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National Biometric IDs
Jester998 writes "I just came across this article about how two U.S. congressmen want biometric identification. They're trying to avoid the controversial 'national ID' issue by creating what would be new drivers licenses with biometric information embedded. What does the Slashdot community think about having your retinal pattern embedded on a smart card?"
i'd just like my retinas embedded on a smart card. then i could see if i have correct change before pulling out my wallet.
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fight global cooling
What does the Slashdot community think about having your retinal pattern embedded on a smart card?"
The same as ALL THE OTHER attempts to remove our privacy...NO! NO! How often does this need to be repeated before people finally understand that "NO" really does mean "NO"?
It's not the method of privacy removal that we find disgusting. It's the removal of the privacy in the first place.
There's no sig like this sig anywhere near this sig, so this must be the sig.
Setting aside the privacy issues for a moment, how do these guys figure that $315 million will be enough money to create this system?
After all, with the current US population somewhere in the neighborhood of 270+ million (I'm too lazy to look up a more accurate estimate) they think they can create and implement this system for just over $1 per citizen?
Seems a little conservative to me.
Think For Yourself. Question Authority.
Why not just mark everybody's hand and forehead? If they don't have the mark, don't let them buy and sell. Easy as that.
Nobody is asking what the problem is that this is supposed to address. Step 1) of implementing a security measure is to ask "What is the problem it addresses?"
So, what is the problem? Terrorism? The 9/11 terrorists HAD legal id. Having their DNS sequence on the card would not have stopped them.
I haven't considered all of the ramifications, but I think it's a good idea. There may be privacy issues, but, really, who cares if your retinal pattern is in a database somewhere? It isn't as if your DNA is being sampled[1].
What makes this a GOOD idea is that identity theft would be much more difficult. Right now, if someone gets a hold of your SSN, they can screw you over. It's much more difficult to recreate a retinal pattern.
David Brin refers to this distinction in The Transparent Society. Your SSN maybe a good identification number, but in many cases it is also used as a password, which is just foolish, because you can't change it, and it can be stolen. On the other hand, a retinal scan, as I said above, makes an excellent ID/password, because it is so difficult to duplicate.
I'm still interested to hear other's arguments against this.
[1] The implication here is that insurance companies may be able to get a hold of your DNA and use the information within against you.
The basic question is easily stated: do we apply the privacy desires of the majority, or the privacy desires of the individual? The majority may very well not have a problem with having megabytes of data in every corporate database that leads to loads of junk mail, spam, targeted ads, higher insurance, HMO profiling, your neighbor knowing about how depressed you got when your fiancee left you, if you are a women, the creepy guy down the street finding out when you shop and what tv shows you like so he can always "bump into you"... ad naseum. Once the data is open, it will get used in... creative... ways that we can't predict.
So... I am a mass of data. I know what I like, what I don't like, my favorite indulgences, my pet peeves, my moral boundaries. I don't want my neighbor knowing.
Biometric info on my ATM card? Sure! As long as it *remains tied* to that account. If you start cross correlating that with my purchasing and medical data, that starts to worry the hell out of me. Not for what will happen in the next few years - but for how my children's children will live.
Do we really all want to live on the set of the aptly named "Big Brother" with any corporation or neighbor with a wallet able to predict, profile and peer into our lives?
I am data, and I want to be able to control who knows me.
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Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
I think that's what this is trying to avoid. The whole problem with National Id cards is what you just described.
Biometric encoding would eliminate this because you could easily match a peron to an id card.
My problem with this kind of stuff is just the security involved. I'm a System Administrator and so I know first hand how lazy people can be when it comes to security. People always choose convenience over security. No matter what. And the U.S government is no exception.
A couple small examples:
In the gulf war a U.S Navy ship was compromised and e-mail was leaked.
Presently there's a group of blackhat's calling themselves "The Deceptive Duo" who have succesfully hacked into government systems..
I don't want to trust every single piece of information that's very personal to an irresponsible government that doesn't take the security of it's network seriously. Because most likely everyone's information will be stored in a single database that government officials can use to lookup your information. It's already happening it's just not as centralized as they want it to be.
I guess the idea is that if you get pulled over the cop will take a hand or retinal scan, go to his cruiser and get every single piece of information he could possibly need to know about you from a central database.
That scares because of both security and privacy concerns that I have.
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Garett
Harder?!? Like when Arnie used an employee's dismembered thumb to gain unauthorized access in The Sixth Day, or when Wesley used a employee's eyeball to escape from prison in Demolition Man??? Oh no, biometric technology will simply cause violent crimes to increase. Identity theft will come to signify the loss of a finger or eyeball! We must rely on movies to provide the rationalization our policy makers lack : )
It wouldn't be so bad if the card could be used for verification, and not identification. If the cards could answer specific questions, yes or no would be sufficient instead of divulging all sorts of other information that I would not necessarily want divulged.
For example, there are bars now that at the door have a magnetic strip reader which is used for verification purposes. This makes it easy for the bar to make sure a patron is 21 or over by swiping the person's driver's license. It does verify that the person is over 21, but also records their birth date, DL number, address, height, weight, eye color, and driver restrictions which the bar uses for marketing purposes.
In the same situation I would want a smart card to just answer two simple questions; Does this person belong to this card? (yes/no) and Is this person 21 years of age or over? (yes/no). And nothing else.
For airline checkpoints, does this person belong with this ticket, yes or no? Does this person belong with this baggage? This way everything is on the card and your personal information is not tracked all over the place. Of course the government doesn't want this because they can't track anyone this way.
-Matt
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
Part of an article by Bruce Schneier:
Biometrics don't handle failure well. Imagine that Alice is using her thumbprint as a biometric, and someone steals the digital file. Now what? This isn't a digital certificate, where some trusted third party can issue her another one. This is her thumb. She has only two. Once someone steals your biometric, it remains stolen for life; there's no getting back to a secure situation.
And biometrics are necessarily common across different functions. Just as you should never use the same password on two different systems, the same encryption key should not be used for two different applications. If my fingerprint is used to start my car, unlock my medical records, and read my electronic mail, then it's not hard to imagine some very unsecure situations arising.
Biometrics are powerful and useful, but they are not keys. They are not useful when you need the characteristics of a key: secrecy, randomness, the ability to update or destroy. They are useful as a replacement for a PIN, or a replacement for a signature (which is also a biometric). They can sometimes be used as passwords: a user can't choose a weak biometric in the same way they choose a weak password.
Biometrics are useful in situations where the connection from the reader to the verifier is secure: a biometric unlocks a key stored locally on a PCM-CIA card, or unlocks a key used to secure a hard drive. In those cases, all you really need is a unique hard-to-forge identifier. But always keep in mind that biometrics are not secrets.
http://www.counterpane.com/insiderisks1.html
A biometric ID won't make us less free. It probably won't make us more secure against terror, although reliable ID might have caught Ahmed Ressam, the guy who plotted to blow up LAX, then panicked at a routine border search. He had come and gone across the US border with different Canadian passports. Sure, half of his names were on watch lists, so he just switched identities. Had he not blown his cool, a lot of people could have died.
But that isn't what interests me.
Here is where a biometric ID can help:Identity Theft
It is trivially easy to impersonate someone and rack up credit card charges, commit crime with their identity, etc. Biometric IDs would put a stop to that.
A year ago, my wife's wallet was stolen from her gym locker. The usual credit card fraud ensued, which was stopped within a few hours.
Then the crook took her drivers license, somehow mangled it, and got the her picture on the front and my wife's name. Apparently, the Illinois DMV doesn't compare you to a file picture when you get an ID. This let them write checks on that identity, taking out loans (despite calls to every credit agency to put a watch on that sort of thing), culminating in the purchase (with a stolen check) and financing (naturally) of a used Ford Explorer at a sleazy car dealership too lazy to verify the bank balance or credit info.
Once the car check bounced, the dealer reported the theft, the cops came to us talking about grand theft auto. After some explaining, the license plate (in my wife's name, of course) was put into the police database. Amazingly, they actually caught this crook when she tried to pass one of the checks for a carton of smokes. The check came up bad (for once!), the store called the cops, who ran the plate of the SUV and got her. She naturally looks nothing like my wife, who is short, skinny, and white, not tall, obese, and black.
The moral of the story is that it is easy to impersonate someone, causing harm to that person because there is no biometric element at any point in the US ID system.
It doesn't make us more free because we have unreliable ID. Most of us never have a reason to fake an identity (save trivial stuff like faking your grocery club card). We don't get a privacy benefit from poor ID, we just have the risk of identity theft. How are you less free because your identity may be tied to your physical person? How are you more free because your identity is (at present) not 100% properly verified when you get a passport or drivers license?
We already leave data trails almost everywhere we go. These can be picked up by commercial concerns interested in selling you the exact type of extreme soda for your demographic. A biometric ID won't change that.
Your SSN will still be in 1000 poorly secured databases, ripe for the taking. The only thing a biometric ID will do is make it harder to impersonate someone else.
I say it is high time we get ID that works.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: a far better authentication system would be to have your biometric information, picture, and name on the card, but have it digitally signed by multiple private keys held by the government in different places. Duplication would be virtually impossible, since you would have to get access to the biometry (not that hard), then get it signed by all of the keys (very hard).
Anyone could validate that you are you by verifying the digital signatures and checking the picture or biometry. Since the name, picture and biometry are signed as a unit, there's no way to create a card with your biometry and another person's name and picture without cracking all of the keys.
Apparently the bill "directs that the chip [on the license] be capable of accepting software for other applications, including those of private companies".
This isn't about security, it's a taxpayer-funded giveaway of your privacy to big corporations. It'll save them a few bucks lost to fraud and make this even more of an electronic nanny state.
Luckily the EFF spokesman pointed out that "The real thrust... is so that the ID card or driver's license will be even more useful to commercial entities in terms of tracking consumers, doing consumer profiling, telemarketing -- all those kinds of things that people currently consider to be an invasion of privacy."
And the Center for Democracy and Technology calls it a "honeypot".
This has to be fought on the retail level. Hopefully Joe and Jane Public have enough love of freedom left to be skeptical of the government fingerprinting them at the DMV. If it turns out they don't, I'm ashamed of-- and afraid for-- my country.