05.03.11

Driver’s license fail: Unintended consequences of the war on terror

Posted in Permanent Fail, War On Terror at 12:42 pm by George Smith

If you live outside California you probably haven’t heard the tale of fail concerning the state’s new driver license.

It’s been going on in slow motion for months.

And it has resulted in massive backlogs of unfulfilled license renewals, people driving without valid licenses because they have no other choice, and the boondoggle of using a company — L-1 Identity Solutions — that’s cornered the market on US production of passports and driver licenses (it has 85 percent of the market for the latter.)

It is yet another example of the opposite of a free market. It is rather, a more standard story of a US company that has inexplicably soaked up all the business in a certain area, become a single source, and — as a result — left everyone greatly inconvenienced and without recourse while providing inferior service.

Since late last year L-1 Identity Solutions has had a series of failures, poorly described in the press, in manufacturing California’s new license.

The failures were so profound that at one point 80 percent of entire lots of license production were deemed defective.

The CA Department of Motor Vehicles processes 40,000 licenses a day.

So any screw up in the pipeline in a state this large immediately cascaded into a problem affecting everyone. As the renewals piled up, an awesome barrier of delay and inadequacy was created.

By February, the Sacramento Bee had reported a backlog of 850,000 waiting to receive new licenses. At that point, the state instituted an e-mail point on the DMV page so drivers could inquire as to the status of their renewal. The volume of queries crashed the system.

A friend of mine waited about a quarter of a year for her new license.

At one point she had to apply for a temporary through the DMV, a process that was also, naturally, backlogged.

As for myself, I’ve been waiting for almost three months for the new license. My current license expired almost two months ago. In the meantime, the state began issuing automatic temporaries to fill the gap. They are valid for ninety days. My temporary arrived this week.

However, as with everyone caught in this high-tech trap, there was a window in which I had no valid driver license.

Since almost all Californians over the age of twenty depend on their auto-transportation, this presented a huge number of drivers who, if pulled over, would have no valid paper. As a response, the state informed police officers to run such drivers, when they were stopped, through their computer system. If it returned information that the renewal fee had been sent in that acted as verification of license.

But this is now also the time of the TSA and needing a valid photo ID — like a license — to get on an airplane.

I’ve seen no statistics on people who just abandoned the idea of flying if caught by the license “outage,” so to speak.

However, I was one of them. My mother died in Pennsylvania when I had no valid photo driver’s license and no temporary. Flying to PA was out. So I missed the funeral. (In full disclosure, we weren’t close. But it would have been nice to have had the option to consider, not something unilaterally removed because of a screw-up at one of America’s taxpayer-funded homeland security companies.)

And I am also sure many other people, for any variety of reasons, just gave up on the idea of flying because of the license fiasco.

If you just Google L-1 Identity Solutions you’ll immediately see how corporate spam and astroturf has defeated the giant search engine. You can go through pages and pages of results and not find anything about L-1’s major fuck-up in California.

This is no accident. That’s how corporate America, at its best, works. It takes some effort to get past walls of obfuscation and even the mandarins of Google can’t fix it.

L-1 came into being after 9/11 and expanded explosively.

The firm’s local newspaper — the Westport Express — ran an extensive profile, explaining the history:

Most of us remember where we were and what we were doing on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.

For Robert LaPenta, president, chairman and chief executive officer of Stamford-based L-1 Identity Solutions, that day’s terrorist attacks led to an epiphany about U.S. defense, and a company aimed at filling the huge, suddenly apparent, gaps.

“I watched the towers come down from my offices on 600 Third Ave.,” said LaPenta, who was president of a company he co-founded, L-3 Communications, at the time.

“It was that event that really was the genesis, the starting point of me beginning to think about a new business that ultimately spawned L-1,” he said in an interview with Hearst Connecticut Newspapers.

“I realized on that day that we spent $600 billion a year on aerospace, defense, ships, planes and weaponry, you name it,” LaPenta said. “None of those things really mattered when it came to what transpired on 9/11, where 20 terrorists with basically false driver’s licenses and a $25,000 budget were able to inflict the biggest attack on U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor.”

……..

Homeland Security Today magazine named L-1 among its Rising 10 of 2009, a list of companies that promise to grow quickly in coming years because of either recent contracts or their overall positioning within expanding areas of homeland security.

Homeland security issues will fuel much of L-1’s future growth, LaPenta said, adding that about 80 percent to 90 percent of L-1’s business comes from public sector customers such as federal, state, local and foreign governments.

“Over the next three to four years, governments will still be bulk of the growth,” he said.

We were in Iraq and our products are now being deployed in Afghanistan,” LaPenta said. “They include jump kits that take biometric information and do matching to identify people in the field.”

“We are a prime provider of intelligence gathering, mission planning, mission analysis, cyber-security and imagery analysis and we do a lot of counterterrorism work for the agencies, which I cannot go into too much detail with,” he added.

LaPenta said the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the unsuccessful “Christmas bomber,” who tried to light a plastic explosive with a syringe sewn into his underwear on Northwest Flight 253 near Detroit, will ensure future demand from government customers.

It’s worth noting puckishly that L-1 Identity’s current mishandling of CA driver licenses would have certainly slowed any 9/11 bombers’ desires to quickly acquire them.

It’s also worth noting that the procedures used by the bombers would not have been foiled by the fancy new license which L-1 Identity has been failing to manufacture properly.

The 9/11 attackers’ strategy was procedural and based on system exploitation, not on high-tech stuff embedded in newfangled documents.

Just as the California license imbroglio was warming up late last year, this article on more of L-1’s gadgets hit Wired on-line, part of the Empire’s Dog Feces beat (aka security tech news to give the nerdy-boy crowd erections):

In Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. troops use handheld devices to take iris scans and thumb prints off of detainees and put them in vast databases to distinguish insurgents from civilians. Now your local cops are getting in on the action.

L-1 Identity Solutions, a four-year-old company, makes the Handheld Interagency Identity Detection System (HIIDE), a mobile device that digitally records someone’s iris, fingerprint and facial characteristics “to create a comprehensive database on the enrolled subject.??? The tool, which has earned high marks in Iraq and Afghanistan, is marketed to cops, as a way to avoid taking suspects to booking stations,

In California, we’d still like our driver licenses.

Reported the Los Angeles Times, back in January (it’s now month five of 2011 and still not straightened out):

DMV Director George Valverde said the vendor, L-1 Identity Solutions, has struggled with color accuracy, the raised lettering and the positioning of images of California icons, including El Capitan in Yosemite and the Golden Gate Bridge. L-1 was the only bidder on the five-year, $63-million job, Valverde said.

The DMV issues more than 8.25 million driver’s licenses and ID cards annually. Some days the agency strives to distribute as many as 40,000 cards.

But when production on the new cards began, 80% of the cards in some daily batches contained errors. In such cases, Valverde said, the agency would return the entire batch to the vendor. Complicating matters, some days the vendor delivered no cards, and the agency quickly fell behind its usual pace.

…..

“Color [in the license] seems to be the biggest challenge,” Valverde said … Lisa Cradit, a spokeswoman for L-1, said the company’s policy was not to comment on issues related to customers.

Of course they wouldn’t. People here still want their licenses, though. And they’d probably wish ill on the firm if they knew who was responsible. Now they just know the thing has been a major pain-in-the-ass.

Thanks to one national security infrastructure company of scumbags.

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