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HP Announces National Id System Built on .NET
Anonymous Coward writes "Yahoo is running a story about HP's national ID plan, 'The need to securely identify people moving across national and international borders has never been more important than it is today,' said Jim Ganthier, worldwide leader, Defense, Intelligence and Public Safety, HP. 'HP and Microsoft are working together to provide government agencies the ability to access the integrated data streams needed to securely identify people both in the physical and virtual worlds.'"
I can't decide if I'm upset because it's a National ID, because it's made by HP or because it's being built on .NET.
Where would you like your identity to go today?
The UK ID card system is now estimated at £18 billion (30 billion dollars or so). That's up from £3 billion and £6 billion previous estimates.
m
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4590817.st
Deleted
Microsoft is helping to make it. That makes me feel SO safe.
Tluin natha Linux xxizzuss uriu olt bwael mon'tun.
that the answer to all of our homeland security issues would be Micrsoft?
Gee, I feel more secure already.
What could possibly go wrong?
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
they intend to build a secure national id system out of technologies which have proven themselves to be insecure at each turn?
god forbid there ever be something like code red or equivalent that hits this system, because the resulting sound will be that of 280 odd million people being simultaneously sodomized by very large cacti.
So if someone exploits a security hole in .NET they can take my identity?
Maybe, maybe not, it depends on how their platform works. But the same can of course be said with any other API an application may use. Not sure what you're trying to say -- that these important systems should always be built from scratch? But the downside of that is you'd rely on 100% homebrewn code that hasn't been tested in production ready systems since before.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I'm trying out the beta version, and it includes an option for anonymous posting on Slashdot. See, it works just fine!!
-----
Name: Richard Kniefle
Citizen Location: San Francisco, CA
Occupation: Hospital Records Manager
SSN: 123-12-1234
DOB: 04-23-59
Political Affiliation: Liberal Democrat
Status: Citizen of Concern
Church Affiliation: None
You have a constitutionally protected right to be wrong, and I the right to ignore you.
Greetings and Salutations...
I would feel far better about this if;
a) the bad guys would play by the rules and register for their identity cards just like us law-abiding citizens and...
b) We did not have such a long history of government abusing power that it takes.
It may be a more complex world now, but, because of that, privacy should be even more valuable and preserved...rather than being stripped away.
While there is no current indications that this ID card will become a required, internal passport, there is a VERY good chance it will be...which undercuts one of the mainstays of American life - that of unfettered travel throughout the country. It could, alas, lead to a totalitarian state on a VERY easy road. Read Lewis Sinclair's "It Can't Happen Here", and see if you see any parallels between HIS thesis and OUR reality today!
On top of that, I have little confidence in the government or large organizations to keep accurate enough records to make this workable. So far, the track record is not great.
Regards
Dave Mundt
YAB - http://blog.beemandave.com/
Wow, just what did that press release say beyond "we're going to help create a national ID using Microsoft .net"??? A whole lot of veribiage and redundant terminology. For example:
- 22 instances of "indentify" or "identification"
- 7 instances of "integrate"
- 7 instances of "system"
- 5 instances of "e-government"
- 4 instances of ".NET framework"
- 3 instances of "authenticate"
Feh. That's enough of reading through that tripe. Now I need to take a bath. --MHP provides the hardware, and Microsoft provides the software. It's like the worst of both worlds!
Simplely put, the government can fuck off. I will downright refuse to use ANYTHING built on microsoft technology which is this important. If all my personal data is being kept on it then I DEMAND security above and beyond anything MS has ever done.
I don't care if I get arrested 100 times over for refusing to carry an ID card, it'll be worth it.
I like muppets.
Now I'm going to have to get a hotmail passport account!
Libraries are now requiring finger prints.
Chicago installed 3000 camera's.
And now this...
I just have one question. Did ANYONE read the patriot act?
What if I want to read a book by Lenin, and not let anyone know that I have read his book? It seems that will be more difficult to do in the future. If I read it at the library, they have my fingerprint scan. If I buy it from the downtown borders, the police camera can look inside to see what books I have. If I somehow sneak the book home, and read it, then want to discuss it on the internet, they can find me.
This reminds me of Ray Bradbury, only far more sinister, with a splash of Orwell tossed in. My dear God, how dumb is the american populace? Has the smartest 5%, the ones that run the entertainment industries, the news, the companies, has the smartest 5% of the people sold their souls for more money?
We have all been enslaved.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Yes I am. Quite right. Except the comparison is large apples (national ID system) versus tiny apples (OS on a PC). I don't care about performance: I care about security. Part of the reason for the .net scrap was SECURITY based.
The Crimson Dragon
They make the system just insecure enough to let hackers get in, to let disasters strike. They use that as justification for more intrusive forms of government control.
Is it possible that governments aim here is not to make a system that is unhackable? Maybe they want it to fail, as a prelude to enslavement?
This is why computers suck. They will no longer be an aide to your life, no longer making life simpler and easier. Computers will now be used to track you, identify you. You are already probably in some government index with a score of how much of a threat you are. Check out Lenin from the library, your score goes up. Join the wrong chats, your score goes up.
Remember, this is the same government that tapped the phones of the Black Panthers in the 1960's, arrested innocent people, killed innocent people, overthrew the democratically elected president of Chile. Our government stinks with evil.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Is that more clear?
If we have a system where everyone is tracked, through databases, camera's, RFID in cars, fingerprints in libraries, and a future dna database, think about the abuse?
Someone hacks the government servers, and puts in data, data that says you are a terrorist, a dangerous terrorist with knowledge of how to build bombs.
You, of course, are just an avarage joe who is walking to the local park to read Invisible Man. Next thing you know, a van hits you on the sidewalk, and you're dead. The driver is not just some old man who lost control. He is an old man who appears to have lost control.
I can't help but wonder, if Joe Mccarthy was alive, if Bush would nominate him to be Director of Homeland Security? The technology we have today is what he was missing to acomplish his goals. If he had todays technology, he could have killed the people who complained, before they got organized. Just find out who is reading the "banned" books, and execute them. Of course, the USA will never pull a book off a library shelf. They will just monitor who reads it.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Lets See:
Hitler needed an ID system. IBM was the ideal partner for them during the Holocaust. Perfect for tracking victims.
Bush needs and ID system. HP is the ideal partner for them during the Crusades 2.0. Perfect for tracking non christians.
history does always repeat itself.... sadly.
Considering that Oracle said they'd donate the software to the
feds for free for a national ID system, you have to wonder what Microsoft's price was. Clearly there's some payoff; but my bet is that it's to some special interests (individuals, or the states of specific lobbiests) and the taxpayer'll get screwed.
Be thankful for small mercies.
..buffering(5%).. ..buffering(12%).. ..buffering(27%).. ..buffering(46%).. ..buffering(68%).. ..buffering(89%).. ..buffering(95%)..
The bid from Real to host the system was rejected.
Please wait, connecting to ident server.
Husgaard(858362) is a confirmed
valid citizen
liqbase
The article cites several countries where the .NET identity solution by HP is already in use. Obviously there has been no news about any security problems with these systems. You should be far more worried about simply losing your wallet than this system getting hacked.
In the UK, the Labour party just got reelected with only 36% of the vote. Yup. That's a minority. Almost 2/3 of the population didn't want them in power.
Step 1: So, the first thing you do in a "democracy" to reduce individual liberty *and* get them to pay for it is take advantage of a medieval electoral system which gives a 1/3 minority an absolute majority in the parliament.
Step 2: Then you use that parliamentary majority to push just about any legislation you like through the house.
Step 3: Profit!
Good eh?
Deleted
'The need to securely identify people moving across national and international borders has never been more important than it is today,'
If *anything* the lesson of 9/11 should have been that identification is not effective nor relevant to certain types of security sitautions, like air travel.
Instead, the assumption stands that identification is essential, but, in regards to 9/11, it was somehow lacking, either in format (see REAL ID act) or application.
Bad security is built around bad assumptions. Remove the bad assumptions and rebuild the security framework.
Based on the vast quantity of individuals flying, and the amazing sum of variables, all of which indicate little about the potential danger of the passenger, a defense could be made that we would be safer building a security system around nameless tickets.
I agree that we're collectively allowing "freedom" to become a meaningless buzzword - but the 60's hippie generation didn't do much of anything to help prevent that. Rather, much of it had seeds in that era.
IMHO, we do an awful lot of worshipping the 60's that's unwarranted. Flower children, hipppies, etc. etc. The fact is, most of the people growing up in the 60's doing their psychadelic drugs, having sex with anyone willing, and protesting Vietnam ended up tightly wrapped up in "corporate America" afterwards anyway. (Hey, take Steve Jobs for example. Still pays lip service to his 60's "hippie past" with all those folk-rock 60's artists he has play music before his Apple keynote speeches and so on. But he's just another big-time corporate C.E.O. today.)
The 60's was great from a cultural standpoint. Lots of really good music and art came from it. But "greed" was never exclusive property of the "corporation". It's a trait shared *individually* by all of us, and properly channeled - can be a good thing. (To some extent, "greed" is what motivates people. If you didn't want more than what you already have, why would you work for someone doing a task you disliked? If there was no such thing as "greed", pay-raises would serve no useful purpose in the workplace.)
The real problem is, most Americans seem to be far too "non-chalant" about political issues. We take a "Who cares? Politics is boring! New law X or Y doesn't affect me directly anyway." attitude, and government grows and grows in power. The founding fathers of our country realized this could be its downfall. That's why they made such statements as "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." Preserving freedom is *work*. It's not something you attain once and you're finished. You have to fight to keep it every day, or it slips away, one new piece of legislation at a time.
What kind of complete moron uses "Rapid Application Development" to implement something as dangerous as a national ID system?
Is this the same government that helped stop Fascism, stopped Soviet Communism, and gave the world the Internet, or is it a wholly different government? Is it the government that sat by while the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan? Is it the same government that in the 1970s let inflation run rampant in the United States, causing the standard of living here and around the globe to stagnate, or is it the one that fostered a huge technology and economic boom through more open market policies?
My point is that a government is never wholly good or evil. I'd say that describing a government as "good" or "evil" plays right into the hands of absolutists like Bush, except in the most extreme cases (Nazi Germany and Pol Pot's Cambodia come to mind).
I'd say that even elected governments make mistakes, sometimes horrible ones. Talking about the US government desiring the enslavement of its own citizens is just bizarre. But putting a government like that of the United States in the same boat as one like Nazi Germany is absurd.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Statistics based on released Secunia advisories since 2003. Choose below to see statistics based on different criteria.
Please Note. The statistics below should not be used for a direct comparison of how secure two different products are. This is partly due to the fact that a Secunia advisory often cover multiple vulnerabilities. Also certain operating systems bundle a very large number of software packages and are therefore affected by many vulnerabilities that would be counted as a vulnerability in stand alone products for other operating systems / platforms. Other factors such as vendor response times and ability to properly fix vulnerabilities is also important.
The Real ID Act was cleverly attached by its author, Rep. Sensenbrenner (R-WI), as a rider to a completely unrelated appropriations measure for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since voting against appropriations for troops is unAmerican, the bill along with its Orwellian rider passed easily (House 368-58, Senate 100-0).
Note that the rider specifies no funding. The federal ID card is left as an unfunded mandate for states to implement on their own budgets, with the usual extraconstitutional trick of threatening to withhold federal highway funds from states that fail to enact supporting state legislation. In practical terms, aside from being a fascistic federal power grab, this is a really expensive measure for the states. Unfortunately Real ID enjoys some myopic political support because it will stick it to illegal aliens. (And anyone seeking asylum, political or otherwise.) People don't realize the larger implications of a national ID card that one is forced to carry, and we just got them with hardly any public debate at all: