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RFID Passports Raise Safety Concerns
CurtMonash writes "CNNMoney.com features a skeptical article about the US State Department's plans to soon issue RFID passports (currently being tested on State Department employees). One fear is that they can be hacked for information about you. And even if they can't, carrying around a little transmitter saying 'I'm an American! I'm an American!' isn't a fun and safe thing to do in all parts of the world." From the article: "Basically, you've given everybody a little radio-frequency doodad that silently declares 'Hey, I'm a foreigner,' says author and futurist Bruce Sterling, who lectures on the future of RFID technology. 'If nobody bothers to listen, great. If people figure out they can listen to passport IDs, there will be a lot of strange and inventive ways to exploit that for criminal purposes.'"
Yeah, that is important because I know when Americans visit say, China or India, they can blend right in with everyone else if they don't have that transmitter.
So if I wrap my RFID laden passport in tinfoil I am safe right? right?
I know that having your personal data stolen isn't any fun, it'll be worse if they put biometric data in there as well (I don't know what data the US passports currently have, in the UK we'll be having that put in soon). but for me a bigger concern is that they can be infected with a virus, which could quite easily be used to cause havok with the computers at airports and possibly bring the whole system down... the register reported on the proof of concept here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/15/rfid_tags_ infected_by_virus/
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
Barring the bloody obvious target painted on you, they say in the article:
They'll have radio frequency identification (RFID) tags and are meant to cut down on human error of immigration officials, speed the processing of visitors and safeguard against counterfeit passports.
Human error will still occur in whichever system a human is involved in.
Couldn't they get all the same benefits with a simple barcode?
Does the RFID hold just your ID number for lookup on the database or is the RFID part now full identification?
I hope this doesn't go ahead (like the UK now isn't going ahead with its ID scheme) because whilst RFID might make tracking warehouse stock easy, its not great for humans.
Just because the technology exists doesn't mean we should use it for everything.
liqbase
Surely they cannot be unaware of how this could be exploited by those wishing to do harm to Americans, therefore I can only reach the conclusion that rfid passports are being pushed as a way for the government to ultimately track people in general. It would begin with being able to track foreigners and later as rfid makes its way into things like driver's licenses and auto plates, it could be used to track citizens. This is probably a goal of governments everywhere these days. First they'll tell you it's to stop terrorists, but with a flick of the switch, tracking citizens will be a breeze. I know the effective range is pretty short, but I can imagine that it would not be too hard for the government to build out an effective network, certainly in the most densely populated cities. It might even be able to piggy back on cell phone tower locations, so ordinary people wouldn't even know it was there. Ironically, true terrorists will be able to easily defeat this kind of tracking.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
This gives me a great idea for a new business opportunity! Sell RFID tags to American tourists that broadcast to the world "I AM A CANADIAN".
As I understand it, RFID cards don't do anything until they're exposed to an electromagnetic field, which gives them just enough juice to fire off a message, usually an identity code. Unless I've been completely misinformed, you'd have to generate quite the field to even have a chance of reading one of these things at a distance. I know that my RFID card doesn't work until it's within a coupla inches of the appropriate reader.
The whole "it's broadcasting all of your personal information!!!!" hype is a bunch of FUD. The only way it could really be a security risk is if the card itself was stolen, and then it's really no different than having your S.S. card or driver's license stolen.
"You will pay for your lack of vision..." - Emperor Palpatine to Ray Charles
US passports are good for 10 years from the date of issue. Get or renew yours now, before RFID becomes required.
You have it right. I used to go to a school which used RFID keycards to open doors. In that particular case, it wasn't even a matter of inches - the card had to be within about two centimeters of the reader.
It would take a heck of a lot more juice than what those readers put out to make something that's actually useful for reading these passport chips remotely. Assuming the effective range on the readers I've used was exactly 2cm, the inverse square law tells us that doubling the power my chip out (and keepin the reader's receiver at the same power) would increase the range to 2.83cm, quadrupling it would get us to 4cm, octupling it would get us up to 5.66cm. . . and by the time you get to the point where a potential passport snooper isn't making himself *really* suspicious by running around an airport waving his briefcase next to everyone's baggage, you've got yourself quite an RFID reader. And then you throw on the shielding that's being put into these RFID passports and it's back to square one.
Not saying it's impossible to make a device that effectively identifies Americans by their passports, just saying that everyone should probably put their tinfoil hats on now because a device like that would probably give you one heck of a headache.
Since RFID tags use the transmitting signal to send a reply, the strength and therefore distance that it will transmit or echo is dependant largely on the signal of the detector. Obviously the tags themselves can't rebroadcast an infinitely large signal, but the fact that you needed to get close to the doors at your school is a design feature of the doors and not a limitation of the technology. After all, they don't want doors unlocking just because someone is walking by...
As I stated in an earlier post, Austrailia, New Zealand and Singapore already have RFID passports. The information that can be obtained from the chip is encrypted, and will only be readable using the public-key which is encoded in a machine readable format inside the passport http://www.dfat.gov.au/dept/passports/. The plan in the U.S. is the to do the same thing, as well as putting a metal lining in the cover of the passport so that the RFID cannot be read when the passport is closed. See http://www.aimglobal.org/members/news/anmviewer.as p?a=394&print=no