I think this gets to the crux of the issue. My reading of the article is that they are focusing on the ability of a citizen to control his identity - adding a biometric component to our current means of authentication such as a drivers license is a way to guard against being impersonated by others. I believe that their point is that fear of losing anonymity has caused us to settle for a low level of authentication. A problem with RealID is that if this system gains an underserved trust then it will be harder to fix the damage when you are impersonated by someone with a fake RealID. So a RealID that uses biometrics would be preferable to one that is easier to forge.

Whether the government should mandate / control this biometric information is a good question. The government knows my height, weight, eyecolor, and has some old photos of me at the moment. But would I want them to have a fingerprint? A DNA sample? That would be problematical. The article manages to duck the real issues here - I think that makes their argument a lot less compelling.

Oh, and you can't blame our political ills on Yale profs - it's the students who are doing all the damage. :-)