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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."
The floating images will be of loons, an enduring symbol of the state.
I thought that was California?!?!
The picture of the Loon is actually your photo!
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.
Don't see any possible problems with this move, apart from the immigration part. Sounds like the information encoded in the chip contains no sensitive information, so that's a bonus, and a more secure identification system makes the entire system more reliable. However, from the article:
There will also be a "status check" notation on the front and back of licenses showing when an immigrant's visa expires, something the state already had begun to put on licenses despite opposition from civil liberties groups.
This is a bit of a sticky point, IMHO. This isn't really necessary, and will probably achieve nothing but undue stress for immigrants, and prompt deportation if an illegal gets caught at a traffic stop (presuming that these IDs can not be forged). I don't know what Minnesota's illegal immigrant problem is, but this is a disturbing development. It's a drivers license, not a citizenship card. First step in a bad direction?
"There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."
- Bob Dylan
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.
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 ----
All this to keep terrorists from attacking us. And by 'keep terrorists from attacking us', I mean 'keep underage kids from buying beer'.
I just happened across this the other day. Filling out an accident claim I saw this page on the MN Dept. of Public Safety site which has a picture of the new liscense. My first impression was not terribly positive. To me it looks pretty ugly, but whatever.
How is this news?
Missouri has been issuing drivers licenses with a digital water mark of the state capitol for a number of years.
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.
You are afforded basic human rights by the constitution while in our country. We don't have to let you stay in our country. If anything this move is better for immigrants than some of the other proposed solutions, because they have to be caught breaking another law, as opposed to simply having their ID broadcasting with an RF chip. Sure, our immigration laws can be silly, but part of that is due to the fact there is no one litmus test to tell who's a productive member of society and who isn't. In my mind, we should actively be seeking out illegals who are working in this country not to deport them, but to grant them visas and begin collecting taxes from them. I know, it's simplistic given the wages many of them earn, but I have a hard time divorcing the right to live in the USA with the responsibility to pay taxes. I guess I believe in "pay to play".
Never confuse volume with power.
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
Ah, but if you repeat it enough, then it becomes truth
wanted: one clever sig,apply within
For the first time I actually have something to contribute. As an attorney in Minneapolis who works with mostly undocumented immigrants (illegal immigrants) I think i should add a couple of details to this.
1) Minneapolis has an ordinace preventing police from asking about a persons immigration status, unless that status is a part of another crime. (so this means at a traffic stop they can _not_ ask you about your status) There are two reasons behind this law. One reason the city passed this law is to encourage immigrants to feel safe and comfortable with city police, to report crimes, call for help, not leave the scene ect. However the primary reason for the law is that federal law gives sole jurisdiction over immigration matters to federal law enforcement. That means that even without the Minneapolis ordinace the local police can't enforce immigration law. Just like the Immigration officers can't arrest you for speeding or running a red light.
In Minnesota you can not get a license if you are an undocumented (illegal) immigrant. And an estimated 60,000 undocumented immigrants live here. Right now they either have no IDs or occasionly an ID from their home country - and these are often difficult to validate or even read if not in english.
A few of the main reasons people push to give undocumented immigrants license are 1) becuase that way they will have ID and police/banks/hospitals/ect will know who they are 2) they will have to pass the drivers test if they want to get an ID and that will encourage many (not all) to learn the traffic rules 3) once they get a drivers license they will be able to get car insurance 4) terrorists have enough resources and money to get IDs other places, so this law has little impact on well organized terrorists.
Alberta (Canada) came out with a new driver's licence a few years ago. It was quite a step forward from the traditional print-it-off-on-paper-then-laminate-it licence. Check it out:
c urity.h tml
a tures_f lash.html
http://www3.gov.ab.ca/gs/driverslicence/
"An original. Just like you." Glad my taxes went towards picking that. Probably had a committee set up and daily meetings for 3 months to come up with it.
Security features used on the card:
http://www3.gov.ab.ca/gs/driverslicence/se
Picture of the card:
http://www3.gov.ab.ca/gs/driverslicence/fe
This is nothing new. We have had the loon (state bird) on them many years ago. Now, we have the word "Minnesota" instead, same kind of thing. The loon looks better and will be harder to fake than a word (ever see a loon?)
For a long time there as been a 2D barcode
I think the state bird should have been the moskeeto; that is the thing people remember and see a lot of in MN.
This type of license identification and verification might be one way of plugging that loophole.
Damn right, they didn't!
The 9-11-2001 terrorists that needed to have
driver's licenses got real ones from the
Commonwealth of Virginia. At that time, VA
didn't even require proof of residence in the
state. This has subsequently changed in VA.
However, ID fraud is still prevalent in the
Metro DC area. There have been employees of
the Social Security Administration (in Baltimore)
who were finally arrested for selling SSNs.
Employees of DMVs in both Virginia and Washington
DC have been arrested for selling legitimate
drivers licenses to persons without proper
identification (just cold hard cash). And the
FBI and DHS/INS recently raided a home in NoVA
where more than 1,900 sets of forged IDs (BCs,
drivers licenses, and other documents had been
created for illegal aliens from Indonesia. This
illegal enterprise had been on-going for more
than 3 years, and generated more than 2-1/2
million USD in revenue for the perpetrators.
I, for one, would welcome a national ID card
that used photo, blood type, fingerprint(s),
and DNA sequence. I don't much care for the
notion of an embedded RFID that broadcast this
data, but using adequate encryption that requires
an official scanner to read (like Minnesota) does
sound pretty reasonable.
Link to photo of new license
The US Federal Reserve has just announced a new space-age digital holographic RFID watermarking scheme to prevent currency counterfeiting. The technology will be used exclusively on US $1 bills (the most frequently counterfeited), and cost approximately $35 per bill to implement.
"In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user. You've got your own newsgroup, alt.total.loser." -Weird Al
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
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.
...Beginning in 2005, the Department of Homeland Security will issue new uniformity regulations to the States requiring that all Drivers Licenses and Birth Certificates meet minimal Federal Standards with regard to US citizen information, including biometric security provisions...
Because the federal government now controls the universal standard for Drivers Licences.
Its clear that the house should never pass a bill with more than 10 pages; these provisions were buried in a 3000 page bill, which no legislator read before voting.
Each congressman should be forced to read every page of the bills that they sign into law, and they should be made to sign each page indicating that they hare read the page.
Then again, no one in america cares about any of this, and for certain, at least 59,054,087 people will think that its a good idea.
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