the future

Getting a Fake New York ID to Become Much More Difficult

This July, New York will replace its bendy, colorful driver’s licenses with rigid, polycarbonate cards with black-and-white portraits. Forgeries of New York’s current ID are particularly popular among underage drinkers (and possibly other kinds of criminals), and the style change is intended to halt their production. Making one of the new licenses — which will be engraved with personal data as well as small “ghost images” of the driver “that will float in a transparent window and will be visible from the front and the back” — requires an expensive laser-inscribing machine which, as one DMV official told the New York Times, is “not something a college student is going to be able to go out and get” because then they wouldn’t have any money left for beer. New York is the second state to adopt this design and technology; Virginia began using it in 2009, and a spokeswoman for their DMV says they haven’t ever seen a “credible forgery” of the new ID. It’s a good thing there are 48 other states, right kids?

New York Introduces New Driver’s Licenses