Slashdot Mirror
RFID Cards to Include Tin Foil Hats?
An anonymous reader writes "The tinfoil hat finally gains government approval. From the story: 'Wrap an RFID chip [of the US passport] inside a Faraday cage, and the electromagnetic waves from the chip reader can't get in and activate the chip. The State Department says it may use the principle to give travelers an added sense of security. No, there won't be rolls of aluminum foil included with every passport. Instead, the passport cover may include a network of wires woven into the fabric. Fold the passport shut, and there's your Faraday cage. Even Schneier agrees that a properly shielded passport cover should solve the problem. He wonders why this wasn't included in the original plans for the new passports. 'It took a bunch of criticism before they even mentioned it,' Schneier said. And he hopes the anti-snooping technology is thoroughly tested before the new passports are introduced next spring.'" We've also seen this suggested in the past.
Was that a rational thought from the government? I know it's cold enough for hell to freeze over, but...
Wow.
I can't wait for people to start selling clothing with built in faraday cages, or a stylist alternative to the woeful 'tinfoil hat'... a (insert favorite h4x0r phrase here) hat with a built in faraday cage!
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
It is time to make a new conspiracy theory. The current one that they government wants to use our passports to spy on us just got defunct. Maybe we can not trust the government issue Aluminum foil and it will be some sort of hidden spy method.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Something like 666 strands per inch. Remember only the BAD GUYS have something to hide. Fear not.
Personally I have found that if you use a double layer of tinfoil when fashioning your headwear that it more than doubles the effectiveness! This is due to a resonance effect between the two layers of tinfoil which resonates precisely at the frequency of the government's invisible brain lasers.
In addition, if you fashion two antennas on the top of your hat instead of the usual one, it increases the effectiveness by an additional 37 percent.
(+5 Misinformative)
Those who would give up liberty in exchange for security and DRM should switch to Microsoft Palladium!
... of tin foil companies were up by more than 5 points today.
It means metal detectors will find your passport cover. When I go through airport security, I get wanded and they look in my wallet, which bugs the heck out of me. I usually carry my passport and cash in a nylon neck pouch though, and that doesn't set off the metal detectors. I don't like the sound of this new wire mesh thing. Big Brother and for that matter any club or courthouse I might visit has no need to know whether I'm carrying a passport.
A stun gun is portable, works great, leaves no marks, and has pretty blue dancing lights.
You're not trying to stop a static magnetic field (there's no need) -- you're trying to stop a electromagnetic wave, and stopping either part of it (electric or magnetic) will do it.
While I get the joke, you're wrong.
.05 meters of wavelength, or about 50 millimeters. A typical RF shield needs to block 1/4 of a wavelength, or .0125 meters, or just about half an inch.
The frequencies used by RFID at the most are 5.8GHz. That equates to about
In my book, that means about, oh, two strands per inch.
They want you to wear tin foil hats. It enhances the ability of the orbital mind control lasers to control you. The only sure protection is to shove your head up your ass.
I for one welcome our new RFID overlords.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
...they put metal wires in to keep others from accessing your information, big deal. How are they going to keep a thief from stealing your passport altogether?
This is an early precedent towards a totalitarian state. We say, "Okay, that sounds resonable." Then, they do it with something else, something slightly more intrusive. You know the government wants to put tracking devices in every car for "taxation purposes". Another precendent. There are already black boxes in most newer model cars that save some of the statistics of your driving. Call me paranoid, but I don't like this kind of stuff, and I seem to be in the minority.
We re-write ours at work all the time. With the right equipment, they can be re-writen on the the fly.
I heard that, in order to cut costs. they will put wires only in the front cover.
Nobox: Only simple products.
It sounds like someone's getting an RFID kickback...why not use a barcode? Proven, cheap, and doesn't require new wars for foil...
Ok, lets recap: they are going to sell magnetic shield with those RFID passports, right? That's briliant! I also have some prime estate on mars I could sell them at a discount. A real steal!
Note that NOT using RFID is not what they propose. It is really impressive to see how far they are willing to go in order to justify pushing corporate interest despite its lack of use. There is plenty of technological solutions that can do the job, they have to insist on the one that won't...
i'm personally going to wait for o'reilly to release "passport hacks" before i start tinkering...
Get your torrents...
Barcodes can't truly store information, and they misread all the time. I work at a library that uses barcodes, and the bc scanners will misread every 1 out of 50 books, or try to read the desk, mouse.. what have you. And a misread in this situation is not what you want.
"We need to get over this notion, that, for Apple to win... Microsoft must lose." - Steve Jobs, 1997
- They (incorrectly to their own knowledge) deny implications of RFID (in passports or otherwise) for the bearer's personal safety
- They want to force RFID chips inside passports
- Then they promise to shield it so the passport needs to be opened anyway - but could still be identified as e.g. a US one even when closed, and potentially still be read out with special (i.e. simply more powerful and/or sensitive) equipment, despite the apparent perception of security
- Unlike with optical reading, where the document can simply be put out of sight, the bearer has no way of knowing whether and when an RFID shield actually works
- Why pretend that only governments (or "the good guys" in general) would be able to procure RFID readers? This technology is not rocket science, and it could be every thug's dream come true (especially as the European Central Bank even seems to consider putting it into their money) - so "finally" for the nastier elements of society, remote assessment of who might be a "promising" victim e.g. for abduction, robbery or worse becomes possible
So there is always certain inconvenience -if not danger- to the bearer, but not a single valid reason for embedding RFID into a passport: If it needs to be opened anyway, and faster machine-readability than with the current (already standardized) printed text is required, a simple printed barcode would do, at much greater reliability. Make no mistake, if RFID is enforced even though it does not have any benefit in the proposed application, there have to be ulterior motives for its use - then, however, it is no conspiracy theory to suggest that future mischief is implied in this scenario.Later, of course, Faraday discovered that the cage prevented electromagnetic waves with wavelengths greater than a quarter of the mesh size from escaping, and it is in this form that it has entered technical terminology.
This information brought to you by the Department for the Dissemination of Less than Reliable Data.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
"You want wine? May I see your ID?"
American pulls out passport.
RFID snoopers who hang out nearby restaurant frequented by foreign tourists scoop up yet another id.
The best solution is to eliminate the stupid idea that you can send and receive vital information wirelessly.
However, baring that, somehow preventing the RFID from working unless you do something explicit to make it work should be sufficient. For example, the RFID chip won't send personally identifiying information unless it has a low voltage electrical contact that you can make by pressing a specifically marked spot in the passport marked "press here to activate wireless identification".
The world will not get better through technology. We must seek to be better people.
Naturally, I agree with the majority of people here that RFID passports are insecure, a threat to our privacy, and just generally a bad idea. However, I see a bigger problem here-- and a trend that's been growing over the past few years, at airports in America as well as in other countries. Airport security has already essentially dropped the facade of "random" checks; my male relatives (of Israeli descent, but most holding American passports) have all been interrogated/strip-searched/had the bomb squad called on them in the past few years at various airports throughout the world, for no justifiable reason. I find it pretty ridiculous that governments are spending so much money paying people to do things such as spend 2 hours detaining/interrogating a random girl (me) and doing things such as turning my violin upside down and shaking it violently, repeatedly turning my laptop on and off, etc., asking me idiotic questions ("why do you have this computer? what are you using it for?"). At any rate (sorry, got a bit off-track there), the real problem I see is this: airport security/governments in general already have such ridiculous criteria for profiling thought criminals (oh excuse me, "suspected terrorists".) It's bad enough to be detained/searched in this manner on a regular basis simply because of your ethnicity or appearance, but with RFID passports, passports containing a smartcard, etc., they can just take it one step further and start flagging "suspicious" people even more easily. Maybe I'm on the wrong track, but I really fell that the biggest threat here is not random criminals trying to steal your data or abduct you (as others have suggested); I think it's government entities with which we should be more concerned.