Most people, for some odd reason, care deeply about how their driver’s license photo appears. They want it to be just perfect. And yet the pictures seem to always come out bad anyway.

But when you go in to the DMV and you actually want your picture to look bad, the pictures which actually come out are pretty funny.

As part of a new movie, independent filmmakers Will Carsola and Dave Stewart went into the Virginia DMV while dressed in some rather crazy outfits, not quite expecting the bureaucrats to actually take their picture and issue licenses, but the bureaucrats did anyway.

Watch their two videos:

Part 1

Part 2

Needless to say, the bureaucrats are quite ticked off that someone showed them up for the idiots they really are.

“We have sent letters to the individuals that basically require them to appear at DMV to reapply for their driver’s licenses and surrender any previously issued licenses” within 15 days, DMV spokesman Bill Foy said. . . .

“We were like, ‘There’s no way this is going to work,’” Mr. Stewart said in a telephone interview. “Even when I did the kung-fu guy, it surprised me how little they laughed. Will had red skin, and they didn’t even tell him to come back when it was normal.”

Mr. Foy said the men’s actions weren’t illegal, because they didn’t obscure their appearance with hats or sunglasses, but they did abuse the system.

“Using a disguise while obtaining a driver’s license is not a joke,” he said. — Washington Times

It looks like a joke to me.

“I was up at the booth talking to the guy for like 20 minutes and he kept stalling and going in the back,” Carsola says in the video, after having gotten a license with his face spray-painted red. “They thought I was some sort of terrorist or something.”

These guys have done the Virginia DMV–and the nation– a big favor. Many of us have tried to argue how much of a joke these agencies and our homeland security remain after 9/11–particularly the issuance of driver’s licenses (it was the Virginia DMV that issued state photo ID to several 9/11 hijackers who were aided by illegal aliens).

But few dissertations and policy analyses drive the message home more effectively than these two damning videos. — Michelle Malkin

This is a good time to remind everyone that identification does not equal security. Unless, of course, by “security” you mean cataloging everyone so that you can round up the undesirables later and ship them off to internment camps. But that’s not security for the people, it’s security for the state against the people.

Perhaps that’s the reason behind all this?

“I honestly don’t know if she realizes that REAL ID won’t solve this kind of problem, though,” writes security expert Bruce Schneier. “Nor will it solve the problem of people getting legitimate IDs in the names of people whose identity they stole, or real IDs in fake names by bribing DMV employees.”

I really couldn’t say it any better.

The fatal flaw in “homeland security” is that the state is your enemy. It doesn’t have your interests in mind. It has its own interests in mind. So long as putting on a show of “keeping people safe” serves its interests, that’s what it will do. When it no longer serves the state’s interests, then “homeland security” will become the department which keeps the state safe from the people, rather than keeping the people safe.