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.
From the article:
"As the system is envisioned, Americans still will be able to mail their passport photographs to the State Department. The department will encode them into the passport chips and add them to a database."
So, you never even get personally face scanned. They put information into the chip that lets a face scanner automatically check if your face looks like the picture on the passport... which is exactly what the humans sitting at the desk do anyways under the current system. What is this adding to our security?
Besides buzzwords.
"TV is great! Every New Year's I make a resolution to watch more TV." - Ann Coulter
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
I don't like this idea. Last thing I need when I'm in some third world country is passport showing a blue screen of death. "Welcome to Congo, Mr. Thread Exception!"
I personally don't mind extra scrutiny if it's in the name of keeping me and my family alive.
People in 1933 Germany were quite happy to put up with Hitler's new policies, and give up "some" of their civil rights, for a variety of perfectly valid reasons too...
Do you realize the government is taking the constitution apart slowly but surely?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
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?
Yes, constitutional rights were violated before 9/11. However, now everytime someone wants to pass a law curtailing the public's rights, they proclaim that it is a "security measure" designed to "fight terror." It isn't like it was impossible to get obviously unconstitutional laws into place before 9/11, but now it is easy. Before, patriots said "Give me liberty, or give me death!", but now our government (I wouldn't call these people, as a group, patriots) says "Give up liberty for fear of death!"
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