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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...
I don't particularily like the Big Brother idea, but I have no qualms about this. You carry your licence so that people know who you are, and this would just provide a better way to verify that information. It would also be a nice way to lower the costs of corporate identification systems. I have a few workstations I manage for students to use at my college in the Physics office. I had gotten some old card readers and just set people's passwords to the raw string of text that their driver's licence would read out. It worked really well to keep them secure and the make it easy for people to log in, and if RFID tags were in our driver's licences it would make keyless entry systems and RFID based computer security systems a lot less expensive to get started with if there was enough secure information on the RFID tag.
Of course there are problems with the fact of how much data would be on there. Could I walk past a pillar in a mall that would read my address and phone number off my licence and sign me up to receive unsolicited calls and mailings? Also, would the data be secure enough if it were to be implemented in a security system? If these concerns were taken care of (well, the security system one less so, probably actually not that feasible, that's just the old hobbiest ticking inside me), then I wouldn't have a problem at all with a more secure and harder to forge driver's licence.
A pickpocket's dream come true! You can steal from a passerby without laying a hand on them.
Can you imagine how quickly wallet manufacturers would come out with new wallets that either sandwich your drivers license between two pieces of metal (aluminum foil I guess) or shield the entire wallet? I don't usually get too excited about privacy issues because I don't believe we have any these days. But, it is way too easy to imagine thieves walking around with readers and harvesting drivers licenses numbers and info in crowds. A drivers license often has all you need to get a credit card, especially if your state uses your social security number as your drivers license number (do any states do that anymore?).
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Will now be a New and Improved Canadian.
*sigh*
Anybody got some tin foil?
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
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!
Sure it's different - as long as I leave my driver's license in my pocket, no one can read that mag stripe off the back. And, frankly, I don't give my driver's license to anyone who doesn't have the legal authority to compel me to give it to them. Cashiers get to look at it. They don't get to touch. With RFID, anyone and everyone can read my driver's license number (or a number that corresponds to my driver's license number). There have been times in my life when anonymity was important to me; there will be times in the future when it will be also. /frank
And the worms ate into his brain.
200,000 volt stun gun will tune that puppy up.
I took my current DL and bulk erased the mag stripe, then threw it on the concrete and stood on it and twisted my foot, grinding the barcode up so that it is no longer machine readable.
Visually, my DL still functions, it shows my ID correctly, it just can't be read by a machine.
If they want to check it against some DB, they have to call it in the old fashioned way.
"Sir, your DL is damaged, you need to have it replaced" "Gee, imagine that, I guess I better do something about that huh?" and that's that.
Resistance is NOT futile.
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.
Another thing to do would be to make a reader-detector, to see who is trying to scan your cards surreptitiously. That would be a great way to embarass people and businesses trying to play Big Brother, and you might even be able to get such snooping prohibited by law.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
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.
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.
Not really. To a limited extent, yes, but not as much as you might expect.
I use what I suspect are the same key cards that the grandparent (great grandparent?) poster uses at work. Most of the readers require nearly physical contact. The ones on the garage downstairs, however, to avoid people having to get out of their car, can read those same badges from... I believe 24 inches, if memory serves. Basically, as soon as I get my badge near the car window, it beeps.
The device is passive. It reacts to an RF (or in the case of most badges, magnetic) signal by modulating that signal and bouncing it back. The range, AFAIK, is limited mainly by the transmission power of the reader. Granted, there are other issues, like the ability to get something resembling line-of-sight to the RFID tag (i.e. curvature of the Earth limits), the ability to distinguish between a potentially large number of RFID tags within that range, and multipath distortion problems, but those still won't prevent a range of several feet under most conditions.
There's probably also some fairly high power limit beyond which you would smoke the card if you got too close to the reader, but if you lower that limit enough on your cards to force all RFID readers to only work in close proximity, odds are the devices would have a high failure rate just from "natural" phenomena... like standing too close to your microwave or even walking outside on a day when you can see the aurora borealis.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
If you want an example of this, cut out a small piece of aluminum foil, one inch by four or so. Tune a hand-held AM radio to a strong station. Now put the foil over the housing near the loopstick antenna; the reception will die. Doesn't take much, does it?
Sustainability and energy independence essay
"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.
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