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France May Require Biometric ID Cards
Will Affleck-Asch writes "According to an article on Infoworld today, France may require her citizens pay for new identity cards that hold their biometric information in electronic format. The French government outlined its plan last month to replace the identity cards and passports offered to French citizens with new ones that carry a microchip containing digitized photographs and fingerprints. The plan is to introduce the passports in 2006, and the identity cards a year later. Citizens haven't been forced to carry ID cards since 1955."
I would object far less to having biometric data on an ID card if it were a one-way hash than if it's storing a copy of my fingerprint/retina scan. Can the biometric data be hashed and the hash used for verification instead? Like what we do for passwords... the scary thing about someone being able to get an electronic copy of the data is the ability to make a replica.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Walking down the street to get me some gum, show the doorman my credentials so I can leave my own building. Show the officer on the street corner my papers so that I can continue walking down the street. Pause at the front entrance of the store to flash some ID. Show my valid cards at the counter when I buy some gum. Walk again past the officer who again asked for my papers. Show my credentials to the doorman who lets me back inside my apartment.
I'll need to hire someone to stand outside my apartment to check my ID to be completely safe from bad guys.
Wait the bad guys have computers too?!? Then it's all for naught
*DrugCheese rants*
We already have biometric data on our passports. It's called a photograph.
Can somebody explain to me:
A lot of the identity card/biometrics scare I hear seems nothing more than fear of the unfamiliar versus technology for technology's sake. This just seems like more of the same.
...it will make it easier to detain and deport illegal Muslim immigrants from the Maghreb. Seems like a pretty crappy reason to implement a national biometric card system if its going to be used to harass minorities.
That's not clear, but that's the history of ID cards and other photo based documents.
The photo based driver's license was justified as an all purpose ID card, but my research has indicated that no one could justify a strong need for it...nor was there driver's licensing fraud that would be eliminated with the photo. I hypothesize that the photo driver's license was essentially a way of photograph companies to sell expensive instant color photographic equipment. (Those interested in my reasoning can ask.)
The photo based passport really became vogue during World War I, when european nations were afraid that spies would be crossing border. (Hello! Counterfeiting? I'm glad people were as dumb then as they are now.) With new regulations US citizens won't be able to return to the US after 2006 without a passport, even in the western hemisphere. US Citizens were not required to travel with a passport until 1941 (and during World War I and the Civil War.) For reasons not clear to me, the restriction was only rolled back to hemisphere travel after World War II.
So the lesson is, mandatory identification is either vendor driven, or war/terrorism/fear driven, or, as is most likely the case, both.
Ok, I'm asking: what supports that suggestion besides mere cynicism? Not that a cynical worldview is often wrong, but I'm guessing that you wouldn't have thrown out that broad hint if you hadn't had something to offer.
See what I've been reading.
The biometric data's on the card to prove that the card is genuine.
For obvious reasons you already have your retina and fingers with you at all times. An ID card is simply a cheap and convenient mechanism for mapping you to a database record somewhere (possibly cached on the card itself). If retinal or fingerprint scanners were cheap enough there would be no need for the card. But you'd still need the database and you'd still need to be in it.
But what should go in the database?
The whole scheme is very secretive, but from what we know, all citizens will have to take about 50 pieces of personal data, their eyeballs and £80 to a registration centre for the dubious pleasure of being entered into a national database. Their fingerprints and iris patterns will be digitised and a hash generated from each. The hash is then written to the chip on the card. the idea of the government is that soon Britain will have tens of thousands of biometric readers at paces like airports, police stations, hospitals and doctors. Whenever you need a service, enter or leave the country or get arrested you'd have to produce the card.
It won't be compulsory (at first) to carry a card, but it will be compulsory to register and keep your personal data up-to-date. The card is not yours, instead it remains the property of the government and can be withdrawn at any time on the say-so of the Home Secretary.
Last year the government conducted a trial of 10,000 people and promised to tell us the results before the ID card bill was brought before Parliament. Well they've had one go at getting the bill through but ran out of time before Parliament's dissolution - and we still haven't seen the results of the trials. Which is kind of suspicious - surely if everything is hunky dory then they would have been shouting it from the rooftops?
As for reliability, the Home Office (think Ministry of the Interior) doesn't seem to know the difference between false positive matches between two biometrics (where one person is mistaken for another) and false negatives (where a person isn't recognised at all). In written answers they only ever cite a failure rate based on the very low false positives - NEVER the much higher failure rate for false negatives. BUT positive confirmation of identity is the entire reason for their introduction.
The general feeling of IT experts is that the scheme will rocket in price and never work properly - but that millions of people will be inconvenienced and perhaps thousands have their lives ruined by the cards.
So for those UK people reading (hello!) - Labour is the only party promising to introduce ID cards. The Tories made no mention of it in their manifesto and have gradually gone off of the scheme. The LibDems, Greens and nationalist parties are all opposed. If you don't want ID cards, then the nice people at No2ID will be able to help.
This has to be the worst dupe ever. How often has slashdot covered this?
The *entire European union* will require biometrics stored in contactless chips (RFID) in a passport. The EU didn`t think of this all by itself, the US forced it. If the EU doesn`t go along fast with this billion dollar hype it`s citizens will have to get a visa to visit the US. (How are US plans for this coming along?)
The biometrics are two fingerprints and a digital portrait. The last one will be to low resolution for camera surveilance but ofcourse this wont stop people from trying. Face it(no phun), the words "false positive" sound complicated and no politician is going to bother to look like caring about these words. Ofcourse you can translate them to "huge lines at the airport", "tens of innocent people questioned on ever major airport every day" (So mister Bin Laden, how did you turn into an asian twelve year old?).
Want to hear some of the argumentation behind this? Yes you do! Implementing passports with biometric identifiers will be a great business opertunity, especially for the business that get to build the hardware for this stuff... Boy do I wish I was making this up.
Of course the people who sell biometrics are alway happy to tell how many people on this planet have the same fingerprint and face. wanna guess? Its always a very low number, like zero. In fact they keep saying this over and over. They never have any time left to mention that:
a. biometric comparisons always allows for lots of differences because no one want`s to hold up a line at the airport because of a mismatch due to some sweat.... every time someone sweats one these occasions.
b. cheap fingerprint scanners are fooled by gummy bear taste gelatine prints, pressing bags of water on the scanner.... or just blowing on it. Can you blame these vendors for not mentioning this? Maybe not, they are afterall, very busy in this "post 911 world". Or so they keep saying.
Ofcourse it doesn`t stop here. Other bright ideas going on the the EU:
- Giving US three leter ancronym agencies read access to all airline booking systems. If airlines refused they couldn`t land in the US, now they comply they might be send back midair from time to time. But hey, what are the chances of someone matching a name on a list of 70,000 names? (If you think this list sounds to short, don`t worry adding names is easy, no evidence of anything is required)
- Storing traffic data for every telephone or Internet connection in the EU... Depending on the phase of the moon this data consists of telephone call data, GSM location data and ofcourse URL`s of every site visited and headers for send and/or received mail. Yes I mean storing everything about the communication of everyone....
Apparently the words terabyte`s/day, gigabyte`s/sec and innocent until proven guilty have to be reinvented.Meanwhile Italy, Germany and Sweden are investigating what heaponed to a some of their citizens. They where kidnapped by the CIA and sent to places that make abu graib look like the holiday in... Ofcourse these investigations arent about getting justice for these people, they are just about making things difficult for the national goverment for allowing these kidnap operations.
Anyway, it seamed like the right time for an European update on these things.
With pleasure.
Interesting fact: it is indisputed that it is easier to identify people with a black and white photograph than with a color photograph. As an actor, my headshots are in black and white, as is the case with most actor's headshots for NY based actors...the features of the face pop up better in black and white than in color. If a person presents a passport to an immigration official, and the official isn't sure if it's the same person or not, often they will photograph the person in black and white, and then compare the black and white photograph with the color photograph. Black and white photographs are superior to color when it comes to identification. They would make it much harder for people to use others' ID cards.
Yet, every state and province (except for Alberta) issues a driver's license with a color photograph. (And Alberta used to, their black and white photograph is based on the technology they use to create their license, not based on a preference for black and white.) In fact, if you read state legislative codes, it will say, in nearly all instances, that there shall be a "color photograph" on the driver's license. Historically, in all the states I have known and read the legal code, the word color was there from the very beginning (Ohio for instance had it in 1967 when they codified the mandatory photo license law.) The only exceptions are Colorado and California, who issued black and white photo licenses from about 1957-1965, at which point they switched to color and codified the color requirement (those two states admittedly blow my argument a bit.)
At any rate, that all seems too purposeful to me, which brings me to the timing issue. A lot of states started codifying photo licenses in the late 1960s. Polaroid developed color instant photography in 1964...and was the leader for at least 10 years in photo ID card issuance systems (in fact, it was their only profitable business from the 1990s on. It was spun-off when Polaroid entered bankruptcy.) As a cultural thing, we were crazy about photography in the 1960s...I've seen newspaper advertisements for general stores where a pack of flash bulbs was just as expensive as men's shoes. But color instant photography was fantastically expensive, and out of reach for the average person...so I hypothesize that Polaroid was searching for something to do with the technology other than sell it to people directly. (I've got an advertisement in my possession of a local Columbus bank issuing credit cards with polaroid photos from 1967...offering it as a good ID for cashing checks. They did go out of their way to mention that it was with Polaroid photos.)
Perhaps even more key than the color requirement and the timing is the fact that every state has always and still does...takes the picture for you. Compare to a passport--you bring your photo in, and it's incorporated into the document. In fact, there are countries in which you bring your photo for your license or ID card...countries which have had photos on their licenses or ID cards for much longer than in the US. Remember this from a historical perspective...it would have been cheaper for a person to bring any old photograph of themself, than to pay the state to take a color instant photo for them. But clearly if that were to occur that would shortchange the revenue stream for the company wanting a very lucrative photo ID contract. It's essential that the state takes the photograph.
So if you look at it in that context...you could say that vendor driven documents are those in which the photo is taken of you (many ID cards, driver's licenses, et cetera.) Documents that were created for reasons other than vendor lobbying you take the photo yourself (passports.)
With more time and research, I can probably string together more arguments. One thing I've been wanting is Polaroid annual reports from the mid to late 1960s.
> Try and buy a SIM card in Paris without an ID.
I'm not by any means an advocate of government control, but being certain of the identity of a telephone owner isn't necessarily a bad thing. For instance, if the telephone is used to harass somebody else, or to detonate explosive devices by remote control (remember the Madrid bombings ?)
> borrow money, open a bank account
Huh... hello ? I sure would hope for banks anywhere in the world to check for positive ID before doing *any* transaction. But the reality, which I've experienced numerous times, is that you can enter your bank's local branch, and withdraw money just by telling them your account number (which is known and stored in probably insecure databases by lots of organizations. LexisNexis, here we come !). This gives me the creeps.
> buy medicine
For *prescription-only* drugs, which of course the pharmacist shouldn't hand to whoever comes in. Sure, told this way, it sounds less orwellian. D'oh !
> there are always the mentally retarded who say things like [...] "How can you control identity without it?" (said to me by a French man)
Ah ! Those wacky French. They have such weird arguments, at times ! I mean, they probably would even have the guts to be upset if someone impersonated them and did nasty things under their identities... Well, I'm known for being a mentally-retarded monkey, so I'll ask : how do you check the identity of who has done what if you've no records ? I'm sure there are extremely clever ways to do it without an ID, and I want to hear about those (this isn't just sarcasm, BTW. I would like to know if someone has devised such a system, and how it works).
> These imbeciles are the perpetual stumbling blocks to the continuation and longevity of any sort of freedom in the west.
I've got the strange feeling you're confusing "freedom" and "anonymity". These are two different and unrelated concepts. For instance, if there was a law against writing under a pseudonym, it wouldn't mean you have no freedom of speech. Just that you need to speak under your real name. Of course, it's better when you can do it anonymously, but it's not necessarily related.
Finally, I would like to ask : why is it that when programmers write software like 'rsh' which doesn't try very hard to check who its user is, it's deemed insecure, and conversely when such flaws are pointed out in real life, they are OK for the sake of privacy ? I just can't fathom where the logic of this lies...
Xenu brings order!
Maybe it's time that the EU required visas or biometric passports from US visitors?
Only slightly so. You don't get in trouble -- you might just waste a few hours of your life. I'm not saying this is a good thing; only trying to put it into perspective. I'm not a big fan of cops myself; I've always had a philosophical problem with any sort of authority.
But anyway, compared to US cops, no matter how dumb and nasty ours can get, well, they really shine. Just like I can't hate Chirac as I used to now that I know Bush.