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WarCloning, the New WarDriving?

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the now-everyone-with-a-laptop-in-their-car-is-gonna-get-searched dept.

ChrisPaget writes "After my legal skirmishes with HID a while back, The Register has coverage of my latest RFID work — cloning Passport Cards and Electronic Drivers Licenses from a moving vehicle. Full details will be released at Shmoocon this weekend, but in the meantime there's video of the equipment and articles all over the place."

9 of 154 comments (clear)

  1. RFID on identification scares me by sempiterna · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'm very much afraid of government implementing rfid on a widespread level. I have to admit that if I was government, I'd probably push to do the same thing.

    Having Big Brother being able to know who I am by walking into a door of the court house, or if a police officer pulls you over and 'scans your arm', really scares me.

    The potential for abuse is tremendous.

    1. Re:RFID on identification scares me by ushering05401 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Who knows what your prospective employer etc would see in your file?

      Who knows if it would be true?

      Oh wait.. there could be some sort of efficient appeals process to get improper notations removed from your file just as easy as fixing your credit history after getting ID jacked...

      Boy, my grade school teachers didn't know how right they were when they threatened me with screwing up my 'permanent record.'

    2. Re:RFID on identification scares me by commodore64_love · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Go to a concentration camp; they could have a name, phone numbers, next of kin, final will and testament, etc already on file. No more wasted paper or wasted time filling out the same info on different forms. Just send them straight to the "showers" for processing.

      Go to a job interview; they could have a genetic workup, list of potential diseases, previous health expenditures, current debt accumulation, etc already on file. No more hiring of people who are sickly & likely to aste company resources, or are deep in debt and potential thieves. They can be weeded out immediately.

      Point:

      Having information so easily available is dangerous. It's loss of power by the citizen & a gaining of power by the politicians and the corporations.

      --
      "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
  2. Why? by EmbeddedJanitor · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Right now the police can pull you over and ask for your license. Don't show it and you see the inside of a cell.

    And while you're driving around your car has license plates on it which can be scanned from far further than RFID.

    The potential for abuse is already there and has been for a long time.

    One cool thing with new tech is that it lifts the bar for the scammers. With RFID you need a lot more than a photocopier and laminator to make a fake drivers license.

    --
    Engineering is the art of compromise.
    1. Re:Why? by faloi · · Score: 5, Insightful

      With RFID you need a lot more than a photocopier and laminator to make a fake drivers license.

      Yeah, you also apparently need a couple of hundred bucks worth of stuff. And the added "advantage" to RFID is that most people will probably actually believe it's secure and take the scan at face value, making it easier than ever to pass off fake ID most places.

      --
      "It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
    2. Re:Why? by NonUniqueNickname · · Score: 3, Insightful

      your car has license plates on it which can be scanned from far further than RFID

      Very few people carry their car's license plates in their wallet or purses. For most of us, having RFID on our driver's license is akin to having RFID implanted in our skull.

    3. Re:Why? by davester666 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Using RFID isn't that big a leap for the police, as they already have access to all the information that it transmits, only with RFID, they may be able to retrieve the information without having to ask you (if you keep your DL,passport,whatever unshielded).

      Using RFID IS a big leap for everybody else. Suddenly, anybody who has the inclination can find out your name, address, SIN, your digitized picture and fingerprints. Without your knowledge or permission.

      With license plates, they do uniquely identify your vehicle, but in a way generally keeps you as an individual anonymous to the general population. It takes a non-trivial amount of effort for someone to convert each license plate to their owner, and it must be repeated for each plate. With RFID, after the initial investment, you can acquire a large amount of very specific, private information for a large number of individuals for no significant additional costs.

      And for RFID-enabled ID's, I would guess that people 'authenticating' you using them are more likely to blindly use the RFID-encoded information, and not put a lot of effort into checking that the card itself is valid.

      --
      Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
  3. Re:Protection by pluther · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The first thing I did was to put it in the microwave.

    We are still supposed to do that to all our mail, right? To protect against anthrax? (Are we still living in fear of that? It's hard to keep up sometimes.)

    Surely Homeland Security can't be upset at us for doing what they told us to do!

    --
    If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
  4. Don't be scared by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    We're safe. Cloning RFIDs is illegal.