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Cruising Fisherman's Wharf For New Passports' Serial Numbers
schwit1 writes "Fox News has an AP story on a hacker in San Francisco driving around and needing as little as 20 minutes to be successful in acquiring a passport number: 'Zipping past Fisherman's Wharf, his scanner detected, then downloaded to his laptop, the unique serial numbers of two pedestrians' electronic US passport cards embedded with radio frequency identification, or RFID, tags. Within an hour, he'd "skimmed" the identifiers of four more of the new, microchipped PASS cards from a distance of 20 feet. ... Meanwhile, Homeland Security has been promoting broad use of RFID even though its own advisory committee on data integrity and privacy warned that radio-tagged IDs have the potential to allow "widespread surveillance of individuals" without their knowledge or consent.'"
It's strange that politicians and other managers seem to have a totally different idea of the meaning of the word 'security' than other people.
-- Cheers!
You just need to buy an RFID shield for your passport and you can put your mind at ease. Unless, of course, you want to worry about how they don't work.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
If only these same people who secured my passport were in charge of my healthcare as well, then everything would be great!
Politicians have zero education, training in IT, they will buy into ideas pitched by lobbyists in order to secure rich government contracts for certain businesses.
Meanwhile, Homeland Security has been promoting broad use of RFID even though its own advisory committee on data integrity and privacy warned that radio-tagged IDs have the potential to allow "widespread surveillance of individuals" without their knowledge or consent."
s/even though/exactly because/g
Sure, but with facial recognition you'd first need a good database. The RFID in those passwords makes life a lot easier for terrorists wanting to strike at American tourists, for example.
Worse still, if it can be read once, it could be read twice, for instance to trigger their assassination e.g. with a bomb that would identify its targets based on the RFID (of the passport or any other of their belongings).
Moreover, remote-readable IDs could make it easier e.g. for kidnappers to single out the most promising victims from a crowd.
What obstacle would stop determined attackers from getting their hands on this kind of technology? Bigger and more thoroughly guarded things than simple hand-held radio tag scanners are probably being stolen from airports every day.
Actually, fears will never come to pass until the technology doesn't exist. Then, you have the problem of new technologies replacing it and the fears associated with it with new ones. This keeps going until the fears happen. So, it's probably wise to have the fears and keep them from becoming than to do nothing.
Passports use BAC encryption, which is obviously pretty weak.
You mean that RFID actually works!?
Yes, but do we really need it in passports and identification cards?
thats a endorsement for continual increase in use.
I wonder how long it will take before credit companies, homeland security and other rfid pushers join forces to create a implantable credit card/passport/whatever-service-you-can-think-of rfid chip. For your own protection and convenience, honest...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
You're right though, that you can't just type in "tell me where Joe Soap went on thursday afternoon" into the system and get an list of his/her whereabouts, but for targeted individuals, tracking without their permission has been available for some time.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Slashdot has covered this story before, many times, beginning at least as early as 2005.
"This is how surveillance societies like Britain tend to do it now. "
Citation needed.
Really, the UK has billions of cameras, but few people watching them and I'd be very, very surprised if they had anything approaching the level of sophistication you're talking about.
Just wrap it in tinfoil or brass screen.
I cannot imagine that even a SINGLE conversation with someone mildly conversant in basic security, no, just having common sense, would not have indicated that uncontrolled ID reading from a distance was a VERY VERY bad idea. It suggests to me that such a conversation was either not had, someone has a LOT of shares in RFID manufacturing or there is something else behind this rush to promote even more ID theft.
You can read ID from a distance which means it's now possible to create hidden bombs that lie dormant until there are enough people of a certain nationality nearby, it's possible to clone an identity and I suspect it won't be long before you can edit the biometric, making the theft of your LIFE complete because of "the 'pjuter is always rite" syndrome.
In the process other associated idiots are building up databases which are unnecessary (it works prefectly without) and which are a reversal of approach - normally your identity is only collected AFTER you have committed a crime, not BEFORE. You're now guilty until you prove it wasn't you who left a cloned identity behind. All of that without you noticing someone has been near to your passport, you no longer have control over who sees the data. Hello girls, welcome to stalking v2.
Actually, if you want political emotional scare stories, as the EU has now made one passport per person mandatory, it's also "Hello kids, welcome to 'brief your local paedophile'".
It would be really good if the clowns who dream up such stuff would be the first to suffer the consequences, all of them. Because I don't think they will learn otherwise - this is causing risk, not fixing identity issues. /rant
Insert
Those billion cameras are primarily a reactive system, not proactive. While they were initially sold on the public as a crime prevention and safety thing, they don't exist that way any longer. I guess in many ways it is a good thing that there are just too many to be monitored in real time. This makes your simple trip to the store utterly irrelevant and not of interest to anyone - but if your trip happens to coincide with some idiot crashing his car in to the aforementioned store, knocking you down in the process, then someone, be it insurance, police, ambulance, or whatever, might dredge it up for review. All in all you and I are just lost in the noise while the only valuable signal makes the nightly news.
RFID is a pretty good filter if your aim is to create a choke point (i.e. immigration counters) - you can file people past a scanner, snap off their picture without them knowing, have a drone somewhere do a comparison with the databased image, or run it through your super computer in the basement to do it for you.
If these RFID shields don't work, does anyone know something that does?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
The cards discussed in this article strictly provide a number, so they are just being used as a glorified barcode (maybe they have some security features that a barcode doesn't, but the guy scanning the numbers already knows how to bypass them, so they are irrelevant); a barcode is just as easy to link to a government database and introduces all the same problems with securing the database, so the only additional threat created by the RFID here is the ability to track the person holding the card (leakage of identity info is the same with a barcode, and there are no biometrics to edit on the card).
Still, it doesn't seem like the chip adds anything, and it certainly sucks for people to be able to automatically identify the card (not the person, just the card) at a distance.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
The anti-rfid wallet... ;)
Well I am completely against the apparent weak encryption and their lack of shielding but I think the big brother concerns are a little overblown. I don't think this is part of some massive systems to track us. Unless the U.S. is setting up this massive trackng network on cruise ships and all over foreign countries... I don't think it will suck in much.. unless of course they enjoy getting receiving data from my passport that always reports that I am 1) at home or 2) on my way to the airport. Seriously.. what U.S. citizen carries their passport everywhere they go domestically?
Yes, but the people in charge still haven't listened!
I live in Finland and we do have a public healthcare system here. That doesn't mean that here wouldn't also be private healthcare available. Those who dislike the public system (which works pretty well but is underfunded so waiting lines can be hours long in any non non-emergency case) can go to the private clinics. In addition to competing with each other, private clinics also need to compete with the public health care. It sets some kind of a status quo of "If you don't manage to offer extremely good service, people will just use public healthcare".
So I don't think that the wealthy do need to worry about potential for lower availability of care. Public healthcare just gives best of both worlds... In theory.
Recently (within the past decade) right wing government has been trying to change the way that public healthcare works here. Instead of having doctors who work for the government they try to have government buy services from private companies. In practice this works horribly.
Government buys from the company that offers services for cheapest but that lowers the quality. And even those companies have higher prices than what government would pay directly to the doctors as the companies try to make profit. So it is slowly changing from "The best of both worlds" to "The worst of both worlds".
One example of this is a hospital near me (Peijas in Itä-Vantaa). It used to be managed by the government but then there was a decision to privatize (if that's a word) the emergency duty. Now, if you go there complaining that your chest hurts, you might still need to wait four hours in the lobby before a doctor sees you but if they deem that you need further care and send you to the main part of the hospital... You get EKGs taken, evaluations from several doctors and so on, all for completely free of charge. (Speaking from experience here.)
So even with the "worst of both worlds" it works somehow (which is good because I really couldn't have been able to afford the treatments in a private clinic). I just fear what happens if the rest of the hospital services will be bought from private companies too.
Public healthcare can be done very well or very poorly depending on how it is implemented.
As for taxation... Yeah, it raises. Can't deny you there. As a rather decently earning programmer I pay nearly half of my wage as taxes (then again, that is more than free healthcare. It includes, among other things, that government funded my university education and insured my student loan). You are wrong to assume it will hurt the wealthy, though. It uses the people who don't use the services.
Whether you are wealthy or not, having higher taxes that provide services that you use are fine. Higher taxes hurt those who rarely have to visit a doctor, they hurt those who don't go to an university and so on. Others would have had to pay that money anyways, it just wouldn't have gone to government but directly to the private companies that provide the services. And the result might not have been any better.
Yeah, and I'm less concerned about passports being counterfeited than I am about people carrying US passports in other countries being targeted for mugging. Those passports are valuable, you know.
If these were passports or passport cards ? .. Most people here don't carry their passport around with them all the time.. However those new cheapo passport cards (for Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Bermuda) are much smaller and more portable and I can see people keeping them in their wallet.
I realize that both are vulnerable.. Sadly I have to get a passport renewal in 2010, and not looking forward to having a chipped one. I'll be getting the full one again (can see the point in limiting travel possibilities) .. I wonder what percentage of passports are the cheaper one ?
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If only these same people who secured my passport were in charge of my healthcare as well, then everything would be great!
We live in a country that is protected by a military funded by the government
If my house is on fire, the fire is managed by a fire department funded by the government
Law enforcement is provided by a police or sheriff's department funded by the government
I drive to work on roads whose maintenance are funded by the government
I was educated at public schools funded by the government
(just to name a few government services that are entitled to US citizens) If you would rather not have any of those services, there may be countries on other continents where you can opt to not have them. But these are all different departments of government; why you would assume that any of them - or the department in charge of passports - would be connected to a health care system that hasn't even been proposed is beyond me.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Exactly. It's sad to say, but most people are too stupid to save up for the right things. They'd rather buy that new HD television now than worry about their broken leg five years from now. A public health care system increases preventative care (which is cheaper and more effective) and is a way to force people to save for emergencies, rather than going to the emergency room. So if you're smart enough to know how to manage your health, just be glad not as many of your tax dollars will be going to idiots in the ER anymore.
I'd much rather have the choice of health care plan (as Obama intends) and pay less overall.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
Meanwhile, Homeland Security has been promoting broad use of RFID because its own advisory committee on data integrity and privacy warned that radio-tagged IDs have the potential to allow "widespread surveillance of individuals" without their knowledge or consent.
Fixed.
Security through obscurity works every time.
Or not.
The reason you're told not to smile is because the P.R. software has a harder time dealing with it - same with glasses wearers.
So if I want to go blow something up, and not get picked up, all I have to do is smile?
Good thing the whole country's already wired for cellphone service and service providers share connectivity in support of roaming. Lord knows how many people can track your whereabouts right now.
Oops...I left my passport at home today.
Slashdot...if it's technical, it must be stuff that matters?
I severely doubt we (currently) have facial recognition hooked up to the network of CCTV in this country, but what we do have is ANPR - automatic number plate recognition - all over the place.
There are very obvious cameras around that point clearly at the lanes on major roads which are logging all vehicles using major routes. I should think ANPR also gets hooked up to existing CCTV infrastructure too.
And the police seem to routinely have ANPR in their cars these days too. Well, maybe not the "panda cars" that get used for day to day pig work (runs to the doughnut shop and back, for example), but the traffic cars do. Watch any recent UK cop show (like <accent="Manc">Road Wars</accent>) and you will see them using their ANPR. The police cruise around looking for people to ticket (usually no seatbelts or something minor - you know, dangerous criminals), whilst the cameras in their vehicles are reading every numberplate they see. The machine then alerts the tax collectors^W^W police if a car is less than perfect. So any problem with insurance, car registration, owner's licence, road tax and the car will get pulled over. The ANPR system queries a bunch of databases in real time to do this.
What I really don't like is that more than likely the police car's system records the numberplates it sees, but it will no doubt also record the police car's location (from GPS), the direction the police car was going, and the time/date. With this data, along with the static ANPR data, is spelling the end of private travel by car in the UK.
Numberplates over here are pretty standardised, so I guess ANPR is relatively easy to implement compared to facial recognition. But I bet as soon as facial recognition is even slightly reliable it will be retro fitted to everything it can be. Though thinking about it, even if facial recognition doesn't work fully yet it would still be possible to record faces along with location+date+time. Google's streetview is able to tell what a face is, so there isn't much to stop similar happening through a CCTV network. And once facial recognition is reliable the existing data can be run through the system.
When I got a new passport a year or 2 ago, I had a new photo taken and I got the shop to save the photo onto a USB stick. From now on I will be submitting the same photo whenever a photo is needed for something.... at some point I need to get a new driving licence as I still have my 10+ year old paper one even though plastic licences with a photo have been standard for probably 9 years. When I got the photo done I hadn't had a haircut or shave for 6 months either, and I read all the rules about passport photos - black and white photos are still allowed! So my RFID passport has a picture in it that looks like it was taken in the mid-70s! Passport control at Gatwick airport didn't seem too bothered when I used it there, once I said "don't worry mate, it is me".
Car analogies break down.
--
Privacy vs Surveillance Feed @ Feed Distiller
It says it grabbed the "Serial number" - not all the passport information.
Is the serial number even the same thing as the passport number, or is it just the serial number of the RFID chip?
Is that even necessarily a passport? Could it be something else using similar RFID technology they picked up?
I need to get a passport soon, but this issue kind of concerns me - people who think those of us who are concerned are being overly paranoid just don't get it - just because there isn't anything disturbing happening with these things right now at this moment (that we know of) doesn't mean that we know things will remain copacetic in the future...Once the apparatus for widespread monitoring/tracking is in place, it's in place - it isn't a good or a bad thing, it's a tool that can be used in either manner.
I have heard about RFID shields, but have heard various concerns about their effectiveness.
I am wondering how these passports are actually constructed. Could the tag be removed when you don't want it there and re-inserted when you need it there?
Then again, some people may feel it's stupid to worry about such a thing when you carry a cell phone that has a GPS chip in it, and there may be some truth to that; only, my cell phone can be turned off and doesn't come directly from a government and it's not mandated that I carry it for identification when I travel internationally..
Yet another reason --as if you NEEDED another reason-- to stay out of that hellhole.
There's even a YA novel (Little Brother) by Doctorow that has this issue as a plot point; somehow I doubt that the people in charge are going to read it...
You don't have this in the USA? Waaaay to go. Thanks to the new telecommunications data retention laws in the EU this it will become possible ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_data_retention#European_Union ) to track every single EU citiziens life 6 months to 2 years (depending on the home countries implementation of the law) into the past.
If you carry around a cellphone or use any other kind of communcations device your positional data will be saved. And just to prevent any misunderstandings, this data is saved for anybody, no need to be suspicions.
Would it be all that hard for the US government to raise the price $5 and include a blocking sheath?
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Wrap your passport in aluminium foil.
Just do not walk thru the metal detector with that. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjXkOplqrWo)
"Meanwhile, Homeland Security has been promoting broad use of RFID even though its own advisory committee on data integrity and privacy warned that radio-tagged IDs have the potential to allow "widespread surveillance of individuals" without their knowledge or consent." -> 'even though'?! Should read 'because'.
Many smart cards are dual purpose, and have RFID along with it. I'm actually surprised whenever I come accross an RFID card that is not also a smart card. If you read their descriptions a little closer, you'll notice that they are targeting employees working for companies with just such smart cards. That logo is something any smart card user will recognize. It's also a really really good idea to have something other than just wireless to read the card if you are using it for anything more than a door pass.
See sig.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
As they are designed to stop Electomagnetic Radiation coming in then I would guess that they could ork to stop the RFID responses from getting out.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
Just to clarify, these are passport cards which are a hard plastic card that can only be used to travel between Canada the US and Mexico. The "Real" passports also have an rfid in them but they have a faraday cage built into the cover so they can only be picked up when opened.
What do you mean? They implemented it didn't they?
You just don't understand(accept?) their motives.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
You forget that they themselves will be just as trackable. As a politician I would be very worried about that.
Politicians should be more trackable than citizens. Politicians are supposed to work for, and be accountable to, citizens not the other way around.
So either they really don't care, or they just have not clue. What do you think it is? ;)
Both I bet. Some probably don't know what uses can be made of with IDs and passports with embedded chips. And some of those who do probably think they're immune.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
check back with me in a couple years.. I'm betting you won't like him then...
I cringed as I voted for Obama. But as I said during the campaign McCain scared and Hillary terrified me. I was hoping that at least Obama would take the advise of some economists of the Chicago school of economics.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
...he writes a How-To and puts it up online. That's when I'd expect people to really take notice, and those in charge may think, "Oh, maybe that wasn't such a great idea."
Then again, we Americans as a whole really haven't given a shit about our privacy rights for the last eight years (or more), so why start now?
blame the designer for not putting it in the design.
Before blaming the designers, blame politicians first for requiring chips and RFID.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Meanwhile, Homeland Security has been promoting broad use of RFID because its own advisory committee on data integrity and privacy warned that radio-tagged IDs have the potential to allow "widespread surveillance of individuals" without their knowledge or consent.'"
There, fixed that for ya.
in the US there are typically around 12 Doctors involved in the average Americans healthcare. have you ever been to a doctors office?
I last went to my Doc's office 3 days ago, on Thursday and I had 2 different appointments. Next Thursday I have 2 more appoints. Each of these appoints are with specialists, counselors or therapists who cost less than my doctor does. I am both disabled and a diabetic, yet I doubt I'll see half of your dozen docs this year. You'd have to go back more than 10 years before you can count 10 docs I've seen in an official capacity.
having worked in the medical field as a healthcare professional for a while i've seen firsthand the fiasco that is the US heathcare system. sorry folks, you arent getting "the best healthcare in the world" not even close. in fact
http://www.photius.com/rankings/healthranks.html
the US fares pretty abysmally.
France, which is listed number 1 in your list, is still having trouble with "runaway health-care inflation". Canada, which comes in 8 places before the US, still has people coming to the US for surgeries. For those who can afford it the US has about the best medical care in the world. Of course in part because of, and in part caused by, medical tourism other nations are catching up. Why have surgery in the US when you can have it done in India quicker and cheaper? Ah, a freer market.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
And if RFID tags are easily copied, isn't that a good thing? It will discourage attempts to use them for surveillance.
The comparison of RFID tags and Social Security numbers is entertaining, but the risk with SSNs is largely because they are treated as if they are secret when they are not. (Okay, they've also been overused as a primary key because too many public and private organizations were too lazy to generate their own unique ids, which does make it easier to aggregate information *once you have access to it*.)
The article refers to "Paget's cloning experiment." But it doesn't actually say that any cloning was involved, only reading at a distance. Is cloning as easy as reading? I don't know, and neither does the article's author, I would guess.
having higher taxes that provide services that you use are fine.
No it isn't. Why should I work harder and or longer when my taxes go up? Raising taxes discourages people from working. It also discourages people from investing, and investing improves the economy. The more invested the more jobs are created which raises wages.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Only problem is, if you ever need something major like a new kidney or whatever you'd better hope you've got that 25% of your income you weren't taxed for the last 10 years sitting in hand, or you might be in some trouble.
That money could be used to pay for health insurance.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I wrote about RFID landmines here on Slashdot, about five years ago.
It's nice to see that someone else besides me is sufficiently realistic to understand that this can be a real problem. And it's cheap: I don't know what RFID standard passports are using, but various readers on Ebay don't seem to creep much above the $50 mark. Add a microcontroller and some code (which, of course, can be open-sourced amongst other terrorist organizations), along with a little supporting hardware, and you've got yourself a trigger for a device for less than, say, $200 and a few days/weeks of study by an aptly-minded person.
That $200 isn't much money at all, even for a third-world organization, for an attack which is nearly guaranteed to kill one or more civilians of any country which institutes standardized RFID identification. And the best part is, they get to pick and choose which country is the enemy this week when deploying the things.
I, for one, am not very happy about this.
Kid-proof tablet..
Metallized shielding bags, the ones computer components often are delivered in.
You ought to have some lying around, right?
Note that not all anti-static bags are shielded, but usually the ones for RAM and HD have a metal film that effectively creates a faraday cage.
They're the shiny ones. ;)
I learned this when working with RFID used for registering cars passing at tollbooths, the chips and their containers needed to be shielded for transportation to a POS that was on the other side of a tollbooth.
Better for sticking your passport in, less practical for hats.
computers let you make more mistakes faster, with the possible exception of handguns and tequila.
Doesn't the radio frequency request need to reach the RFID chip in order for it to send a signal back out?
My gf had troubles with her knee, she had to get surgery. She waited 16 month before she got it. It wasn't an urgent situation, just inconvenient. Now the situation is better and the average wait in Québec for elective surgery is 6 month. It was a choice, either she pays to get the operation right now (15k$) or she waits.
And I know something about how it is in the US. More than 10 years ago I was a college student without permanent employment, part or full tyme, and without health or medical insurance. One day after my classes I was hit while riding my bike. Despite having no way to pay I was medevaced by helicopter to the hospital. I was in the hospital a few weeks, part of that tyme while in a coma I was then moved to a rehab house for rehabilitation for a few more weeks. When I left there I moved into my mother's house and lived there while going to the hospital for more therapy.
All together my medical bills came to more than $120,000 and neither the docs nor the hospital was guaranteed they would be paid. More than 10 years later I still have a disability, so I receive government aid. I get Social Security Income and Medicare. However instead of the taxpayers being stuck paying, I believe the employer of the person who hit me, he was working while driving a company vehicle should have been required to pay.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
And no responsibility either?
If you get hit by a car, you cannot sue the driver for damages. But the state will sue the driver in criminal court(I think that part is the same in the USA).
I've never heard of the state suing the driver for damages, but the injured can. That's how the medical bills were paid. Unfortunately they didn't have enough insurance coverage to take care of me the rest of my life. That would be a problem whether the injured party or the government sued.
Why would the employer should pay?
It's called responsibility. If the employer had tried to check into employees but didn't find any warning then I'd agree they shouldn't be on the hook. I'd instead hold the person who drove responsible. However the person who hit me had a record of trouble. He left his own state and moved to mine because his state issued an arrest warrant in his name. He had caused accidents before, and he had been taken to the hospital more than once. He was a diabetic but did not take care of his diabetes.
Why would I start a business if one employee can wreck my business if he doesn't behave correctly?
I can say the same about starting a business in Europe. The number 1 country in health care rankings in the previous link was France. A few years ago there were widespread riots in France by the youth. Why did they riot? Because the government was going to make it easier for employers to fire employees under the age of 26, right now it's hard to fire them. My sister's a CPA, Certified Public Accountant, who along with friends started their own accounting business. In doing so they created jobs for others. I doubt she would have started the business if she couldn't fire bad employees easily. It seems that under European rules businesses almost go bankrupt before being able to fire bad employees.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
And even if they do start to read it, they'll never make it more than a few pages into that pile of crap.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
Simple, leave your passport in the hotel's vault and/or your room's safe.
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
You've obviously never travelled to a dodgy African country - there is NO way that you trust anyone to hold your passport as it's your only way out when the shit hits the fan.
Plus, theft is rife even in the 'nicer' hotels in some of these shitholes.
In Finland, Electronic Frontier Finland donated copies of Orwell's 1984 to members of the parliament, the ministers, and (finnish) members of the europarlament this summer. Now if only one of them actually read the book...
Can't you solve the problem in just one minute using a microwave oven? Would that be illegal?
The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.
It's a warning, not an instruction manual! - Orwell
Just insert the RFID emitting credential into a slip-on Faraday Cage and you will be shielded from the enemy.
Meanwhile, Homeland Security has been promoting broad use of RFID even though its own advisory committee on data integrity and privacy warned that radio-tagged IDs have the potential to allow "widespread surveillance of individuals" without their knowledge or consent.
This is not a bug, its a feature.
Not only that, it was part of the design requirements.
Some years ago my credit card issuer stopped using them because the usefulness didn't justify the expense. Now if I want, such as to order something online, my issuer will issue a one tyme use credit card number.
Who is your issuer? Mine stopped doing that years ago, and I'd like to find someone who still does.
Well, I don't know if the company does it anymore. Late last year or early this year Chase Manhattan took over my credit card issuer.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
How in the world will doing this protect you while traveling from A to B?
Not everyone who travels lives in a hotel. They might sleep in one from time to time, but the rest time they've got all of their immediate possessions with them. Including, of course, a passport.
Kid-proof tablet..
It's nice to see that someone else besides me is sufficiently realistic to understand that this can be a real problem. And it's cheap: I don't know what RFID standard passports are using, but various readers on Ebay don't seem to creep much above the $50 mark. Add a microcontroller and some code (which, of course, can be open-sourced amongst other terrorist organizations), along with a little supporting hardware, and you've got yourself a trigger for a device for less than, say, $200 and a few days/weeks of study by an aptly-minded person.
Dead on. And, if you can get the trigger to go off remotely, you get great savings by reusing much of the hardware.
Just set the main stuff up (buried) at a distance from the IED. Use thin enough wires and you can just kick or brush some dust over them.
You are aware, are you not, that khaki, the color of many military uniforms in times past, is the Afghan word for "dust". What better way to keep looking snappy than to make your uniforms out of material the same color as what's blowing all over them in the wind? Perfect camo for uniforms and wires.
Heh, captcha = commando
The reason you're told not to smile is because the P.R. software has a harder time dealing with it
That's really interesting. It's always been the case with California driver's licenses, as far as I can remember. Same with US passports
But sometime in the past year or two, a friend with a US passport got an Irish passport. (This used to be a bad in the US, which frowned on dual citizenship.) When taking the photo, she was told not to look so glum, so she gave them a big smile.
So, being of close Irish ancestry, I decided to do so as well. By the time my app had arrived, things had changed. Now they emphasize that you are not to smile.
If it was just a randomised serial number as is used to detect fake drugs (AFAIK the idea behind aegate.com) it would still not be OK as that implies a mother of all databases with personal details and biometrics which are accessible by any idiot with a border.
However, have a look at http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,431701,00.html and others, a Dutch group CHANGED the data on the chip which implies (1) it's on the chip and (2) it's changeable ON REMOTE.
The chip holds data, data that can be accessed and even changed without the owner knowing (except mine, it appears the lack of shielding makes it very sensitive to being accidentally passed over a microwave comms dish. Funny that..).
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