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.'"

Comments

Re:Security

[HiThere]

Wrong. The driver's license was not only the first step towards a national ID card, but almost the last necessary one. All they need now is regulations to harmonize the variants between the states... which may include an RFID chip. Because, you know, different states need to store different information, and that way we can include whatever's needed. (Nobody can readily tell what it contains, so it doesn't matter that all it contains is a unique ID # for lookup in a remotely hosted database.)