the ACLU tells the Post. The administration seems to be setting up Pass ID as a “compromise” between real ID critics and national-security statists like Rep. Lamar Smith (“Real ID, not a gutted version with a tough-sounding name, is necessary to continue to keep us safe”) and Rep. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (“Maybe governors should have been in the Capitol when we knew a plane was on its way to Washington wanting to kill a few thousand more people” — Jim deserves a demagogue of the year nomination for that one). This is typical of how liberties get chipped away: when the public in the states rallies against assaults on privacy, the security apparatus in D.C. switches tracks to implement its wish-list piecemeal. We’ll see whether the feds succeed in undercutting the grassroots revolt in the states.