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Driver's Licenses with Digital Watermarks
ForceQuit writes "MIT Technology Review reports that Minnesota will begin issuing a unique driver's license designed to combat counterfeiting. It includes a reflective image (of a loon) that appears to float above and below the card when the license is tilted. It also includes an invisible, digital watermark capable of carrying security data such as date of birth. The information would be readable only through a computerized scanner, which law enforcement officers could carry."
This sounds like a good idea. Identity fraud is a serious problem. I work at an insurance office in Saskatchewan (Canada) that does license issuing among other things. We get all sorts of efforts to acquire fake ID, it's rather pathetic. Almost all of the efforts involve trying to drink under age, but these days the reality is that people will try to get fake identities for less savoury purposes. It's hard to criticize this move by Minnesota.
So really, there is no need to worry from a teenage perspective. It'll be another 10 years before any kind of tavern has a card-swiper to actually tell that you're not of age. By then, someone will have found some way to replace/confuse the machine and you'll appear of age.
None of this encoding my life history on the card, or letting my card broadcast my identification to everyone sitting on the bus with me. This state has it right. If the cop wants my information, he can stop me and ask me for it. The things on the computer readable portion are on the card anyway, so it lets the cop scan me in and let me go on my merry way faster, without the hassle of having my DL number mistyped and coming up as some wanted murderer.
Maybe I should look into moving.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Immigrants don't have the same rights as citizens. That's true in every country on Earth. While they deserve certain rights, until they gain citizenship and share in the responsibilities and obligations of citizenship, they don't have the right to gain all the benefits and rights of living in that society. I don't think that Western countries have skewed the balance too far.
Call me a fascist if you want, but this is a step in a good direction.
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by mere idiocy.
If so, it can be reproduced. The only issue is if the cost is too high to make it worthwhile to copy.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Summary of posts:
- This is shocking! Now criminals can see I'm male, and determine my age. Just by looking at me (with a IR scanner device)!
- Yeah, it's fine now, but it's a slippery slope, soon they'll shove these cards in your BRAIN! I told you 1984 was right!
- This is great, those filthy criminals should be shot, anything that keeps us safe is good, and I don't care what the costs are.
- I don't have anything to hide what do I care! Only bad people have bad things happens to them.
- Americans are stupid, and you voted Bush. Americans are stupid!
- And, lots of contrived shitty jokes.
Enjoy.
informative?!?! wtf?!?! that's insightful!
I think the picture of loon is actually the photo of the moderator that mod'd that as "informative".
cp /dev/zero ~/signature.txt
Undue stress? It's the immigrant's responsibility to keep track of his legal status, and to leave the country once his license to remain within it has expired. "Illegal immigrants" are called that for a reason.
according to the article, "Fake ID cards made it possible for the Sept. 11 terrorists to board commercial flights.". I thought that had already been debunked to death.
In most states there is no penalty for forgetting your driver's license at home, or for travelling without it if you're not driving. (The latter would raise all sorts of right to travel issues. The former results in a warning to produce the license within 10 days.)
So from a privacy perspective, am I not better off just leaving my license at home wrapped up in my tinfoil hat?
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
yes, because it's all stored in the SUPER DUPER EVIL GOVERNMENT TRACKING DATABASE!
You know what those barcode scanners do? They simply read the unencrypted data that is stored in the magnetic strip. They're not connected to any network or anything else.
Driver's Licenses were intended to be exactly that, a license or permit that demonstrates that one is legally permitted to drive. They happened to have a photo of the person on them . . . how this became an official government identification card was something of an accident. Private groups started using the driver's license as ID to cash checks becuase it provided some level of photo identification . . . but there was no common standard for confirming identity when applying for a license. Some states were very slack about this (For example, in Virginia until recently, one only needed a form from a lawyer asserting one's identity with no official documents whatsoever.)
It's good to see that states are recognizing that the driver's license is a de facto identification card in the US and they are taking counterfeiting seriously.
Holography and RFID make the document harder to counterfeit. Some biometric information, like the color of the person's eyes, height, weight, etc., is useful in establishing that the bearer is the person belonging to the ID.
Nonetheless, none of this is worth a whit if the ID is issued fraudulently. Here in Virginia, we had a problem with DMV clerks issuing driver's licenses to anyone for the price of a bribe, as well as notaries public who would vouch for anyone for a fee. The licenses themselves were machine-readable, with some kind of special seal on them that would be difficult to counterfeit, and included the information I mentioned above. A policeman could be reasonably sure the driver is the person in the photo. But, at bottom, because the controls on the license issuing process were bad, and the identification accepted by DMV was so weak, it was possible for anyone to get a real Virginia license or ID card that would be acceptable as genuine anywhere.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
Will they get a free replacement whenever their status changes? Will we ever see someone mistakenly arrested because his/her license is out of date?
If you're here unlawfully, sure you're breaking the law. If you're here lawfully but your driver's license disagrees, is that breaking the law? Does the law require you to properly maintain every thing upon which some bureaucrat decides to plaster your visa status?
This is the same problem we have with databases of sex offenders. It may sound like a great idea, if you assume the database is accurate. But entries get stale, and suddenly people start tossing bricks through your window and beating up your kids at school.
Xcott
Sure, 20 years ago I <cough> knew some people who might have made fake Pennsylvania driver's licenses in order to purchase liquor. Back in those days the license was nothing but a Polaroid, very easy to clone. But when the states started going to those funny reflective laminations then cloning became a losing proposition (not that it was particularly hard to duplicate those, either, but it was even harder to make them look bad enough to be real).
Even when it was really easy to fake a license it was more or less a toss-up as to whether to make the license itself or the supporting documentation. For more than a decade now the easiest way to get a fake license (so I hear) is to print up the supporting docs and go get a real one. Way easier. They give out driver's licenses like candy on Halloween, after all.
This kind of fraud is certainly commonplace around colleges, but I find it hard to get worked up over some kids getting hold of alcohol. (It's pathetic that our drinking age is 21 yet the driver's license age is 16 -- that is a recipe for disaster. If anything, the two should be switched.) In a traffic stop the police call it in, in which case the computer wouldn't know about a false ID and it'd be obvious what's going on -- no matter if the ID is a fancy thing or just a slip of paper. Heck, they don't even need the physical driver's license anymore in most places.
So I figure the theory here is that it's for preventing identity theft (eg cashing checks in someone else's name -- although the reliance on driver's licenses, obtained via privilege rather than right, for that process is a rant in and of itself) and that doesn't seem like it's worth a lot of ID technology investment either.
I suspect that many pour misguided souls think that harder-to-fake driver's licenses would stop something like 9/11, in which case I would point out that the 9/11 hijackers had fraudulently obtained real driver's licenses, just like the college kids do. They were legitimate so far as the system knew.
Until they get around to fixing the lack of any real identity check during the process of applying for a license, not an easy or inexpensive thing to do, all these technologies are worthless.
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
At the present time we get the best of both worlds - we get the taxes from immigrants, but we don't have to give the same quality of service to them. Social Security is a good example - Immagrants have to pay it, but until they are citizens they have no rights to the benefits. Similarly, an immagrant has to pay property taxes if he or she owns a house, but has no rights to vote until they are a citizen.
Immigrant Americans (i.e. every American citizen alive today, whose family immigrated here sometime within the last couple hundred years or so) have continued to live up to the reputation which they created early on with the native Americans: "white man speak with forked tongue".
On the one hand, tens of millions of illegal aliens are welcomed into menial jobs throughout the country: from farm labor to maid work to nannies. Ordinary people employ them, as well as companies. You even get illegals doing not so menial work, like tech contracting. Illegal aliens collectively form an essential part of the economy.
On the other hand, the INS (or whatever it's called nowadays) is the most dysfunctional federal agency of them all, and it's not just the agency's fault - it's a function of the national schizophrenia in which cheap labor is desperately needed, but the fiction needs to be maintained that not anyone who wants to can come here to work. Quotas for immigrants aren't even close to realistic in terms of what the economy needs - you could eliminate all the legal immigration and the economy would continue to function just fine, the legal immigration is really just there for show at this point. You couldn't do the same with the illegal immigration.
So, you ignorant anti-immigration types out there (and you are anti-immigration, if all you support is the current legal immigration system which is just for show, and a poor show at that), just keep on with your little fantasies about the way life works in the imaginary U.S. of A. that you live in, while the rest of us live in the real world which you don't understand. The difference is between the two is that the real world isn't going to go away, whereas your fantasies will become harder and harder to sustain as long as you continue to refuse to acknowledge your national addiction to cheap labor supplied by illegal aliens.
Shit just what we need another device to track us in the complete absence of either a coherent process that controls how they are handed out in the first place AND any sort of legislative brakes on the data that is embedded on it or what data its usage gathers.