The only people who would benefit from this are the individuals, corporations, and politicians seeking to quash dissent by outing, and then suing, those who post unflattering comments, no matter how truthful.
It could well be "especially those which are truthful". The untrue ones might be fairly easy to debunk. Ironically the result of this can be to encourage bullying.
Are you sure about that? I mean, do you WANT to keep what you have to keep in your wallet down, don't you? For various reasons my parents have accounts at at least three different banks. Do you propose they keep three different forms of photo ID? Perhaps combined with their ATM cards?
If that's what each bank issued them with, to verify that they are the same person/people who opened the account then they will need 3 such cards. But it should be something between banks and their customers. Of course unless they actually go to the bank in question what do they need the card for...
Right now having your address on your DL helps in returning it if it's lost, especially in times before the internet.
Or gives burglars a possible target. They don't even need to steal the document, just see it.
Citizenship status - good for verifying voting and employment rights. Allows it to act like a 'passport card'.
1. Thing is that most people don't vote or change their employment that often. The average person could easily vote more often in a private election than in a public election. Where a club membership card might be more relevent than any state issued ID.
2. Driver's license - basically just an endorsement. That way places like car rental agencies DON'T need a tie in to the database.
Renting a car is an activity where evidence of having passed a driving test is actually relevent.
3. Blood type/organ donor/special medical status - Yes, if you're diabetic you might want to have more indicators like a bracelet.
In the case of that kind medical condition something well attached to your body might be useful. An accident which renders you unconcious may also result in the loss of the card or the paramedics might be too busy trying to treat you to have time to go through your pockets. There are also people with objections to various medical treatments...
4. Distinguishing characteristics like height/weight to help back up the picture.
Unless the picture is "full height", then this information may well not be of much use in "backing up" the picture.
All this craziness about uber-security is just useless,
Actually it's useless at best. There are undoubtedly much more effective security measures to spend the money on. However these are likely to be unobtrustive, in no way bother the majority of people and likely to catch the "wrong sort" of terrorists. Thus making them unattractive to politicans.
the only risk today is the risk of bombing and it is already hard enough to bring a big engine in the cabin. Bombings are far easier by bringing a car full of explosives into a crowded area...
A car in a crowded area can be an effective weapon even without filling it with explosives.
Have a bit of pity on the people who have to look at the pictures all day.
If they are doing that the security value is probably close to nothing. You'd need something like they do this for a maximum of 15 minutes in every hour or two.
It's like the "so long as you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear" argument: the definition of "right" is getting so narrow as to be ridiculous.
Yet interestingly I don't see politicans, civil servants, CEO, etc being first in line to tell everyone exactly what they are doing.
For example, until VERY recently, there were no mentions anywhere on wikipedia that there was any controversy on what happened on 9-11.
Let alone the contoversy of exactly why it happened...
I came to wikipedia to get my facts straight, but instead, everything was one sided. Everything that got added mentioning the existence of the controversy got immediately deleted as conspiracy theorist nonsense, even though there are huge articles on things like Roswell and Bigfoot.
Also the US Government's version is itself a not very good conspiracy theory. Indeed it's rather hard to explain multiple hijacks without conspiracy. Roswell and Bigfoot are likely to be a lot less politically sensitive and controversal than 9/11.
IDs are only "useful" to nefarious purpose if they link to sensitive data. Name, DOB and gender are not sensitive. But if the governement can then tap into financial records, religion practice, race, sexual orientation, political affiliations, then, it's sure to become a liability.
Actually "Name" can easily be in the senstitive catagory. Since names can corralate with race, religion, political. Governments obesessed with racial, religious or political "purity" tend not to be concerned with "false positives".
An id card merely says "John Smith (23984211038) was born on 4/1/1981, is a US citizen, looks like this, has this signature, and resides here." The cards are hard to forge. Such cards aren't used to replace ATM cards or anything else. They are used when you go to the bank in person and interact with a teller,
It would be far more sensible to have a card which stated "John Smith, looks like this, has this signature, has this account, with that bank". If the bank really needed to know citizenship, date of birth, address, etc they can sort that out when John Smith opened his account.
in which case they are no worse than a driver's license
Unless John Smith is asking for a loan to buy a car the bank really has no business seeing in the first place...
It's my understanding that they want to tie bank accounts, driver's license, social insurance / security (I'm Canadian), passport etc. to one single card.
If you lose this card you are completely fsck'd. And if someone wants to steal your identity all they have to do is either steal or forge your card. And before people say that forging cards is theoretically as difficult as forging a credit card I'll just point out that that's extremely little comfort. Forging credit cards is one of the most common credit card scams.
These ID cards are going to be a lot more valuable to criminals than existing credit cards, so they are likely to put a lot more effort into subverting them.
All you need is an account number and the PIN and you can make a card to use in any ATM. It won't fool a person but it's not meant to.
Alternativly you could use an account number and a CVN. Both of which are printed on the card and likely to be available in the records of a "cardholder not present" transaction.
How many people over the age of 16 or so DON'T have a driver's license or state issued ID card?
Probably most unless you are restricted to parts of the world which have lots of cars and allow people as young as 16 to drive them. It is also logically flawed to imply that a machine operators permit be proof of anything other than the ability to operate the machine in question.
I was issued one in HS, never used it other than to get discounts at a few stores that had discounts for students. I had one for college. I have one for my job.
These all sound like fairly limited IDs which are of little use to fraudsters. Unless they for some reason want to enter your school, college or workplace.
If you give very small countries with corrupt governments disproportional voting power in international bodies your process will get corrupted.
Corrupt governments are not only found in small countries. If anything people in small countries appear more likely to accept that their governments are corrupt.
It is not the government running the digital key part of the register. There are 3-4 registrars who are authorised to issue it and their procedures are actually publically available and they are subject to regular 3rd party audit as part of their license. This includes the procedures for accessing and using the CA keys.
How easy is it for people to change registrars? How easy is it for new registrars to be created?
I say reverse the trend, make the airlines normal again as they were in the 80s and 90s. Who cares if people are "smuggling" drugs, or if someone just happens to be second cousin once removed to the groundskeeper of a member of the Bin Laden family ? Who really fucking cares ? They're on a plane, and they're travelling.
Someone smuggling probably has more reason that the average passenger to get to their destination on time.
If the US Government hadn't been shitting on Iraq for the last two decades, maybe those folks wouldn't be so angry in the first place.
Possibly the best thing the US could have done in response to 9/11 would have been to get out of interfering in the Middle East completely. But that would never happen.
The measures we go through to stop terrorism have reached such a point of insanity that I am simply blown away.
With little evidence that they actually do anything to stop terrorism. Of course if they were to obviously fail the politicans would probably demand "more of the same" rather than admit that this "security theatre" is useless.
This latest scheme in Britain is just one more example of the utter insanity of the masses and their complete and utter inability to make rational decisions. You are radically more likely to be killed by your pool or a car than you are to be struck down by a terrorist. Despite this, we go through insane, fanatical, and expensive measures to prevent one of the rarest ways to die in a western democracy. Death through airplane exploded by terrorist rates somewhere near the absolute bottom in terms of likely ways to die... well below being struck down by lightening.
Wonder where being shot dead by armed police rates on this scale.
This all just proves that the people "charged with our"security" are fucked in the head!
This is news exactly how?
Now, any terrorist that wants to cause grief in the UK knows that he had better take the channel tunnel, and not fly into Heathrow!
Or take the ferry or fly to a different airport, even walk/drive over a land border. There's also whatever methods large numbers of people appear to sucessfully use to enter the UK illegally. Of course if they are planning on a suicide attack they are unlikely to care much about their fingerprints being on file anywhere, not having any further use for their fingers! Then there;s the possibility that they might already be in the UK already.
That "terrorist act" is just used as an excuse/"reason" for them to come down hard on our freedoms and do whatever they feel like doing, in the name of "safety" and "security"..
With little evidence that these actions actually do what they claim to do. Or even any critical analysis of them.
That's it. Just a bullshit excuse for raping the shit out of ordinary peoples' freedoms and liberties.
It's all to easy for people reaching this conclusion to be dismissed as "nutjob conspiracy theorists" however. Which is ironic considering that virtually all of the terrorist threats which the UK and US government have turned out to be far fetched conspiracy theories.
Britain went through so many terrorist attacks via the IRA. Why do a couple of idiot doctors setting their cars on fire provoke this sort of response? Insane. Bring back thatcher!
Whatever her faults she didn't push this kind of nonsense even after surviving a (real) terrorist attack.
Terminal 5 mixes international passengers and domestic passengers into one area. This system hypothetically prevents people who just got off of an international flight from getting on to a domestic flight and not going through immigration.
Then why are you doing it? It seems like they're just trying to get the citizens used to these kinds of abuses so that when they do start cross-checking and retaining data indefinitely nobody will be able to tell the difference, or care.
Which makes a lot more sense than the daft claim that it's to stop passenger subsitution between check in and boarding.
Right, the Russians want to dismantle the weapons and not have to maintain them or protect them. Problem is, what do they do with the Pu once the weapons have been dismantled? Answer: sell it. But to who? Unsavory guys who'll make it into weapons, or US Science Guys who promise not to?
Most likely the US wouldn't use it to make weapons because they already have their own stockpile. The other alternative is to turn it into reactor fuel...
The official position of the US Government is that breeder reactors are a potential threat. Bad Guys(TM) might get ahold of fissible materials bound for reprocessing, and THEN where would we be, hmm?
Which would require said "bad guys" to have a plant for reprocessing nuclear fuel and the vehicles to transport it to said plant. Far easier to use spent nuclear fuel in a "dirty bomb". All you need in addition is some high explosive and some idiots who don't mind dying to rig the explosives.
Never mind the fact that it's about 1000x simpler to create a gun-type bomb with Uranium rather than creating an uber-complex implosion device.
Assuming you have enriched uranium to hand.
All terrorists obviously have access to the advanced nuclear engineering and simulation capabilities necessary to create a plutonium implosion device.
Please, people, don't get any of your legal education from TV. I work with TV writers. They are definitely not scholars in any sense of the word. They will create plot devices that brazenly ignore the law of the land, the laws of human behavior, and/or the laws of physics if it'll move the story forward.
There are enough examples of common "Hollywood physics" for a large number of episodes of Mythbusters (without even revisting those which have already been busted). No doubt there is also quite a bit of stock "Hollywood law" and "Hollywood human behaviour" which is just as much complete fiction.
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The only people who would benefit from this are the individuals, corporations, and politicians seeking to quash dissent by outing, and then suing, those who post unflattering comments, no matter how truthful.
It could well be "especially those which are truthful". The untrue ones might be fairly easy to debunk.
Ironically the result of this can be to encourage bullying.
We all knew the names of bullies at school. It didn't stop them.
Nor does it in other environments.
Also what is someone's "real name"?
Are you sure about that? I mean, do you WANT to keep what you have to keep in your wallet down, don't you? For various reasons my parents have accounts at at least three different banks. Do you propose they keep three different forms of photo ID? Perhaps combined with their ATM cards?
If that's what each bank issued them with, to verify that they are the same person/people who opened the account then they will need 3 such cards. But it should be something between banks and their customers. Of course unless they actually go to the bank in question what do they need the card for...
Right now having your address on your DL helps in returning it if it's lost, especially in times before the internet.
Or gives burglars a possible target. They don't even need to steal the document, just see it.
Citizenship status - good for verifying voting and employment rights. Allows it to act like a 'passport card'.
1. Thing is that most people don't vote or change their employment that often. The average person could easily vote more often in a private election than in a public election. Where a club membership card might be more relevent than any state issued ID.
2. Driver's license - basically just an endorsement. That way places like car rental agencies DON'T need a tie in to the database.
Renting a car is an activity where evidence of having passed a driving test is actually relevent.
3. Blood type/organ donor/special medical status - Yes, if you're diabetic you might want to have more indicators like a bracelet.
In the case of that kind medical condition something well attached to your body might be useful. An accident which renders you unconcious may also result in the loss of the card or the paramedics might be too busy trying to treat you to have time to go through your pockets. There are also people with objections to various medical treatments...
4. Distinguishing characteristics like height/weight to help back up the picture.
Unless the picture is "full height", then this information may well not be of much use in "backing up" the picture.
All this craziness about uber-security is just useless,
Actually it's useless at best. There are undoubtedly much more effective security measures to spend the money on. However these are likely to be unobtrustive, in no way bother the majority of people and likely to catch the "wrong sort" of terrorists. Thus making them unattractive to politicans.
the only risk today is the risk of bombing and it is already hard enough to bring a big engine in the cabin. Bombings are far easier by bringing a car full of explosives into a crowded area...
A car in a crowded area can be an effective weapon even without filling it with explosives.
Have a bit of pity on the people who have to look at the pictures all day.
If they are doing that the security value is probably close to nothing. You'd need something like they do this for a maximum of 15 minutes in every hour or two.
It's like the "so long as you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear" argument: the definition of "right" is getting so narrow as to be ridiculous.
Yet interestingly I don't see politicans, civil servants, CEO, etc being first in line to tell everyone exactly what they are doing.
For example, until VERY recently, there were no mentions anywhere on wikipedia that there was any controversy on what happened on 9-11.
Let alone the contoversy of exactly why it happened...
I came to wikipedia to get my facts straight, but instead, everything was one sided. Everything that got added mentioning the existence of the controversy got immediately deleted as conspiracy theorist nonsense, even though there are huge articles on things like Roswell and Bigfoot.
Also the US Government's version is itself a not very good conspiracy theory. Indeed it's rather hard to explain multiple hijacks without conspiracy.
Roswell and Bigfoot are likely to be a lot less politically sensitive and controversal than 9/11.
I don't see the reason why Wikipedia cannot document every trivial human knowledge and still be a trustworthy and credible reference source.
Anyway the feinition of "trivial" can be highly subjective.
you'll just get arrested on the spot (if appropriate) so that they can check your identity at a later time
Except that the police don't need to know someone's identity if they catch that person committing a crime.
IDs are only "useful" to nefarious purpose if they link to sensitive data. Name, DOB and gender are not sensitive. But if the governement can then tap into financial records, religion practice, race, sexual orientation, political affiliations, then, it's sure to become a liability.
Actually "Name" can easily be in the senstitive catagory. Since names can corralate with race, religion, political. Governments obesessed with racial, religious or political "purity" tend not to be concerned with "false positives".
An id card merely says "John Smith (23984211038) was born on 4/1/1981, is a US citizen, looks like this, has this signature, and resides here." The cards are hard to forge. Such cards aren't used to replace ATM cards or anything else. They are used when you go to the bank in person and interact with a teller,
It would be far more sensible to have a card which stated "John Smith, looks like this, has this signature, has this account, with that bank". If the bank really needed to know citizenship, date of birth, address, etc they can sort that out when John Smith opened his account.
in which case they are no worse than a driver's license
Unless John Smith is asking for a loan to buy a car the bank really has no business seeing in the first place...
It's my understanding that they want to tie bank accounts, driver's license, social insurance / security (I'm Canadian), passport etc. to one single card.
If you lose this card you are completely fsck'd. And if someone wants to steal your identity all they have to do is either steal or forge your card. And before people say that forging cards is theoretically as difficult as forging a credit card I'll just point out that that's extremely little comfort. Forging credit cards is one of the most common credit card scams.
These ID cards are going to be a lot more valuable to criminals than existing credit cards, so they are likely to put a lot more effort into subverting them.
All you need is an account number and the PIN and you can make a card to use in any ATM. It won't fool a person but it's not meant to.
Alternativly you could use an account number and a CVN. Both of which are printed on the card and likely to be available in the records of a "cardholder not present" transaction.
How many people over the age of 16 or so DON'T have a driver's license or state issued ID card?
Probably most unless you are restricted to parts of the world which have lots of cars and allow people as young as 16 to drive them. It is also logically flawed to imply that a machine operators permit be proof of anything other than the ability to operate the machine in question.
I was issued one in HS, never used it other than to get discounts at a few stores that had discounts for students. I had one for college. I have one for my job.
These all sound like fairly limited IDs which are of little use to fraudsters. Unless they for some reason want to enter your school, college or workplace.
If you give very small countries with corrupt governments disproportional voting power in international bodies your process will get corrupted.
Corrupt governments are not only found in small countries. If anything people in small countries appear more likely to accept that their governments are corrupt.
It is not the government running the digital key part of the register. There are 3-4 registrars who are authorised to issue it and their procedures are actually publically available and they are subject to regular 3rd party audit as part of their license. This includes the procedures for accessing and using the CA keys.
How easy is it for people to change registrars? How easy is it for new registrars to be created?
I say reverse the trend, make the airlines normal again as they were in the 80s and 90s. Who cares if people are "smuggling" drugs, or if someone just happens to be second cousin once removed to the groundskeeper of a member of the Bin Laden family ? Who really fucking cares ? They're on a plane, and they're travelling.
Someone smuggling probably has more reason that the average passenger to get to their destination on time.
If the US Government hadn't been shitting on Iraq for the last two decades, maybe those folks wouldn't be so angry in the first place.
Possibly the best thing the US could have done in response to 9/11 would have been to get out of interfering in the Middle East completely. But that would never happen.
The measures we go through to stop terrorism have reached such a point of insanity that I am simply blown away.
With little evidence that they actually do anything to stop terrorism. Of course if they were to obviously fail the politicans would probably demand "more of the same" rather than admit that this "security theatre" is useless.
This latest scheme in Britain is just one more example of the utter insanity of the masses and their complete and utter inability to make rational decisions. You are radically more likely to be killed by your pool or a car than you are to be struck down by a terrorist. Despite this, we go through insane, fanatical, and expensive measures to prevent one of the rarest ways to die in a western democracy. Death through airplane exploded by terrorist rates somewhere near the absolute bottom in terms of likely ways to die... well below being struck down by lightening.
Wonder where being shot dead by armed police rates on this scale.
This all just proves that the people "charged with our"security" are fucked in the head!
This is news exactly how?
Now, any terrorist that wants to cause grief in the UK knows that he had better take the channel tunnel, and not fly into Heathrow!
Or take the ferry or fly to a different airport, even walk/drive over a land border. There's also whatever methods large numbers of people appear to sucessfully use to enter the UK illegally. Of course if they are planning on a suicide attack they are unlikely to care much about their fingerprints being on file anywhere, not having any further use for their fingers! Then there;s the possibility that they might already be in the UK already.
That "terrorist act" is just used as an excuse/"reason" for them to come down hard on our freedoms and do whatever they feel like doing, in the name of "safety" and "security"..
With little evidence that these actions actually do what they claim to do. Or even any critical analysis of them.
That's it. Just a bullshit excuse for raping the shit out of ordinary peoples' freedoms and liberties.
It's all to easy for people reaching this conclusion to be dismissed as "nutjob conspiracy theorists" however. Which is ironic considering that virtually all of the terrorist threats which the UK and US government have turned out to be far fetched conspiracy theories.
Britain went through so many terrorist attacks via the IRA. Why do a couple of idiot doctors setting their cars on fire provoke this sort of response? Insane. Bring back thatcher!
Whatever her faults she didn't push this kind of nonsense even after surviving a (real) terrorist attack.
Terminal 5 mixes international passengers and domestic passengers into one area. This system hypothetically prevents people who just got off of an international flight from getting on to a domestic flight and not going through immigration.
Don't they have tickets and boarding passes?
Then why are you doing it? It seems like they're just trying to get the citizens used to these kinds of abuses so that when they do start cross-checking and retaining data indefinitely nobody will be able to tell the difference, or care.
Which makes a lot more sense than the daft claim that it's to stop passenger subsitution between check in and boarding.
Right, the Russians want to dismantle the weapons and not have to maintain them or protect them. Problem is, what do they do with the Pu once the weapons have been dismantled? Answer: sell it. But to who? Unsavory guys who'll make it into weapons, or US Science Guys who promise not to?
Most likely the US wouldn't use it to make weapons because they already have their own stockpile. The other alternative is to turn it into reactor fuel...
The official position of the US Government is that breeder reactors are a potential threat. Bad Guys(TM) might get ahold of fissible materials bound for reprocessing, and THEN where would we be, hmm?
Which would require said "bad guys" to have a plant for reprocessing nuclear fuel and the vehicles to transport it to said plant. Far easier to use spent nuclear fuel in a "dirty bomb". All you need in addition is some high explosive and some idiots who don't mind dying to rig the explosives.
Never mind the fact that it's about 1000x simpler to create a gun-type bomb with Uranium rather than creating an uber-complex implosion device.
Assuming you have enriched uranium to hand.
All terrorists obviously have access to the advanced nuclear engineering and simulation capabilities necessary to create a plutonium implosion device.
Probably easier to nick one...
Please, people, don't get any of your legal education from TV. I work with TV writers. They are definitely not scholars in any sense of the word. They will create plot devices that brazenly ignore the law of the land, the laws of human behavior, and/or the laws of physics if it'll move the story forward.
There are enough examples of common "Hollywood physics" for a large number of episodes of Mythbusters (without even revisting those which have already been busted). No doubt there is also quite a bit of stock "Hollywood law" and "Hollywood human behaviour" which is just as much complete fiction.