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U.S. Biometric Passports By Late 2004
truthsearch writes "The Register is reporting 'Current plans call for the new passport books to include a contactless smart chip based on the 14443 standard, with a minimum of 32 Kbytes of EEPROM storage. The chip will contain a compressed full-face image for use as a biometric. European biometric passports, by contrast, are planned to feature both retinal and fingerprint recognition biometrics on their smart cards.' How they tie this to '9/11 fears' is curious considering the hijackers had valid paperwork."
It doesn't effect privacy either; it's just kinda worthless, since "Adbar" could be a terrorist, but hey, we don't know that; we just know he's Adbar! 100%!
It's nothing to fear, infact, it is about time that this technology got implimented. It is a secure way of verifying a person's identity. It's not tracking software, so you can still move freely about the globe as long as you are supposed too.
As for the 9-11 throwback, this technology wouldn't help so much, but it does have some excellent usages for preventing fake id's, as well as locating kidnapped or missing children.
Burninating the villagers, burninating the country side. TROGDOR!
This honestly doesn't seem like such a big deal to me. Consider that this changes very little: there's already a picture on your passport, and any country that wants could just photocopy or scan that. This probably won't help prevent terrorism, though it certainly seems to eliminate a less sophisticated avenue of fraud. Far fewer people have the technology to produce a fake passport with a smart chip than without.
Here's another interesting potential positive. When you want a visa to visit a country (something we americans don't need to do for most "westernized" nations) you usually need to send along 2 passport-sized photos, which means the PITA of going to get pictures taken. Now, if the embassy of Brunei has a smartcard reader for the passport, they could just download the picture from your passport instead! Electronic storage of visas and such might even eventually let us do all these things over the net.
There are privacy issues with any form of identification, but they rely less on what the identifier is but more on how it is used. If we want to preserve our rights, we need to fight against regulations forcing us to show or carry ID (a la Gilmore). The form these IDs take is not so important (well, unless they want to implant them in our skin, or make them checkable via radio, etc, but these are separate animals...)
Q:Doctor, how many autopsies have you performed on dead people?
A:All my autopsies have been performed on dead peop
I think it'd be more interesting to make the passport work on more levels, though, such as encoding your driver's license and other relevant information to make it more convenient to use for identification (irregardless of what you're doing, you'd only have to carry one ID wherever you go.) Maybe even include an ability to pay with the card, with a credit issuer encoding their information in the chip -- use the card in a vending machine/gas pump/computer peripheral, verify with a fingerprint, and away you go.
As the original contractor/code-monkey on the INSPASS project, I'm amazed it only took 10 years to cut through enough of the beaurocratic B.S.
... with a photo.
Aside from the very REAL issue of "who owns the data," were battles over smart cards, chips, which biometric was better, how to store the data. I remember one prototype was a smart card augmented with a 2d barcode, a regular barcode, an OCR-B readable (for hand geometry), and a magstripe
Of course, precision of card printing being what it is, the photo would often obscure or otherwise make the data in the other formats unreadable.
Now the question is how fast will they be able to look up the data at the ports of entry? Hopefully, the squabbling between INS and Customs is done and over. Back then, INS accessed a variety of "look-ups" via Customs. It wasn't pretty.
Let's see if this not only makes the system more reliable, but speeds things up.
--- have you healed your church website?
For me, the issue isn't that this invades privacy (although it's not unprecendented for governments to sell personal information from their databases when they run low on cash). The problem is that this is a whole lot of effort to go through to fix a security problem that doesn't exist. So you don't have 100% biometric proof that so-and-so is the REAL so-and-so. Guess what? Even with this biometric information, you're STILL not 100% sure, just a lot surer. And what exactly does this information get you, security-wise? Well, you know that Mr. Psycho Bomber is the REAL Mr. Psycho Bomber, and you happily let him pass because he couldn't be up to no good if he's not concealing his identity.
Shit. We'd be more secure if we had a policy of only allowing women on planes, because there's actual statistical evidence to show they're less likely to cause problems. Sure it'd upset some people, but is it really better to implement a policy that doesn't even fix anything?
This is just my opinion, but I think you seriously underestimate the potential sinister motives behind such policy.
I know it's been said that one should never attribute to malice what stupidity can explain, but I really don't think stupidity explains the goings on in the USA during the last ~2 years.
My issue is this. A passport should allow me to travel to countries that are on good terms with the United States. It should also have some personal identification because the U.S. has to issue it to me and not just any American.
But, is the addition of further features of personal identification the needless expansion of government knowledge of personal and private affairs (travel)? Or, is it a needful response to the the increasingly international and individual nature of crime and warfare (from international corporate criminals to terrorists)?
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
I can't wait to sneak someones passport into a microwave :-) A short range EMP device could then cause lots of trouble over lunch near the airport. I hope these things have regular pictures too, they're a little more durable.
The European scheme, with fingerprints and retinal scans, would disturb me a bit more if I were subject to it.
Leaving aside the privacy concerns of the biometric data, smart chips in passports are not a bad idea per se. As Frank Moss is quoted in the article: "you can read a chip and confirm its validity, but you cannot create one. That is the beauty of public key technology". And I have to say that's actually a very good reason for including chips -- it will be impossible to create fake passports. It will of course still be possible to duplicate existing ones... I wonder what percentage of fraudulent passports are "fake" as opposed to "altered"? It would be interesting to know.
No matter what you all think, biometric identification does increase security because everyone is unique. You may see this as just "He's who he is, that's great!" but there are much broader implications. Now, i'm not an advocate of face recognition or iris scanning, one because face recognition is a very faulty system, and iris scanning is very awkward because you have to be right next to the camera for a good picture. Take a technology such as fingerprinting and there you have what you need for safety. A company called CrossMatch Technologies has a fingerprint identification system that is compatible with the FBI database of possible law-breakers and other things that state someone is a US citizen. If someone is scanned in an airport and checked against that database and either found to be a "not-so-good" person or someone who is not a US citizen, then appropriate safety measures can be taken. I think all of you against this technology need a reality check. No one is going to track us, they are merely keeping us safe.
"Anything that's invented after you're 35 is against the natural order of things" - Douglas Adams
Who gets to decide who is "supposed to" move from point A to point B? The government? Come on. No one has any right to tell you what countries you can or cannot go to. Beware of anyone who suggests otherwise.
Check out my world simulator thingy.
Seriously, this is just another attempt by the U.S. government aimed to increase government spending and give a false sense of security to millions of Americans believe that yet another technological wonder will save our lives.
I am afraid that this so-called bio-passport will let us fall in the path of high-tech internet boom of late nineties: everybody thought that Internet would positively change our lives and the way we did business, unfortunately nobody thought of outsourcing and digitally imported foreign labor. Sure, the idea of something electronic that serves as a signature for our identity is nice; however, why would our government spend tons of money on something that might work instead of directing this money to proven methods like hiring security guards with common sense and proper training?
Additionally, I am afraid that this new technology will be another excuse for not paying attention to broader aspects of the issue; will the checkpoints rely more on the magic chip or on the skills of security officers? Personally, I would rather see well equipped security guards that are in excellent physical condition rather an old lady with "An Idiot's Guide to Biometrics."
P.S.: can you imagine a beowulf cluster of those?
Just like you couldn't mod an Xbox without a mod chip, right? Or break CSS? Or coordinate a massive attack on the two largest towers in the world and fly /two/ planes into them? These guys are idiots.
Tell a geek he or she can't do something, and that something will get done.
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
Not that you are necessarily from the US, but you do realize that current US passport photos are digital scans of the photo you already have to send them, right? And you don't think they save that photo in a database? As other posters have mentioned, it makes no difference whether it is stored on a chip on the passport or not in this case.
Project Steve
While I see why they would want to implement a system like this, has anyone answered the question of just how accurate biometrics are? I've heard that fingerprints taken from a crime scene can be 30-40% different from a "matching" print.
So how accurate is facial recognition? or retinal scans? or even electronic fingerprint scans? I mean, with 32Kbytes, is that more than enough information to positively id someone?
My first thought upon reading the article was: "I doubt the circutry would last long in my microwave."
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Suppose you get into bankruptcy. Well, all your financial data is under SS#666-23-2342. If you get a new SS#, would they necessarily know how to trace you if you wanted to open a bank account? Or would they think 'no problem, no background on this SS#' and give it to you? (simplified, I know, but the take the general idea)
I'm not shy, I'm stalking my prey
The greencard project was pretty fun, and I only worked on it briefly (no, I can't help you get one, I have no real ties to the folks that took over the project, and the project was run well so that "inside" information really didn't help you much -- everything I know that isn't useless serial driver crap, you can pretty much get by reading the press releases).
The really funny part for me was the requirement that the card needed to be durable enough to remain readable for up to 5 years, stored in the shoe of a migrant worker. QA on that has to suck
The reason the buying alcohol with a fake trick works is that if you show reasonably-close ID, then the clerk is no longer at fault if you're underage. Consider the difference between these two situations:
Officer: You just sold alcohol to a 16-year old. Did you card him?
You: No
Officer: You're in trouble, then.
vs.
Officer: You just sold alcohol to a 16-year old. Did you card him?
You: Yes, and the picture looked like him.
Officer: Well, it turns out it was his older brother. Try to be more careful next time.
At that point, it's the 16-year-old's fault for posessing a fake id and using it to misrepresent himself. Both are crimes in the US.
Also, it's in the store's best interest to sell to as many people as they can. After all, they're in the biz to make money. Not to enforce our puritanical drinking laws.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
Extremely fast processing. You enter the gateway, put your passport into a special slot, and off you go. It's a godsend in the Singapore Malaysia border where millions of people cross the causeway daily.
The passport has all the regular pages and stuff and only gets stamped by countries who don't share the similar chip system. The downside to it all is that the Malaysian immigration office don't stamp your passport anymore. And that's bad considering I'd love to have those little stamps telling me when I left the country and what not.