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Feds Start Small on Smart IDs
jcatcw writes "Some government employees will be getting smart ID cards beginning this week. The unfunded mandate to have all employees and contractors use Personal Identity Verification (PIV) cards is part of Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12. The U.S. General Services Administration is providing enrollment centers that can verify the identities of employees, fingerprint and photograph the workers, and issue PIV cards to them. The deadline for getting cards to all employees and contractors is the end of September 2008."
Step by step is how it happens- so subtle you don't even realise until it's too late.
It's starting to get late, heading towards too late soon.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
I've worked as a contractor for the Federal Government and the City of New York (which considers themselves a Federal Government). Most of the agencies I worked at had security that was an absolute joke. I'll give the guys at the DoE/Forrestal Building some credit as well as the Department of Juvenile Justice in NYC , they actually asked questions and took their jobs seriously. (The DoJJ guys in New York are the only ones who have flat-out denied me entry... no matter how much smooth talking I did. For whatever reason, the guards I came across took protecting the identities and lives of the children in overseen by the agency very, very seriously and I have the utmost respect for them because of it.) Most of the other security guards were too concerned about talking about the caboose of the last woman to walk through the metal detector.
/looking for the black helicopters
The point is, no amount of technological or physical security is going to do any good if the people entrusted with its implementation are not trained to do their job properly or take it seriously. The only "serious" contracts I worked were at DoE but at the rest of the agencies I had access to enough information to financially ruin a good number of the people in the United States. Thankfully I worked with people who took that responsibility as seriously as I did but I can't help but feel that was through luck of the draw and not the success of the system.
Smartcards/RFID make sense if they going to be used and implemented properly (e.g. you picture is on the card and encrypted with a public key system so that the agency can verify that it's authentic and not a clever forgery... and the people at the desk care enough to actually check)... otherwise it's just another way for contractors/etc to make money and a waste of everyone else's time.