Tornado Alley (PROG)

[Chris McConnel]

UBIQUITOUS SURVEILLANCE....Security expert Bruce Schneier has a new blog about.... security issues. Check it out.

Today, he writes about the U.S. government's effort to advocate a new standard for passports that includes an embedded chip. That's not a bad idea, except that the chip in question is an RFID, a chip that broadcasts its information to a nearby receiver. Why an RFID?

       Security is always a trade-off. If the benefits  
        of RFID outweighed the risks, then maybe it  
        would be worth it. Certainly, there isn't a  
        significant benefit when people present their  
        passport to a customs official. If that customs  
        official is going to take the passport and  
        bring it near a reader, why can't he go those  
        extra few centimeters that a contact chip — one  
        the reader must actually touch — would require?

       ....Unfortunately, there is only one possible  
        reason: The administration wants surreptitious  
        access themselves. It wants to be able to  
        identify people in crowds. It wants to  
        surreptitiously pick out the Americans, and  
        pick out the foreigners. It wants to do the  
        very thing that it insists, despite  
        demonstrations to the contrary, can't be done.

Advocates of RFID passports insist that privacy concerns are groundless. RFIDs come in various shapes and sizes, and the ones designed for passports use encryption to secure the data and can only be read from a few inches away.

As Bruce points out, though, that's pretty meaningless. In reality, RFIDs can be read from farther away than their specs suggest, and any encryption system designed for widespread public use is likely to be cracked before the ink is dry on the ISO document.

And, as he asks, what's the point? Passports are always read by machines, so what possible reason can there be for using RFID technology? The answers — or lack thereof — are not reassuring.

Unfortunately, this is one more sign of the rapidly approaching era of ubiquitous surveillance. Like the proverbial boiling frog, it's happening slowly enough that we hardly notice it, but within a couple of decades current notions of privacy will be all but dead unless we start doing something about it now. More here.

—Kevin Drum 12:19 AM Permalink