Bill Gates Talks about Belgian eID Card

Brainsur writes "Today Bill Gates visited Belgium to talk about the Electronic ID card introduced last year in Belgium as experiment. Microsoft announced that they will integrate the electronic identification into the Windows Software so they can deliver more security and privacy on the internet. The register has more news."

Comments

I'm from Belgium

[MaynardJanKeymeulen]

These eID cards aren't all that bad.
Here in Belgium we are obligated to carry normal ID cards with us, so if those become one with a chip in them, it doesn't make that much a difference.

If you don't want to use it for identifying with msn, so don't.
On the other hand, they are fully supported on all sorts of unixes, so they might be handy to login your own system or whatsoever.

It's not like they're equiped with some sort of rfid so govmnt can track wherever you are.

Belgian commenting

[WaZiX]

Well, im belgian, and this eID is actually a great advance for us, we will be able to fill out tax forms and other administrative forms, maybe vote and in the future us this eID as authentification for buying prescription drugs (yeah we get most of our medical costs paid for). It also solves a lot of problems between the different language communities we have around here, since a frenchman in flanders (where they speak dutch) could fill out his forms in french. This might seem a stupid problem but it has been a pretty huge on in belgium the last couple of years.

As for M$ using this to authenticate on their services? why not, as long as anyone can use our eID to guarantee some kind of secure log-in/transaction im 100% for it. I very much doubt Belium would let a foreign company take the monopoly of their eID market, im sure all they are trying to do is develop some kind of platform onto which outside companies could use our system.

Indeed this will mean that with time, you could make sure your Credit card could only be used by you (or anyone who stole your card, has an untracable card reader device AND has your 4 digit pin code). This of course makes online transactions much safer.

The only reason i see that Bill gates decided to integrate this to MSN messenger is because thats exactly the type of product that Billy loves (hence his introduction of similar cards in his company.)

So anyways, eID is great, that MS endorses it is not bad at all, as long as the procedure to endorse our future system will not be an MS product.

Re:Belgian commenting

[Space El Hombre]

I'm curious. What does the eID actually do? Does it actually have cryptographic smarts in it, or is it just the same old data from the old ID, only designed in such a way as to be read out electronically? Does it require authentication (from you or the interrogator) before divulging? All data is by default encrypted on the chip. There is no magnetic strip like on credit cards. The chip is commonly used all over the world and very secure. However, the security depends on the encryption. If I'm not mistaken, the current encryption is 128 (or higher) bits. I cannot say the exact type of encryption, but I assume it's the best around. And the most important, you need a 4 digit pin code to access the data on the chip. For now, you still need a paper with the eID card with your curent residence on it, but all data that is a fact (like date of birth and so) is stored on the card. The purpose of this eID card is to manage easily different types of information at different places. Just bring in the card in a (special) reader, and all needed info can be retrieved in the reader's system. MS has nothing to do with the eID card, Bill just likes it, and sees it as an opportunity for additional security. If you don't want to use it, leave it in your wallet. Just see this as a different way of smart card authentication. In one of the earlier comments, it was also pointed out that this chip can be used for lots of things: cell phone cards, proton (the electronic cash we can store on our bank cards), phone cards, SIS cards (for our social security), and many other things... (ex-)US marines can actually know the proton thing, it was (or still is) distributed in the late 90's among soldiers, for use on there base for making payments of small amounts. The chip has a proven security and will continue to spread around the world. You can actually buy empty smart cards, with a chip, and program those chips yourself. On a personal base, I do not like the eID card. I just don't like the government and all that's associated with it :) But I do see the advantages of such a card in terms of security (and certainly identity theft). Sven, Belgian citizen

Re:Belgium Population Explains eID

[Xaer0cool]

I am a Belgian citizen, studying in the US... so I guess I can reply to both angles of your post. It is true that Belgian has a large, mostly northern African, immigrant population. We allow foreigners with five years of residency to vote. So they do wield significant political power, but this is not necessarily a bad thing as you seem to insinuate. I have no idea what you mean by, "accelerating destruction of Western values and Western society", because values are not something the government should be involved with in the first place. However, there are a bunch of people who think along your lines, and they have formed the 'Vlaams blok' (http://vlaamsblok.be/site_engels_index.shtml if you want the English site). It is an anti-immigration party. It was recently declared illegal due to anti-racism laws. Immigration does cause many problems, and even though I don't support vlaams blok type thinking, I'm reasonably sure they will win an election in the near future. And it will be a good thing, because they will mess things up so badly that they wont gain support in the future, and in the meantime things will finally be fixed without going to either extreme. If you are really that worried about high (US-) educated foreigners staying in the US and destroying your precious western civilization... don't worry too much, we already have much stricter controls on us than the Belgian citizens in the article do. We have to pay for the government to track us (SEVIS), we get fingerprinted and photographed upon arrival in the US, we have to check in at the start of every year, and to do any work at all we need more approval than Michael Moore has here in Berkeley.

With one major caveat of course

[IBitOBear]

You have the privacy of the key and the door lock but your issuing authority has the ability to make another copy of the key "from their records" and unlock any door you have locked.

Contrapositively, any guy who muggs you and takes your house key isn't suddenly "you", but the same mugger who takes your ID is suddenly "you" "to the system" and will leave vapor-trail evidence of you-ness behind him as he goes.

Now if your ID card can't be authoratatively canceled and replaced then the thiefs access is total an perpetual. If it *can* be canceled and replaced, then the replacement ID still has to act as the "key" to open "the door". This, in turn, means that there is some fineite or infinite number of keys that can open your "door" because all of the old locked stuff needs to recognize every future permutation of your key.

Either that, or this is Palladium again, where there is nothing magical about the key and it is all in some central database that is actively scanned for each transaction, and so acts as real-time monitoring of the "identified" persons.

So, really, absolutely no privacy or completely illusitory security.

Bill Gates, Belgium and pies in the face

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

Interesting choice of country to be trying to do this in.

Some people in Belgium apparently don't like him. He got a pie in the face there.

http://www.bitstorm.org/gates/