E-Identification?

iVillage Member
Registered: 02-05-2009
E-Identification?
1
Sun, 07-12-2009 - 10:28am

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/tech/news/6525301.html


 



Electronic identification sparks privacy debate
Government pushes technology despite hacking, tracking fears









photo 


(Chris Paget uses scanning equipment to seek information from radio frequency identification chips as people pass by along the Embarcadero in San Francisco.)



RAISING SHIELDS




To protect against hacker attacks, federal and state officials recommend that Americans keep their e-passports tightly shut and store their RFID-tagged passport cards and enhanced driver's licenses in “radio-opaque” sleeves.


The State Department asserts that hackers won't find any practical use for data skimmed from RFID chips embedded in the cards, but “if you don't want the cards read, put them in an attenuation sleeve,” says John Brennan, a senior policy adviser at the Office of Consular Affairs.


Climbing into his Volvo, outfitted with a Matrics antenna and a Motorola reader he'd bought on eBay for $190, Chris Paget cruised the streets of San Francisco with one objective: To read the identity cards of strangers, wirelessly, without ever leaving his car.


It took him 20 minutes to strike hacker's gold.


Zipping past Fisherman's Wharf, his scanner detected, then downloaded to his laptop, the unique serial numbers of two pedestrians' electronic U.S. 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.


Embedding identity documents — passports, drivers licenses, and the like — with RFID chips is a no-brainer to government officials.


Increasingly, they are promoting it as 21st century technology that will help speed border crossings, safeguard credentials against counterfeiters, and keep terrorists from sneaking into the country.


Dubbed ‘Little Brother'

Paget's February experiment demonstrated something privacy advocates had feared for years: RFID, coupled with other technologies, could make people trackable without their knowledge or consent.


He filmed his drive-by heist, and soon his video went viral on the Web, intensifying the debate.


Putting a traceable RFID in every pocket has the potential to make everybody a blip on someone's radar screen, critics say, and to redefine Orwellian government snooping for the digital age.


“Little Brother,” some are already calling it — even though elements of the feared global surveillance web exist only on drawing boards, neither available nor approved for use.


But with advances in tracking technologies coming at an ever-faster rate, critics say, it won't be long before governments could be able to find anyone in real time, 24-7, from a cafe in Paris to the shores of California.


The key to getting such a system to work, opponents say, is making sure everyone carries an RFID tag linked to a biometric data file.


New passports

On June 1, it became mandatory for Americans entering the United States from Canada, Mexico, Bermuda and the Caribbean to present identity documents embedded with RFID tags.


Among new options are the chipped “e-passport,” and the new, electronic PASS card — credit-card sized, with the bearer's digital photograph and a chip that can be scanned through a pocket, backpack or purse from 30 feet.


Alternatively, travelers can use “enhanced” driver's licenses, or EDLs, now being issued in the border states of Washington, Vermont, Michigan and New York.


Texas and Arizona have entered into agreements with the federal government to offer chipped licenses, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has recommended expansion to non-border states.


Border efficiency

The purpose of using RFID is not to identify people, says Mary Ellen Callahan, chief privacy officer at Homeland Security, but rather “to verify that the identification document holds valid information about you.”


Likewise, U.S. border agents are “pinging” databases only to confirm that licenses aren't counterfeited. “They're not pulling up your speeding tickets,” she says, or looking at personal information beyond what is on a passport.


The change is largely about speed and convenience, she says.


An RFID document that doubles as a U.S. travel credential, Callahan says, “only makes it easier to pull the right record fast enough, to make sure that the border flows, and is operational.”


Homeland Security has been promoting broad use of RFID even though its own advisory committee warned that radio-tagged IDs have the potential to allow “widespread surveillance of individuals” without their knowledge.


In its 2006 draft report, the committee recommended that “RFID be disfavored for identifying and tracking human beings.”


Few issued, so far

For now, chipped PASS cards and enhanced driver's licenses are optional and not yet widely deployed. Roughly 192,000 EDLs have been issued in Washington, Vermont, Michigan and New York.


But as more Americans carry them “you can bet that long-range tracking of people on a large scale will rise exponentially,” says Paget, a self-described “ethical hacker” who works as an Internet security consultant.


Mark Roberti, editor of RFID Journal, an industry newsletter, recently acknowledged that as the use of RFID in official documents grows, the potential for abuse increases.


“A government could do this, for instance, to track opponents,” he wrote in an opinion piece discussing Paget's experiment. “To date, this type of abuse has not occurred, but it could if governments fail to take privacy issues seriously.”


 


Any thoughts?


zz

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Sun, 07-12-2009 - 11:05am

Interesting article.


>"Paget's February experiment demonstrated something privacy advocates had feared for years: RFID, coupled with other technologies, could make people trackable without their knowledge or consent."<


A few months back I read John Twelve Hawks' first two books in his trilogy The Fourth Realm. (Looking forward to his third which will be out this Sept.) Some of it is fantasy but some is all too real about how we are tracked, photographed & easily traced

 


Photobucket&nbs