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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%!
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
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?
The European scheme, with fingerprints and retinal scans, would disturb me a bit more if I were subject to it.