By: The Kentucky Anti Real ID

The concept of a National ID card has been around for quite some time, back to at least the creation of the Social Security Number (SSN), and while (SSN) is a form of identification, it is not a National ID card in the sense that is being promoted in our time. The push for a National ID card in the modern era started back in the 80’s during the Reagan administration. Reagan, being the type of man he was, knew exactly what this would lead to and flat out rejected the concept. It was brought up in the Clinton administration as well, and while opposition to it was not as strong as Reagan’s, Clinton also did not sign off on a National ID card. Unfortunately, though the times have changed, I feel we can no longer trust our Federal government to operate in our best interest; it has severely broken with the Constitution and the ideals that founded this union. After 9/11 everyone was scared, angry, wanted protection from terrorism, and in that hysteria, most people did not care what it was or how it worked. As a result we got the PATRIOT Act written two years before 9/11 that gives the government the authority, among other things, to enter your house when you’re not there and to take anything. It’s called a “sneak and peak” (and they say trust us on healthcare). The Military Commission Act (MCA) was passed that has language so vague that it could catch average citizens in the category of a “threat” to the government and warrant the same treatment our government gives terrorists. During the process of making us safer a National ID card also became law in 2005 that was tacked onto a tsunami relief and military spending bill as a national security measure meant to guard against terrorism, illegal immigration and identity theft. Being attached to the type of bill that it was guaranteed no opposition, and so it sailed right through Congress straight to the President where it became law.

I will now remind everyone at this juncture what a couple of founding fathers has to say about Liberty and Security:

“I would rather be exposed to the inconveniencies attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.”

-Thomas Jefferson

“Those willing to sacrifice Liberty for Security will get neither and deserve neither”

-Benjamin Franklin

The issue of REAL ID and all it entails is too complex to give in this medium, but I will give a brief overview and then direct you to a few sites where you can get all the dirty details. REAL ID is not just a National ID card but much more as it is an INTERNATIONAL ID card. When REAL ID became law, DHS had a non-negotiated rule making process, and so they inserted international regulations. The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), a UN agency, are the ones charged with setting the ISOs for identification programs of the various participating countries, and there are a lot that are participating. The American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA) will be the entity that will see to the implementation of REAL ID. AAMVA is American in name only. As they state on their website they are an international organization. Then there are the corporations, most prominently, a company called L1-Identity Solutions. This corporation has a monopoly on identification cards (i.e. drivers licenses) like Microsoft does on computer operating systems.

The required data on these cards will not just be our physical attributes for identification purposes but our religious, political, educational, medical, financial, sexual, firearms, and biometric data will be on this card. Considering the fact that all our information will be on this card and that the state DMV databases will have to be linked and consolidated, the information will be held primarily by one corporation, and our government will be sharing it with any “nation” of the world such as Canada, England, Mexico, Australia, Russia, China, or Iran to name very few. There is no possible way for our information to remain secure. The more information or data on us that is compiled and shared, the more likely it will be stolen (130 million credit card numbers stolen). Note that one of the pieces of data that will be collected is biometric. When most people think biometric, they think fingerprints, iris scans, DNA; however, the biometric of choice is facial recognition because it can be taken without your knowledge or consent. A mathematical algorithm will be used based on your facial features to assign you a specific number. Law enforcement personnel do not need numbers to identify you, but a camera and computer surely does, and we are well on our way to being a surveillance society more than you think we are.

By: Stephen Patrick Hoffman, University of Minnesota – Twin Cities

Abstract

Biometric identification techniques such as retinal scanning and fingerprinting have now become commonplace, but near-future improvements on these methods present troubling issues for personal privacy. For example, retinal scanning can be used to diagnose certain medical conditions, even ones for which the patient has no symptoms or has any other way of detecting the problem. If a health insurance company scans the retinas of potential clients before they purchase coverage, they could be charged higher premiums for conditions that do not present any issues. Not only is this unfair, but the ease with which these scans can be conducted—including scanning without the subject’s consent or knowledge—present disturbing privacy concerns and suggest an Orwellian future, instead controlled by Big Business rather than Big Brother.

INTRODUCTION

Imagine it is the year 2030. As you walk down your street to visit your favorite coffee shop, a camera mounted at the nearest intersection tracks your movements. Initially, you are just a set of pixels transmitted to a video screen somewhere; however, after your movement has been picked up by the camera, it uses algorithms based on general body and skull structure to pinpoint the location of your eyes. Once the camera has found your eyes, it projects an infrared beam of light into your eyes which would not be noticed because infrared light is not visible to the human eye. Using the reflection of the light from your retinas and choroids, the camera photographs the vasculature structure of your eyes and runs it against a database of known criminals, immigrants, and even people dissenting from popular opinion. If your retinal pattern matches that of a person listed in the database, the computer transmits this information to the proper authorities. All of this happens before you even step through the door of the coffee shop. This Orwellian1 future of an omnipotent Big Brother is not consistent with a free democracy subservient to the people.

However, this is not the only worrisome issue presented by this scenario—what if private companies, instead of the government, are the ones running those cameras? What if a health insurance company installs these cameras outside its offices to identify individuals and detect disorders and illnesses before they walk through the door? Retinal vascular patterns have been shown to anticipate future illnesses as well as conclusively identify several illnesses that the individual suffers from, and many of these are hereditary or genetic conditions. If the insurance company knows what you are susceptible to before you are personally aware or have been notified of, and uses this to refuse coverage or charge a higher premium for the policy you apply for, they have appropriated something extremely private of yours without consent and may use this knowledge to profit from your supposed “condition,” regardless of whether those future or current illnesses have manifested or will manifest themselves. Why should such an intrusive procedure be allowed without any concern to the privacy rights of those being examined?

Suggested Citation

Stephen Patrick Hoffman. 2010. “Biometrics, Retinal Scanning, and the Right to Privacy in the 21st Century“

Should our body be considered a form of property to government?

Biometrics and Security should enhance rather than conflict with individual privacy and dignity. As stated by the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): “Human beings should never be treated as merely means to an end” – Namely, ‘Human beings are already the purpose, they must not be sacrificed to fulfill other purposes’.

By: JILL SCHENSUL – TRAVEL COLUMNIST

E-mail: schensul@northjersey.com

OK, let’s calm down for a second. I think it’s time to put this issue on whole body scanning — aka “TSA porn” — in perspective.

Yes, these scanners can put together a good idea of what’s underneath our traveling clothes. That’s the point, after all, when looking for concealed weapons. But some privacy groups, passengers and elected officials watching out for our modesty think the results are a little too creepily lifelike. As Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, coiner of the TSA porn epithet, said: “Nobody needs to see my wife and kids naked to secure an airplane.”

The scans don’t exactly look like naked people. More like naked … avatars.

The TSA also says the machines have a program that blurs faces/identities. And they point out, on the Web page of information about the machines, that the scanner “does not store, print, transmit or save the image. All machines have zero storage capability and all images are automatically deleted from the system after they are reviewed by the remotely located security officer.” It’s not like you’ll be seeing yourself on some scangallery.com site in the future, or finding your head cloned onto some X-rated body.

Probably not, anyway.

An Internet watchdog group, the Electronic Privacy Information Center [EPIC], has obtained documents from the Department of Homeland Security suggesting that the TSA wasn’t being transparent about what the machines can do; apparently, there’s a “test mode” that does allow for data storage and the export of images. Only employees with high-level clearance can access this particular mode, though, and certainly those folks are too busy poring over lists of terrorists and the like to be unleashing such unflattering images upon cyberspace.

‘Virtual strip search’

No matter what their ultimate fate, even subjecting travelers to these scans is an egregious invasion of privacy — tantamount, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, to a “virtual strip search.”

Hello? When was the last time these protesters went through a security check?

Invasion of privacy is what it’s all about. A veritable humiliation, violation marathon, from shoe removal to pocket-emptying, from undoing belts to declaring underwire bras, from swabbing our laptops to disassembling our carry-ons and pawing through purses. And the ultimate de-privatization – usually reserved for the beep-producers – is to be ordered into wanding position, to stand in that Leonardo DaVinci arms-and-legs-spread mode and be subjected to hand scanning and hand-goosings that somehow seem to suck all the freedom out of your soul.

All done before an audience of your peers. Who get to watch the belts come off and the beer bellies bared and the plumber-butts revealed as the beltless pants begin sagging. All in all, I’ll take the scanner.

The more worrisome aspect of these new machines, to me, is the radiation issue. I just keep thinking of those rolls of fogged film I’d get back from the labs every so often. The long strip of nothing but eerie billows of gray, the fallout of overradiation.

So when the TSA tells us the new scanners’ X-rays are harmless, I think about the little sign they used to have at the security screening area, way back when, that assured us X-rays would not harm film up to 400 ASA. And I think about all that gray.

The TSA already has 40 whole body scanners at airports around the country, and, since the recent close call on Northwest Airlines Flight 253, has decided to buy and deploy nearly 450 more.

There are actually two types of scanners being tested. Experts in the field of radiation seem in agreement that millimeter wave technology, which uses radio frequency energy for scanning, is harmless.

Opinions vary on the safety of the backscatter machines, which use low-level X-rays. The dose of radiation is small – about 0.1 microrem of radiation, compared with 100 microrem for a chest X-ray or 10,000 microrem for a CT scan.

According to TSA officials, backscatter machines produce a clearer image.

Radiation danger?

In an article on the American College of Radiology’s Web site, Mayo Clinic neuroradiologist Peter Kalina questions the use of even small doses of ionizing radiation in non-medical applications. “The amount of radiation may be extremely small and safe, but parents have to grasp that their 4-year-old child is being subjected to radiation. Some parents will be concerned,” he says.

David J. Brenner, a Columbia University professor of radiation oncology and public health, worries about subjecting pregnant women to the scans, too. He also says that about 5 percent of the general population is radiosensitive, among them women who carry certain breast cancer genes.

The TSA says these scans will be voluntary – you can opt for the pat-down if you want.

Kalina is concerned about a potential scenario in which a less-developed nation might adopt backscatter scanning technology, but fail to keep its scanners calibrated. “As a traveler,” he has said, “I don’t know who’s checked that machine or equipment. Can I be sure there won’t be a larger dose of radiation coming from it?” I believe he said this before the recent discovery that 206 patients at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles received eight times the normal dose of radiation from a CT scan machine with a computer-resetting error.

Risk-benefit analysis

But all these debates are secondary to the real question: Are the benefits worth the risks, hassle, humiliation and expense?

The new scanners might do a better job than the current technology but obviously have their drawbacks, and opinions vary on whether they can reliably detect weapons hidden in body cavities. And they’re simply an option – not even a terrorist can be forced into one.

The scanners are a good straw to grasp at after the latest high-profile oops in the security system was brought to light.

The problem is, every new measure is simply a reaction to the latest near-miss, a Band-Aid rather than a real systemic change for the better. Various tech companies that make the equipment will certainly benefit in the short term, but will the cost and the risks really benefit the war on terrorism and make us safer?

I’m with Bruce Schneier, an internationally recognized security technologist who said that while whole-body-imaging technology “works pretty well,” the financial investment is a mistake. He believes money would be better spent on intelligence-gathering and investigations.

“It’s stupid to spend money so terrorists can change plans,” he said by phone from Poland, where he was speaking at a conference. If terrorists are swayed from going through airports, they’ll just target other locations, such as a hotel in Mumbai, India, he said.

But the orders are already in for another 100 of these machines. So, well, we’ll deal with it. I’m going to opt for the whole scan thing, especially if I don’t have to take off my shoes. And the new option should at least cut down on the incidence of plumber butt.

But technology is just one link in the security system.

And as the recent incident shows, no matter how much intelligence we gather, no matter how many alert systems we put in place, they’re useless if ignored.

The FBI says the used an image found on Google of Spanish lawmaker Gasper Llamazares, right, to create a digitally altered photo of what an aged Osama bin Laden might look like, as reported by El Mundo. Madrid, Spain – A Spanish lawmaker says he was stunned to find that the FBI used his photograph as part of a digitally enhanced image showing what Osama bin Laden might look like today.

Gaspar Llamazares says he would no longer feel safe in the U.S. after his hair and other features appeared on a wanted poster showing an older bin Laden on a U.S. government Web site rewardsforjustice.net. A reward of up to $25 million is offered.

Spanish newspaper El Mundo, which noted the similarities between the bin Laden composite and Mr. Llamazares, quotes FBI spokesman Ken Hoffman as acknowledging that the agency used a picture of Llamazares taken from Google Images for the digitally altered image of bin Laden.

The photo appeared on a U.S. State Department Web site rewardsforjustice.net, where a reward of up to $25 million is offered for bin Laden, wanted in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya.

Llamazares said he planned to ask the U.S. government for an explanation and reserved the right to take legal action.

FBI headquarters in Washington did not respond immediately when asked for comment Saturday, requesting that questions be sent to them by e-mail. The State Department told a reporter to call back Tuesday after the U.S. federal holiday on Monday.

Llamazares said he couldn’t believe it when he was first told about the similarity, but he quickly realized the seriousness of the situation.

The 52-year-old politician said he would not feel safe traveling in the U.S. now, because many airports use biometrics technology that compares the physical characteristics of travelers to passport or other photographs.

“I have no similarity, physically or ideologically, to the terrorist bin Laden,” he said.

They do share on characteristic — both are 52.

Jose Morales, spokesman for Llamazares’ party, told the Associated Press that no one in Spain had any idea that important security computer images such as the retouched bin Laden photo were built up from photographs of real people. Llamazares, the former leader of his party, was elected to Spain’s parliament in 2000.

Llamazares said it was worrying to see elite security services like the FBI resorting to such sloppy techniques, especially in the light of recent security alerts like the attempted Christmas Day bombing of a Detroit-bound airplane.

“It might provoke mirth, but it demonstrates that what we’re seeing from security services isn’t exactly recommendable,” he said.

Bin Laden is believed to be hiding in the lawless Pakistan frontier bordering Afghanistan. His exact whereabouts have been unknown since late 2001, when he and some bodyguards slipped out of the Tora Bora mountains, evading air strikes, U.S. special forces and Afghan militias.

The U.S. State Department Web site shows the photos and bounty on bin Laden and 41 others wanted for terrorism.

By Duncan Gardham, Security Correspondent

Osama bin Laden and Winona Ryder: airport face scanners reportedly cannot tell the difference Photo: GETTY; EPA

In a leaked memo, an official says the machines have been recalibrated to an “unacceptable” level meaning travellers whose faces are shown to have only a 30% (Thirty per cent) likeness to their passport photographs can pass through.

The machines, undergoing trials at Manchester airport, have apparently been questioning so many passengers’ identities that they were creating huge queues.

The technology was designed to help immigration officials spot people traveling under false passports, particularly terrorists, but the multi-million pound scheme now appears to be in jeopardy.

In the email, the official says: “Update on the calibration – the facial recognition booths are letting passengers through at 30%.

“Changes appear to have been made without any explanation [or] giving anyone a reason for the machines [creating] what is in effect a 70% error rate.

“[The fact that] the machines do not operate at 100% is unacceptable. In addition it would be interesting to know why the acceptance level has been allowed to decrease.”

Rob Jenkins, an expert in facial recognition at Glasgow University’s psychology department, said lowering the match level to 30 per cent would make the system almost worthless.

Using facial recognition software from Sydney airport in Australia set at 30 per cent, he found the machines could not tell the difference between Osama bin Laden and the actors Kevin Spacey or even the actress Winona Ryder while Gordon Brown was indistinguishable from Mel Gibson.

Announcing a trial of five of the devices at Manchester airport last August, Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, said they would improve security by making it more difficult for terrorists using false passports.

At the moment the technology is only being used on British and European travelers on “high risk” flights but it is planned to extend the technology to almost all non-European Union citizens by the end of 2010.

Patrick Mercer, chairman of the House of Commons subcommittee on counter-terrorism, said he would be asking the UK Borders agency about the warnings.

The Home Office said: “We can categorically confirm that the gates are making the same high level of checks on the British and European passengers using them as they were when the trials began in August last year.

“Previous tests show that they system can reliably pick out imposters and even distinguish between identical twins. An immigration officer supervises the whole process and will intervene where necessary.”

http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/744199—israelification-high-security-little-bother
The ‘Israelification’ of airports: High security, little bother
Cathal Kelly Staff Reporter 

Voyeurism Security

While North America’s airports groan under the weight of another sea-change in security protocols, one word keeps popping out of the mouths of experts: Israelification.

That is, how can we make our airports more like Israel’s, which deal with far greater terror threat with far less inconvenience.

“It is mindboggling for us Israelis to look at what happens in North America, because we went through this 50 years ago,” said Rafi Sela, the president of AR Challenges, a global transportation security consultancy. He’s worked with the RCMP, the U.S. Navy Seals and airports around the world.

“Israelis, unlike Canadians and Americans, don’t take s— from anybody. When the security agency in Israel (the ISA) started to tighten security and we had to wait in line for — not for hours — but 30 or 40 minutes, all hell broke loose here. We said, ‘We’re not going to do this. You’re going to find a way that will take care of security without touching the efficiency of the airport.”

That, in a nutshell is “Israelification” – a system that protects life and limb without annoying you to death. 
Despite facing dozens of potential threats each day, the security set-up at Israel’s largest hub, Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport, has not been breached since 2002, when a passenger mistakenly carried a handgun onto a flight. How do they manage that?

“The first thing you do is to look at who is coming into your airport,” said Sela.

The first layer of actual security that greets travellers at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport is a roadside check. All drivers are stopped and asked two questions: How are you? Where are you coming from?

“Two benign questions. The questions aren’t important. The way people act when they answer them is,” Sela said.

Officers are looking for nervousness or other signs of “distress” — behavioural profiling. Sela rejects the argument that profiling is discriminatory.

“The word ‘profiling’ is a political invention by people who don’t want to do security,” he said. “To us, it doesn’t matter if he’s black, white, young or old. It’s just his behaviour. So what kind of privacy am I really stepping on when I’m doing this?”

Once you’ve parked your car or gotten off your bus, you pass through the second and third security perimeters.
Armed guards outside the terminal are trained to observe passengers as they move toward the doors, again looking for odd behaviour. At Ben Gurion’s half-dozen entrances, another layer of security are watching. At this point, some travellers will be randomly taken aside, and their person and their luggage run through a magnometer.

“This is to see that you don’t have heavy metals on you or something that looks suspicious,” said Sela.
You are now in the terminal. As you approach your airline check-in desk, a trained interviewer takes your passport and ticket. They ask a series of questions: Who packed your luggage? Has it left your side?

“The whole time, they are looking into your eyes — which is very embarrassing. But this is one of the ways they figure out if you are suspicious or not. It takes 20, 25 seconds,” said Sela.

Lines are staggered. People are not allowed to bunch up into inviting targets for a bomber who has gotten this far.

At the check-in desk, your luggage is scanned immediately in a purpose-built area. Sela plays devil’s advocate — what if you have escaped the attention of the first four layers of security, and now try to pass a bag with a bomb in it?

“I once put this question to Jacques Duchesneau (the former head of the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority): say there is a bag with play-doh in it and two pens stuck in the play-doh. That is ‘Bombs 101′ to a screener.. I asked Ducheneau, ‘What would you do?’ And he said, ‘Evacuate the terminal.’ And I said, ‘Oh. My. God.’

“Take Pearson. Do you know how many people are in the terminal at all times? Many thousands. Let’s say I’m (doing an evacuation) without panic — which will never happen. But let’s say this is the case. How long will it take? Nobody thought about it. I said, ‘Two days.’”

A screener at Ben-Gurion has a pair of better options.
First, the screening area is surrounded by contoured, blast-proof glass that can contain the detonation of up to 100 kilos of plastic explosive. Only the few dozen people within the screening area need be removed, and only to a point a few metres away.

Second, all the screening areas contain ‘bomb boxes’. If a screener spots a suspect bag, he/she is trained to pick it up and place it in the box, which is blast proof. A bomb squad arrives shortly and wheels the box away for further investigation.

“This is a very small simple example of how we can simply stop a problem that would cripple one of your airports,” Sela said.

Five security layers down: you now finally arrive at the only one which Ben-Gurion Airport shares with Pearson — the body and hand-luggage check.

“But here it is done completely, absolutely 180 degrees differently than it is done in North America,” Sela said.
“First, it’s fast — there’s almost no line. That’s because they’re not looking for liquids, they’re not looking at your shoes. They’re not looking for everything they look for in North America. They just look at you,” said Sela. 

“Even today with the heightened security in North America, they will check your items to death. But they will never look at you, at how you behave. They will never look into your eyes … and that’s how you figure out the bad guys from the good guys.”

That’s the process — six layers, four hard, two soft. The goal at Ben-Gurion is to move fliers from the parking lot to the airport lounge in a maximum of 25 minutes.
This doesn’t begin to cover the off-site security net that failed so spectacularly in targeting would-be Flight 253 bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab — intelligence. In Israel, Sela said, a coordinated intelligence gathering operation produces a constantly evolving series of threat analyses and vulnerability studies. 

“There is absolutely no intelligence and threat analysis done in Canada or the United States,” Sela said. “Absolutely none.”

But even without the intelligence, Sela maintains, Abdulmutallab would not have gotten past Ben Gurion Airport’s behavioural profilers.

So. Eight years after 9/11, why are we still so reactive, so un-Israelified?

Working hard to dampen his outrage, Sela first blames our leaders, and then ourselves.

“We have a saying in Hebrew that it’s much easier to look for a lost key under the light, than to look for the key where you actually lost it, because it’s dark over there. That’s exactly how (North American airport security officials) act,” Sela said. “You can easily do what we do. You don’t have to replace anything. You have to add just a little bit — technology, training.. But you have to completely change the way you go about doing airport security. And that is something that the bureaucrats have a problem with. They are very well enclosed in their own concept.”

And rather than fear, he suggests that outrage would be a far more powerful spur to provoking that change.
“Do you know why Israelis are so calm ? We have brutal terror attacks on our civilians and still, life in Israel is pretty good. The reason is that people trust their defence forces, their police, their response teams and the security agencies.

They know they’re doing a good job. You can’t say the same thing about Americans and Canadians. They don’t trust anybody,” Sela said. “But they say,… ‘ So far, so good…’ Then if something happens, all hell breaks loose and you’ve spent eight hours in an airport. Which is ridiculous. Not justifiable

“But, what can you do? Americans and Canadians are nice people and they will do anything because they were told to do so and because they don’t know any different.”

By Jonathan Kent,  BBC News, Kuala Lumpur

Police in Malaysia are hunting for members of a violent gang who chopped off a car owner’s finger to get round the vehicle’s hi-tech security system.

The car, a Mercedes S-class, was protected by a fingerprint recognition system.

Accountant K Kumaran’s ordeal began when he was run down by four men in a small car as he was about to get into his Mercedes in a Kuala Lumpur suburb.

The gang, armed with long machetes, demanded the keys to his car.

It is worth around $75,000 second-hand on the local market, where prices are high because of import duties.

Stripped naked

The attackers forced Mr Kumaran to put his finger on the security panel to start the vehicle, bundled him into the back seat and drove off.

But having stripped the car, the thieves became frustrated when they wanted to restart it. They found they again could not bypass the immobiliser, which needs the owner’s fingerprint to disarm it.

They stripped Mr Kumaran naked and left him by the side of the road – but not before cutting off the end of his index finger with a machete.

Police believe the gang is responsible for a series of thefts in the area.

Letter

Executive Committee Home

Submitted by MacRonin on December 13, 2009 – 7:00pm

Real ID Follies Continue with PASS ID Waiting in the Wings: Via EFF.org Updates.

Since 2007, the U.S. State Department has been issuing high-tech “e-passports,” which contain computer chips carrying biometric data to prevent forgery. Unfortunately, according to a March report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), getting one of these supersecure passports under false pretenses isn’t particularly difficult for anyone with even basic forgery skills.

As 2009 draws to a close, we’re inching ever deeper into the corner that Congress painted us into by passing Real ID under the table in 2005. (Recall that Real ID is the failed, Bush-era attempt to turn state drivers licenses into national ID cards by forcing states to collect and store licensee data in databases, and refusing to accept non-compliant IDs for federal purposes, like boarding a plane or entering a federal building.)

The official deadline for states to comply with the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) final Real ID rule is December 31, 2009, and an estimated 36 states will not be in compliance by then, leading to some ambiguity for many citizens. For example, will residents of Montana be able to board planes in January 2010 with only a driver’s license (a state-supplied, technically non-compliant document) and without a passport (an identity document issued by the federal government)?

Past history strongly suggests that DHS will issue last-minute waivers to states that have not amped up their drivers licenses to adhere to Real ID. Early in 2008, states that actively opposed Real ID received waivers from DHS, nominally marking the states as “compliant” despite strongly-stated opposition to ever implementing Real ID.

But waiting in the wings is PASS ID, a bill that attempts to grease the wheels by offering money to the states to implement ID changes. Despite having the appearances of reform, PASS ID essentially echoes Real ID in threatening citizens’ personal privacy without actually justifying its impact on improving security. For this reason, PASS ID is not popular — privacy advocates refuse to support the bill because it still creates a national ID system. It still mandates the scanning and storage of applicants’ critical identity documents (birth certificates, visas, etc.), which will be stored in databases that will become leaky honeypots of sensitive personal data — prime targets for malicious identity thieves or otherwise accessible by individuals authorized to obtain documents from the database. And on the other side, short-sighted surveillance hawks are unhappy with the bill because they support the privacy violations architected into the provisions of the original Real ID Act.

As such, advocates of PASS ID are publicly wringing their hands over the deadline in order to encourage Congress to approve the PASS ID Act before the end of the year. But the fracas over health reform is suffocating any chance for meaningful debate about the merits of PASS ID before the Dec. 31st deadline.

A pragmatic analysis should show that Real ID is dead. To date, 24 states have enacted resolutions or binding legislation prohibiting participation in Real ID, and the varied, desperate efforts to reanimate it are misguided. Whether the states or the federal government signs the invoice, the cost ultimately falls to taxpayers, who should be troubled that neither Real ID nor PASS ID is likely to fulfill the stated goal of stopping terrorists from obtaining identity documents. (Just this week, noted security expert Bruce Schneier linked to a report about government investigators successfully using fake identity documents to obtain high-tech “e-passports,” which were then used to buy plane tickets, and board flights — the point being that a fancy, “secure” identity document doesn’t stop individuals from exploiting a weak bureaucracy.)

On the other hand, the resulting databases filled with scanned identity documents will, create tantalizing targets for identity thieves and headaches for people whose digital documents are pilfered; and a national ID system will invite mission creep from the government as well as private entities like credit reporting agencies and advertisers. It’s high time for reason to replace the reflexive defense of a failed scheme. Congress should repeal Real ID for real and seek more inspired, protective solutions to identity document security.

ISRAEL at Risk of Not Being a Democracy Anymore: Knesset Approves INVASIVE ‘Biometric Law’

Anyone who follows the news has no doubt come across the claim that “Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.” Usually, this claim is followed by its logical inference: “As an island of freedom located in a region controlled by military dictators, feudal kings and religious leaders” - Not any more – Israel democracy is now controlled by superficial politicians…

Black Day for Democracy

By Gil Ronen and Nissan Ratzlav-Katz

(IsraelNN.com) The Knesset plenum approved Monday evening the ‘Biometric Law’ in the final readings. Forty Knesset members voted in favor of the law, 11 against and three abstained. The purpose of the law is the creation of a biometric database that would hold the fingerprints and facial photos of all of the country’s citizens. The data would be stored in the Interior Ministry computers.

MK Nitzan Horowitz (Meretz), who led the opposition to the law, said after its approval that the vote was “a serious mistake which causes grave harm to freedom of the individual in Israel.”

“I hope that we do not pay too heavy a price for it,” Horowitz said. “In any case, it has been proven that an unrelenting public struggle by idealists can have influence and make a difference. The proof is that the law in its final wording is completely different from the original version.”

During the Knesset debate about the law, MK Horowitz stood at the podium and held up printouts of information from the Ministry of Interior’s database which contained information about Knesset members and which reached the Internet. He said that he would not show the contents so as not to invade the MKs’ privacy. “The leaked data which reached my hands prove how easy it is to break into government databases,” he said. “I hope that this will not be the fate of the biometric database.”

MK Dov Henin (Hadash) said that despite the government’s statements that it would not force Israeli citizens to join the database, “in fact, whoever does not do so would be punished – he will not be able to leave the country’s borders, since he would not receive a passport at the level required in developed countries.” The database is not truly a voluntary one, he said.

Faked fingerprints
On the same day that the Knesset approved the law, there news from Tokyo that appeared to show that this system, too, was not foolproof. Police in the Japanese capital said that they arrested a 27-year-old Chinese woman suspected of illegally entering the country after surgically altering her fingerprints to deceive a biometric recognition system operated by immigration officials.