Here's what I know so far:

The draft regs had absolutely no privacy protections for personal information in the machine readable zone. This means if a company, restaurant, club, bar, etc., swiped the back of your Real ID driver's license, there would be no protections that you could rely on (absent a small handful of states that protect that information).

The final rule does nothing to change this - there are still no protections for our information. One of the points made on the call was that this would enable a dept. store to grab your info, match it up with your purchase history, thus enabling them to send you more physical spam. It would also make it a lot easier for data brokers/aggregators to buy and sell information about you - in some cases back to the government.

The draft regs discussed costs, and acknowledged the huge burden this would have on the states. However, the final rule didn't really do anything to help ease the burden. What they did instead was to assume that one in four people wouldn't get a Real ID drivers license (no reason given, seemed like it was a number pulled out of a hat), and based on one in four number, reduced the costs of the card.

This tactic is interesting because DHS contemplates employers, the insurance industry, and others will use the card, yet one out of four people won't have a card. This means that one out of four people will automatically become second class citizens, and may have a more difficult time getting a job or insurance.

In terms of timeline for compliance, DHS has pushed the deadline way back. People over 50 won't have to comply for 10 years, all others will have 7 years to comply. The general consensus was that this is a hugely difficult rule to put into place, and that it may never be possible do do correctly, so DHS and the Bush administration want to kick the responsibility for Real ID to whoever becomes president next. The Bush admin. doesn't want the blame for all of the implementation fiascos that are sure to happen.

The verification systems for the breeder documents (certified birth certificates, for example) are still not in place, so it's not really possible to implement right now anyway.

Something that I didn't know -- Obama, Clinton, and Huckabee are all against Real ID. If one of them is elected, there is a fair chance that the Real ID law could be repealed.