Mark presents the documentation to anyone who questions his experience. A methodical and careful man, he kept the records, the same information he presented to the SEC.
Today he continues his battle saying that to be truly defeated the Real ID Act must be challenged and brought down simultaneously from three different directions. First, he calls on the grass roots, people, he says, must know and take action. When he speaks he asks them to tie up the phone lines of legislators who support the Real ID; to become informed on the Act, and to ensure that more people find out what is going on under the radar. Then he lays out how the Act can be challenged at the state level and federally. So, he says, “the wolf does not come back again dressed in the skin of yet another sheep.”
To date, Mark has spent four weeks giving evidence to several different committees of Congress in Washington D. C. He has spent weeks on the road, sitting down with legislators in Oklahoma, California, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Kansas, and other states. Every day he or his one occasionally paid staff person hear from activists or legislators in another state who now are beginning to realize what is really in store for Americans. A month ago the ACLU and ACLJ came together for the first time to help Mark in fighting the Real ID Act.
Typically, Mark stays at the cheapest possible hotels. Motel 6 costs less and so keeps him on the road to the next state. He eats fast food; it is cheap and filling. It is a far cry from the kinds of places he stayed while giving advice to the heads of the Biometrics Industry. Asked what others can do to help he responded for this interview, “We have a button on the site if you can spare anything to help. If you have no money we also accept frequent flyer miles.” He evidently means it. Major contributors to the effort have been few and the money tight. The money is so tight his group, Stop The Real ID Coalition, is just a blog that costs them nothing. Mark says that every penny counts.
And Mark, like the energizer bunny, just keeps going and will not stop, he says, until he has driven a spike through the heart of the Real ID because, as he said, “our freedom and the Constitution are in danger and I am an American.”
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