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E-Passport In the Works
ExE122 writes "In an attempt to curb falsification of passports, the United States has placed an order for millions of embedded ID chips. 'The chips carry an encrypted digital photograph of the passport holder. The chip is designed to be read by a special device that will be used by U.S. government workers who check passports when travelers come through border crossings. The State Department began issuing what are being called e-passports to tourists last week and will gradually increase production. State Department spokeswoman Janelle Hironimus said existing passports will remain valid until they expire but, eventually, all U.S. passports — about 13 million will be issued in 2006 — will contain such chips.'"
A 'chipped' passport would be susceptible to drive-by scanning, adds nothing a mag-stripe couldn't, and will likely be more expensive to implement. What's the point?
A German semiconductor company with offices in San Jose said Monday that it has received an order from the U.S. government for millions of identification chips that will be embedded in passports to help prevent fraud at border crossings.
Why do we always have to get everything from the Germans? (beer & cars for example) Why can't the government contract this out to good ol' American workers? Especially since it deals with National Security?
When they say "encrypted," do they actually mean digitally signed? Being able to provide a digitally signed (by a government key) passport photo in a machine-readable form would be good for security.
But simply encrypting the message with a symmetric key (as seems indicated by the blurb) would be bad for security, because many people would have the key, and so it would provide a false sense of security.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Forget about the so-called security. It's "secure" to the vast majority of voters.
The objective is to be able to process more people through customs faster and with more data captured as they get off ever-bigger airplanes.
This doesn't address a control point failure (customs) which is inevitable, but it looks good on paper and sounds really good.
FYI: Yes it's possible to store a picture and a fingerprint template on the contactless modules in question, but more likely it's storing a hash that looks the data up in a DB. Sending a picture file or a fingerprint template across the reader would be pretty slow.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
"Prefer?" I prefer quite a bit more time off. I would imagine most people do. The problem is, U.S. corporate behavior is geared toward maximizing profits at the expense of the employees and an imaginary work ethic that drives people into the ground and causes them to change jobs on an average of every two or three years and careers on an average of every 10 or 15 years. You ask, stupidly, who pays for Europeans' 6 weeks holiday -- obviously as a cultural norm the employer shells it out. It's a quality of life issue.
But please, don't insinuate that just because you're a driven workaholic with nothing better to do that the rest of us would 'prefer' that lifestyle. I think, given 6 weeks of guilt-free holiday, most Americans would take it gladly.
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Well, we 'take' 2 weeks (or 1 week, or whatever) a year. We do not 'get' 2 weeks a year. Americans can arrange their vacation vs. work time quite easily. As a nation, though, our cultural habits come down to preferring about 2 weeks per year.
Are you kidding me? "As a nation", we take what we can get. And all we can get is 2 weeks per year or less.
I don't think there's a man, woman or child alive that wouldn't want more than 2 weeks vacation. This is not a "cultural habit", this is just the dynamic of our employer/employee relationship. Employers want to ride their employees as hard as they can and employees are just doing all they can not to get fired.
Of course, us backwards wierdo liberal faggy Europeans get 6 weeks holiday.
Wow, who pays for that?
If the entire society accepts that this is normal, then no one pays for it.
Let's face it - the world works the way it does because we accept that the world works that way. If it worked differently, we'd accept that too. I mean, who's "paying" for the fact that you're sleeping 8 hours a day rather than working? You, and the rest of American society (at least to this point) has drawn the line at having at least enough time off every day to sleep. Nobody "pays" for that; that's just the way society has chosen to work. Could companies make more money if all of their employees worked 24 hours a day, 7 days a week? Sure. But you don't "pay" for something that never existed in the first place. That downtime is just downtime, not a debt that needs to be paid.
We Americans are overworked. We work more hours, on average, than any other nation in the world (yes, including places like Japan, which lets its employees have an average of 25 non-weekend days off per year). But it's not by and large because we want to, it's because we're demanded to and because employers have decided for us that this is the cultural norm. Someday, maybe we'll get in step with the rest of the world and realize that there are more important things in life than work.
I agree that we need to continue to constantly increase our security measures, but I believe there is a danger in supposed security measures which actually *don't* increase security. It causes the users of such measure to relax their guard, assuming that they are safe when they actually may not be.
As far as anti-counterfeiting measures, the 9/11 terrorists had valid passports and IDs, so how exactly would this prevent terrorism? If an immigration official lets his guard down because a person has an RFID passport, he may be ignoring other tip-offs that would alert him to suspicious activity. This would probably only really effect illegal immigration.
Again, no one is saying that we shouldn't increase security measures. But let's not claim that this is a panacea, or going to do something that is actually can't. Americans seem to have the belief that some simple technology will solve any problem we encounter. The reality is that we have to hire and train competent personnel in immigration and security. Mass surveillance, face recognition, gait recognition, etc. will not keep us safe from terrorism; motivated terrorists will always outsmart the machine or system. What we need is human intelligence, building contacts and infiltrating groups. These sorts of technological fixes are just to pacify jittery Americans into thinking that something is being done.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
what kind of contradictory Bullshit are you spewing? First you say...
...which clearly indicates that you are of the opinion that if someone makes a statement about how Americans prefer 2 weeks they must be workaholics.
"The problem is, U.S. corporate behavior is geared toward maximizing profits at the expense of the employees and an imaginary work ethic that drives people into the ground"
Which clearly indicates you believe that U.S. Citizens are pushed against their will to work as much as they do, because the CEOs and other corporate bigwigs want to increase the amount in their already overfull pockets. Then you say...
"But please, don't insinuate that just because you're a driven workaholic with nothing better to do that the rest of us would 'prefer' that lifestyle."
So which is it? Is that 2 week limit there because of people being workaholics and not wanting more vacation time, or is it there because the employers push harder than they should and only allow 2 weeks?
Personally I've never had a job where I had 2 weeks official vacation time per year. And I'm a U.S. Citizen.
I can clearly see from the anti-U.S sentiment here in the responses exactly WHY most Americans would prefer not to travel. It could also be due to the fact that while a lot of European countries are very tiny, the US is very large. Why go to another country when you can go somewhere in your own country that is easier to get to, somewhere you have never been before, and somewhere that won't cost you your entire vacation budget on airfare? An American can even expand their travelling habits to include visiting other countries, namely Mexico and Canada, so that they can spend their entire life vacationing once a year somewhere in North America, and never go to the same place twice.
Americans are not all rich. Not even most of us. Most Americans don't have a passport, because they will NEVER BE ABLE TO AFFORD TO TRAVEL OUTSIDE THIS COUNTRY in their lifetime. It is not because they are workaholics, or Xenophobes. If you work 6 days a week, 10 to 12 hours a day, it does not automatically mean that you are addicted to work. It most likely means that your job sucks, you have no prospects for a better job, you have no skills (or more importantly, documented notarized certification) to get a better job, and you have to support your family.
The cost of living in the US is now so high, compared to the "average" income, that we live in a DUAL INCOME culture. This is where there must be the equivalent of two incomes coming in, in order for a single family to be able to afford an "average" lifestyle. Guess what? Only those with an "average" or better lifestyle get to take 2 week vacations. THe rest of us working schmucks get to work on holidays (Christmas, Thanksgiving, Fourth of July, Etc.) and don't look forward to a vacation. THe rest of us working schmucks find that our vacation time comes when we get burned out with the job, and spend a few weeks looking for another. That's our vacation.
Looks like you Europeans are the ones with all the money and leisure time. Looks like YOU should be the ones on the world crusade to help the needy. We did our part. We saved your countries over 60 years ago. Get off our backs. How about a Thank you? How about taking US out for a vacation?
It's nice and all that the travel industry is growing and attempting to get more secure with the addition of these identifier chips. Soon, we won't need a separate passport. Soon, our regular Identification (what ever that turns out to be) will be all that is needed to travel. ANd I'm sure it will include a digital component.
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