Real-ID: Costs and Benefits:

All of these problems demonstrate that identification checks based on Real ID won’t be nearly as secure as we might hope. But the main problem with any strong identification system is that it requires the existence of a database. In this case, it would have to be 50 linked databases of private and sensitive information on every American -- one widely and instantaneously accessible from airline check-in stations, police cars, schools, and so on.

The security risks of this database are enormous. It would be a kludge of existing databases that are incompatible, full of erroneous data, and unreliable. Computer scientists don’t know how to keep a database of this magnitude secure, whether from outside hackers or the thousands of insiders authorized to access it.

And yet, there's a group that will carry on insisting that this is something we must have. We open ourselves up to theft of identity information on a grand scale, and for what? As Schneier continues:

Even worse, as soon as you divide people into two categories -- more trusted and less trusted people -- you create a third, and very dangerous, category: untrustworthy people whom we have no reason to mistrust. Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh; the Washington, DC, snipers; the London subway bombers; and many of the 9/11 terrorists had no previous links to terrorism. Evildoers can also steal the identity -- and profile -- of an honest person. Profiling can result in less security by giving certain people an easy way to skirt security.

So, we do all of this Real ID nonsense, and what do we get? Oh, right. Less security. Along with the false sense of security, we also receive diminished privacy, heightened risks to privacy, greater government aggregation of data that is is unlikely to be able to manage, and just generally a worse situation than we had before.