Slashdot Mirror
Updated Schedule for U.S. Biometric Passports
SRain315 writes "The story from the Chicago Times via Yahoo! give more details about biometric information to be added to U.S. passports. Trial run this fall, full production next year. Slashdot covered this last year."
Questions of privacy also had to be addressed because the chips will use radio frequency identification technology to transmit data. Without protection, the technology theoretically might allow people--identity thieves, for example, or intelligence agents other than immigration officials--to electronically and surreptitiously determine the identity of a passport holder.
I hope that these passports will come with some kind of jacket of material that can stop the radio transmissions or whatever -- sorry, I'm not much of a geek to know the intricate details of that kind of thing. I really don't think that such protection should be limited to those "in the know" about such things -- all American citizens traveling abroad should be given an information packet about the dangers of leaving that sort of data exposed to anyone and everyone in the country you're visiting.
The UK government is trying to introduce ID Cards that sound similar to this. I'd be interested to know if the Americans have taken on board problems that the UK trial encountered early on. These included contact lenses, I believe, as well as long fringes disrupting measurements between significant facial features.
"I think everyone is an agnostic but just doesn't know" - Frazz
Will they scan everyone entering the US from Mexico (and Canada)? At some border places it all ready takes an hour to cross...
It's pity to watch all those protests against violating your privacy. And no, I don't disagree about them, they are perfectly valid and right. It's just sad that they are.
...or, maybe, are there so many wannabe criminals? ;)
Think of this utopia: The government is honest, never abuses info collected about the people, allows you to do mostly anything that doesn't mean serious harm to others, doesn't steal from you, that respects you and provides you with all basic necessities a good government should.
Now would you really mind having a lot of data about yourself collected, then analysed for potential abuses of the system, then discarded when none, or some not important enough are found? While knowing that whoever actually tries to ruin your life will be caught and stopped just the same you would be if you actually meant some serious harm?
Collecting personal data by itself is harmless. It's how it may be abused is bad. And it's sad people have strong reasons not to trust the government enough to willingly provide it with their personal data.
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Your name, age, address, and photograph is going to be stored in the EU passport database the instant you cross an EU border if the US Biometric passport is issued.
Americans will have no control over what is done with this data. It will be retained forever, and shared within the EU as the EU sees fit.
Eventually, everyone everywhere that has a passport will be stored in every country's passport database, as the billions of international travellers criss cross the globe.
This will not happen if the Biometric passport effort fails. In the article, the spokesperson from one of the companies set to make billions out of shearing the western population talks about there not being "showstoppers". There are showstoppers. Ask any Australian about their sucessful fight against ID cards.
We can have a more secure passport without a centralized database. The problem is that the governments WANT centralized passport databases for the purposes of control. This biometric push has nothing to do with making passports that cannot be forged.
But you know this!
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Fake security - real control. This is to keep people IN - not out.... "In Soviet America, Passport stamps You!"
The parent got modded funny for the Soviet Russia joke; but he should be getting modded Insightful for pointing out the real reason from these new passports.
Like me expand a bit on his insight: these biometric passports are the thin edge -- a proof of concept, if you will -- of mandatory National ID cards.
Indeed, Homeland Security will point out stories, like the one posted above about the 88 illegal immigrants taking a domestic flight from California to New Jersey and the general ability if illegals to bypass our borders, as evidence that we will need a "fool-proof" way of ascertaining identity not only at the borders but inside the United States.
And since the biometric passport will by then have been, however reluctantly, accepted, the government will apply the same technology to National ID cards.
Of course, a National ID card is only useful if it's checked, so expect to see uniformed men asking you to present it: "Your papers, Citizen!". This will also have the useful -- for the government -- side effect of getting the citizenry used to seeing and docilely taking orders from uniformed "security" officers; you can already see that happening in airports and government buildings, where we've all learned to shut-up and passively follow orders from any guy with three days of training and a badge, on penalty of delay, harassment or arrest.
(This acclimation to the presence of soldiers as quasi law-enforcement, incidentally, is one of the requirements Army War College grad Charles Dunlap posits for "The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012", co-winner in 1992 of the of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff 1991-92 Strategy Essay Competition -- in other words, it's not a fringe tin-foil hat screed.)
Expect also that the government will quickly thereafter require presentation of the National ID for transactions that "terra'ists use", like banking or buying plane and train tickets, similar to the "Know Your Customer" requirements of the "Patriot" Act. A little way down the road, expect that the government will expanded the "significant economic activity" to encompass all credit card purchases -- and perhaps using the fig leaf of "preventing (economic) identity theft", will require your National ID Card be presented for all credit card purchases.
At that point, you'll either have to present you National ID Card several times a day, or remove yourself from "the grid" entirely. I can think of few ways better to suppress dissent than letting anyone contemplating it know that their movements can be tracked with this sort of granularity: "why did you use the ATM machine a block from the People Against Surveillance meeting, Citizen? are you a member of this anti-Patriotic organization"?
Now, some will accuse me of wearing my tin-foil hat too tight: I'll refer them to the subpoenaing of protest groups' membership records (dropped only after unfavorable publicity), the CAPPS II Airline screening and the subpoenaing of women's medical records of their abortions (this link from BusinessWeek, of all places, the FBI investigation of Freedom of Information act requests, and the Federal prosecution -- even after state charges were thrown out of court -- of peaceful protestors against Bush. And there are, unfortunately, many many more examples of the current administration supressing dissent -- in fact, if you're reading this, please reply with links to more of these cases.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
All these draconian 'security' measures are not needed because barbarians are at America's gates, but that American policies around the world are creating tensions that are easist to address via terrorism.
"Extra scrutiny" has never been shown to add true security. And the US government has been taking apart the US Constitution since the US Civil War. Consider the War Powers Act for one. The printing of a fiat currency for another. Censorship. Affirmative Action (aka 'reverse discrimination') which is strictly against the principles of the Constitution -- social engineering is ineffective and people, especially when considering generations: time and societies are not algebraic equations; you can't take away from Jim in 1850 and give Joe a handout in 2004 and make up for it. All it does is create a class of people who feel as though society owes them something, which it most surely does not. Clearly the Constitution never allowed for this; if it did, it would have included "inequalty" as its key premise. This does exist because the US government does indeed pervert the US Constituion.
Bastiat wrote of 'legal plunder' which is how the State works. In fact he wrote that the State was 'that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.' Whenever the State gives itself authority that the indiviuals making up that State do not have, it begins to live above the power that created it and by definition must oppress the creating power. That is the mechanism through which principles of civil rights are lost, which is quite different than judging such by contravening current laws. Laws flow from principles, not the other way.
"This isn't that complicated but nobody on /. understands it and they all bitch about things that understanding it would resolve and I am sick of it."
Okay, well let's imagine for a moment that we don't think anyone involved in the implementation of smartcards understands these ideas either.
It's not that strange. After all, secure voting protocols exist, but they're completely unknown amongst the people who build voting machines for government use. Why should we imagine that smartcard contractors are any less ignorant of secure protocols?
How better to desensitize herds into accepting it... Think of the stormtroopers in 5th Element...ubiquitous A/V mapping in Demolition Man(not to mention Arnie as pres.)...eyescanners in Minority Report...going back a ways, total identity check in Gattaca... The question isn't what affect this has on the now...What's the long term goal here? I can't fathom... Imagine Columbus, Magellan, Polo, any of them being asked for biometric ID! It's as ridiculous as the concept that any of us really own anything!
Point taken. An interesting and scary variation of this could spawn from: http://news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,954972 3%255E15306,00.html
where someone or a cell of people strategically placed can easily or brute-force interfere with Wi-Fi-based controls and directions systems. Maybe they'll never controllably manipulate the systems, but interfering with them, making them repeatedly shut down or restart or have address-assignment contention issues and the like would be a heinous denial of service attack.
If such an attack occurred to an immigration facility or an airport, thousands of travellers would suddenly find themselves in "lock-down". Imagine if the airports start getting retrofitted with cell-block doors or drop-gates to keep hoards of wanton or impatient travelers in place until the computers are rebooted (which in the case of windoze, with the issues w2k seems to be having with dual-homed Wi-Fi/traditional nic devices, could be troublesome), inspection agents sign back in, guards wait for the OK to open the gates, and then people tear the place up rushing to their taxis... Maybe the parking system might be wonky, and then nobody gets out without paying the maximum daily rate...
Sigh, the opportunities for juvenile to international exploits...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Heck, it's just that not everbody thinks thet hardware biometric schemes are as generically secure as you think they are. I dunno if they're all maroons. There might be some people on Slashdot who fritter away their home time coming up with faster ways to determine whether p mod n is primitive for large n and who like to analyze the power consumption of hardware devices to gain information about the bits that comprise the keys stored therein, or mebbe not.
You appear to be a mite irritated by the notion that everyone on Slashdot seems to be pretty ignorant of cryptography stuff. Here's how I'd use that against you:
I would create two files of the same size. The first file would contain stuff that I wanted to hide from you. The second file would contain the stuff that I wanted you to discover. I would use a cryptographically strong psuedorandom number generator seeded with a passphrase to make an XOR pad, and I'd encrypt and overwrite the first file with it. Then I'd use that as a pad and XOR and overwrite the second file. The result would be two files of random-looking gibberish that when XORed together, resulted in the second file. I'd leave the second file ciphertext out somewhere for you to find, and I'd scatter the first file ciphertext around in slack space or wherever to make it hard, but not impossible to find.
I think that your belief that other people are hayseeds would cause you to stop investigating when you found the XOR decryption pad for the second file and successfully decrypted the second file. I do not believe that you would pause to consider that a completely different file was stored within the decryption pad.
Among a larger audience however, like the set of Slashdotters, it would be virtually certain to occur to somebody. No matter how smart you are, there are always people who have different and potentially useful perspectives.
Anyway, it seems like the "if the system is properly implemented" could be a mighty big if. Doesn't it seem probable that there will be an error or two in a complex system's implementation?
Yes, yes. I should take off my tinfoil hat. Here's a novel idea: maybe you should consider whether I'm the one with the tinfoil hat, or you're the one with blinders?
I will take off my tinfoil hat when I have a president that was clearly voted into office and not one who's appointment via a set of judges is questionable, at best. I will take off my tinfoil hat when I live in a country that doesn't preemptively attack sovereign nations in a sorry display of blatant imperialism. I will take off my tinfoil hat when PATRIOT is rolled back. I will take off my tinfoil hat when my country stops detaining people without lawyers, outside contact, or any hope for a fair trial even if they've not been charged with anything. I will take off my tinfoil hat when the mere act of getting on an airplane doesn't subject me to a terrorism rorschach test. I will take off my tinfoil hat when we have an administration that doesn't think the answer to every question is "terrorism". I will take off my tinfoil hat when we have an administration that actually tells the people it supposedly serves what it's doing now and then.
Or, to sum it all up: I'll take off my tinfoil hate the second America comes back around to being America and not one goddamn second sooner.
That makes no sense. If they already knew who they were, what good would a biometric system do? Is this new system magically going to tell them why people are here and everything they're going to do? No. That's stupid. Whoop-dee-frickin-doo. We can tell when some big badass comes in, in the unbelievably unlikely event that they do. Of course, if some sucker that just got recruited a few days ago gets sent in, well, we're shit out of luck, now aren't we? Gee. So... WHAT problem does this solve, exactly?
I am a US citizen...
Ah yes, preface all statements with that little tidbit and that's that, right? Well, I'M a U.S. citizen and I do have a problem with it. It's just another bullshit feelgood scheme to make everyone think these dumbasses are doing anything. In the meantime, it costs money, it's going to back things up at the airport when the initial rollout doesn't work right, and it's yet another governmental power that they'll never want to give up once they've got it. It's easily turned against individual citizens and it serves no other purpose.
People always act like the U.S. government is some big huggy teddy bear. Well, it's not. Like any other government, it wants to grow and control. Funny thing about those built-in checks and balances, huh? Except, now, we're letting them kick those checks and balances right out the window. People are going to be awfully surprised when they wake up and realize one day that the U.S. government wasn't anything special, it was just built in a way that made it harder for it to turn on its own people.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!