Slashdot Mirror
A Look Into National ID Cards
mr.buddylee writes "Last month Slashdot reported a Popular Science story on your privacy. This month the magazine has a couple different articles about the future of security after the attacks on 9/11. Included is a very interesting read on National ID Cards which looks at possible technologies integrated into the card. For instance, how would you like a memory strip containing a digitized image of your fingerprints, your photo, your medical history and flight history stored in your wallet? All secured with what could be a less than secure Smart Card."
Your papers please.
the problem is, why do you need to show your ID to a police officer?
But what happens when you have to show it everyplace you go? what happens if you change a pattern of behaviour and it sets of a red flag and suddenly your being investigated?
This sort of stuff happens in russia. Back during the cold war, the USSR would do this, and that was w/o computers.
eyeballs change with time. Plus the same way you would fake an eyeball, is the sameway you would fake a thumb print, by changing the data on the card.
We, are a country of Independent states, with, what is supposed to be, very specific guidlines on what the feder government can do. Are fore-fathers knew that a central government that controls everything is bad for personal freedom.
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Why do we need to have a national ID? Why not just a federal minimum standard for ID cards, like data field locations, orientation, picture type, etc?
funny munging
Whether the information is on the physical card makes no difference. In fact, most likely you would not want to store much information on the card. Only the basic: name, address, physical characteristics, digitized picture, and that sort should be stored on the card. Just enough to make it roughly equivalent to a current ID, but a bit stronger.
For any effective system, the DB should be centrally managed. Both for revocation of ID's, and for security of the sensitive content.
The card has the person's private key, stored in a physically secure chip. That key can be authenticated against the government's issuing authority (as can the validity of the data on the card).
Then, data can be accessed from the central DB, according to the privileges allowed the requestor of the data, on the authority of the cardholder.
There are obvious security / privacy concerns. Particularly if the entity you fear abuse from the most is the government. But, it has the potential to offer a lot more privacy and security than current completely insecure systems.
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The problem is... having a national ID does not lead to the other effects that you mentioned!
What happens when you have to show it everyplace? What happened was that *something else* changed, not the existence of a national ID, but a more significant survillance.
In other words, you take what *may* be a perfectly reasonable measure for *personal security* (it might greatly reduce identity theft) and conflate it with police state behavior and then use that to condemn the technological measure.
Besides, we already have a national ID card in the US. It is called your drivers' license. Oops... it isn't national. BUT... that problem IMHO hurts the citizenry more than having a national one! It allows all sorts of fraud, because of its lack of standardization. And... it doesn't protect you one bit unless you are a criminal... because all of those drivers licenses are in the same database (or accessible through the same switch) just like a national ID owuld be.
Let's not get too knee-jerk about security measures. Some are important. Furthermore, we are in a new age - where a single individual, through technology, may be more dangerous than an entire military fleet or division was in the past. In a world like we now live in, we may need different security measures than we have had in the past.
The key to avoiding totalitarianism is not simply attacking every change in policing and security techniques. It is in fighting those which have no value, and more importantly, it is in fighting those who would actually engage in totalitarian practices.
The ID isn't the problem. Someone who would track innocent people for nefarious purposes is the problem. Prevent the latter, not the former. P
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