Slashdot Mirror
RFID Drivers' Licenses Debated
meganthom writes "How would you feel about having an RFID chip in your driver's license? Virginia is considering just such a measure, largely because several of the 9/11 hijackers were licensed there. Civil rights advocates are obviously unhappy with this turn of events, and it seems the ACLU has already taken the case. Proponents claim it would help law enforcement determine that you are who you claim to be and would make forgeries less common. The Federal government is also considering uniform 'smart card' standards."
How soon until you can buy a pocket ID sniffer/cloner? Or the plans become available on the latest 'warez' site? Great. Just by walking down the street 20 people can steal my identity...
A pickpocket's dream come true! You can steal from a passerby without laying a hand on them.
I doubt an RFID in a drivers licence is any kind of deterrent when you're prepared to hijack a plane and kill yourself and everyone else in it by crashing it into a building.
Virginia government officials need to keep reading this until they get it:
THE 9/11 HIJACKERS HAD VALID DRIVERS LICENSES.
THE 9/11 HIJACKERS HAD VALID DRIVERS LICENSES.
THE 9/11 HIJACKERS HAD VALID DRIVERS LICENSES.
THE 9/11 HIJACKERS HAD VALID DRIVERS LICENSES.
Stop using the hijackings to justify your pet police state!
fair enough, you wouldn't mind.
but I'm not getting Viriginia's apparent reasoning for introducing the RFIDs - "Virginia is considering just such a measure, largely because several of the 9/11 hijackers were licensed there". How would have RFID helped? It's a non sequitur.
As I understand it, the issue wasn't that identification failed at the airport. So how would RFID have helped?
-- james
More direct attacks on privacy and tracking all Americans, in the name of 9/11, with something that would have had absolutely no effect on preventing the 9/11 attack at all.
Perhaps a better idea would be to not give terrorists drivers licenses at all, or maybe not to give illegal alliens drivers licenses at all. Instead many states (including mine) have gone out of their way to make it easy for known illegal alliens to obtain drivers licenses! But somehow at the same time this is being used to justify making people cary one more thing that will make it extremely easy to track them.
Kind of makes you think that all those crackpots who question how and why World Trade Center Building 7 collapsed when it wasn't even hit by planes, the only skyscraper to ever collapse from such a fire before or since, might be on to something.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
How, EXACTLY, would the 9-11 attackers been stopped if they had been issued RFID drivers licenses? There is no sane connection. I can't think of any easier examples to prove that government and businesses are taking advantage of the 9-11 fear to lock us down. PATRIOT acts, car transponders, GPSed cell phones, RFID armbands, implants, RFIDed ID cards, biometrics... NONE OF THESE THINGS would have stopped those men from crashing those planes into the towers. But that attack is used to justify every possible wet dream of a police state.
Now, onto Project TinFoilHat. If issued such a card, I will build a Faraday cage into a belt pouch, and there their assine tracking device can sit until a POLICEMAN asks to see it. I know damned well they can build RFID detectors that can work at great distances; I will not cooperate and being tracked on a giant Ms. Pac Man screen by whomever can afford the equipment.
As for those of you who don't care about this, you are good Germans. What else can I say.
You carry your licence so that people know who you are, and this would just provide a better way to verify that information.
I carry my drivers license so I can drive. I have no interest in other people knowing "who I am".
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
what makes you think that the people passing this law won't also make it illegal to purposely block or interfere with the signal?
It seems to me that the proper course of action would be to prevent this from becoming law in the first place.
We do not have to carry our papers.
Yet.
"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." - Thomas Jefferson
I'm genuinely curious, what is it you're afraid of? Life is sometimes hard and good people sometimes die. Is it worth living in a police state to somehow keep that one set of crazed morons from blowing something up? Honestly, is it worth it?
How about this: Let's stop pissing people off so that they don't feel like it's worthwhile to blow our stuff up. Then, let's stop blowing up their stuff so that they won't have any reason to retaliate.
There, we're right back where we should have been pre-9/11. Stop being frightened by the boogey-man-terrorist. Oh, he's out there alright, and he's real, but I'm much more worried about the crazies here in our own country, with valid IDs, that think they need to kill their girlfriends when they break up with them, or hold babies out of car windows while driving, or go on a sniper rampage in Washington DC.
You can get struck by lightning, or a car can come careening out of control and smush you into the sidewalk in a New York Minute. Drunk drivers are way more dangerous than any terrorist to you. Police-state Gestapo tacticts are way more dangerous to you than any terrorist.
"Virginia is considering just such a measure, largely because several of the 9/11 hijackers were licensed there."
because wouldn't everyone agree that it would have been just so much better if the 9/11 hijackers had Virginia drivers licenses with RFID chips embedded in them when they flew into the WTC. Sigh. Putting RFID chips in drivers licenses doesn't make it any harder for someone (terrorist or not) to get a drivers license. It wouild make just about as much sense to say "Virginia is considering just such a measure because tasty smoked ham is made in Virginia. There's no correlation between the two, but every effect must have a cause, so we'll use ham." I'm thinking that the "logic" here is that if they know someone is a terrorist, they can use RFID chip scanners to find them more easily. But if you know someone's a terrorist, then maybe you should arrest them when they come to pick up their driver's license in the first place, or when they get their airline ticket, or when they get pulled over by a cop for speeding, or at any other time when they actually present their driver's license and/or name. This is a solution to a problem we'd love to have. If someone could solve the problem of figuring out who's a terrorist, and the only obstacle was in finding them, then maybe this would be usefull. As it is, this is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
Pound! Bang! Bin! Bash! is this a shell script or a Batman comic?