National ID cards - good idea?

[Digsby]

My take on this is very simple

I am a free citizen in a democracy.

therefore, the State is employed by me, as is the Police Force, the Army and indeed all the other various bits and bobs that go along with it

Therefore, the police, army and other paraphanelia of government may be required, should I, or indeed any citizen so request, to prove who they are . However, I am under no obligation to prove to anyone that I am anyone, as I am a free citizen, until such time as it can be proven, beyond reasonable doubt, that i am a criminal.

therefore, should I be required to carry an ID card then, in all seriousness, I would set fire to the thing. it runs directly contrary to my basic right to privacy. Who I am matters not, I am a private free citizen, who is not convicted of any crime - that is all you need to know. If you wish to prove I am other than that, then go ahead, prove it.

[snowychap]

Here's a question, sort of related / sort of not

I got an email in work yesterday asking all staff to bring in either their passport or birth certificate which we were told was to do with proving that the company doesn't employ illegal immigrants

Is this new legislation? Some legislation that our firm has somehow overlooked until now? Or simply bollocks?

Bicks, I'd imagine it is a result of the Prevention of Illegal Working – Immigration Asylum and Nationality Act 2006, part of which, I believe came into force at the end of February this year.

I think it makes the penalties for employing an illegal worker and knowingly employing an illegal worker (two different offences) much sterner than before (maximum of £10k fine and also imprisonable, I think).

The way for employers to give themselves a defence is to show that they have adequate procedures to check the legitimacy of a worker's right to work in the country and that they have followed these.

I would guess it is pretty standard practice in recruitment so it seems logical that employers have to get around to checking their existing employees at some time, too.

I'm not sure what they could do to an existing employee if they were a legal worker and refused, though.

[bickster]

I think I'll get them to sack me as I can see absolutely no need for my employer to see either my birth cerrtificate or my passport

for the following reasons:-

a) I have a National Insurance number

I have a Private Hire Drivers Licence issued by the council for which the birth certificate / passport are already a requisite

c) I need to have said private hire drivers licence to enable me to do my job (company job condition)

d) If anyone who has ever met me (bearing in mind I have worked for them for 7 years) can put up a decent convincing case that I'm anything other than British born and bred I'll relent

[blandy]

Sorry about the gringo/snowy confusion, snowy.

my mistake over Northrop Grumman.

re the ISTAR stuff, though - it's all military, it's about Battlespace management, Weapons Systems concepts and force mixes, not about civil surveillance. We've gone off at a right tangent, though.

It's true that some elements of ISTAR, and C4 ISTAR could be used for civil purposes, but then again so could troops.

I just feel that the comments about military planning and about airspace and airworthiness regs are nothing to do with civil liberties, other than protecting joe public from things falling on his bonce/shed from up in the blue yonder. I appreciate the "mission creep" thing as valid, but if you go down that road, then everything is sinister.

And lastly, Mr B - spot on. My sentiments completely.

[blandy]

oh and Bicks example just shows the stupidity of the whole thing.

[bickster]

certainly does

[snowychap]

Sorry about the gringo/snowy confusion, snowy.

my mistake over Northrop Grumman.

No probs and no probs again (as I said, I probably didn't make it clear myself).

It's true that some elements of ISTAR, and C4 ISTAR could be used for civil purposes, but then again so could troops.

Well, yes, that's true. And the moment I see MOD planning for the armed forces talking about potentially using the military for counter terrorism and civil matters on the streets of blighty (other than in extremis) then I'll get a bit jumpy.

Though I agree that we've probably gone off at a giant tangent and I've gone a bit negative into the bargain.

I appreciate the "mission creep" thing as valid, but if you go down that road, then everything is sinister.

Indeed.

[villanfromluton]

My employers always require two forms of ID before employing anyone now as we did a purge on cleaners employed and 17 were illegals.

I see nothing wrong with an I.D card if you have nothing to hide.

[bickster]

My employers always require two forms of ID before employing anyone now as we did a purge on cleaners employed and 17 were illegals.

I see nothing wrong with an I.D card if you have nothing to hide.

then you wont mind being locked up for forgetting it

Read PB's post, he sums it up perfectly........THEY work for US

[PaulMcgrathsknees]

My take on this is very simple

I am a free citizen in a democracy.

therefore, the State is employed by me, as is the Police Force, the Army and indeed all the other various bits and bobs that go along with it

Therefore, the police, army and other paraphanelia of government may be required, should I, or indeed any citizen so request, to prove who they are . However, I am under no obligation to prove to anyone that I am anyone, as I am a free citizen, until such time as it can be proven, beyond reasonable doubt, that i am a criminal.

therefore, should I be required to carry an ID card then, in all seriousness, I would set fire to the thing. it runs directly contrary to my basic right to privacy. Who I am matters not, I am a private free citizen, who is not convicted of any crime - that is all you need to know. If you wish to prove I am other than that, then go ahead, prove it.

Very righteous.

Very very naive. Money talks. A true free person need not prove anything. A true free person will not pay taxes and be totally self sufficient. No law enforcement requirement. No refuse collection. No electricity requirement. No Euro/ WHO trade dependency.

We rely on the Gov't to help us. They control us.

[bickster]

My take on this is very simple

I am a free citizen in a democracy.

therefore, the State is employed by me, as is the Police Force, the Army and indeed all the other various bits and bobs that go along with it

Therefore, the police, army and other paraphanelia of government may be required, should I, or indeed any citizen so request, to prove who they are . However, I am under no obligation to prove to anyone that I am anyone, as I am a free citizen, until such time as it can be proven, beyond reasonable doubt, that i am a criminal.

therefore, should I be required to carry an ID card then, in all seriousness, I would set fire to the thing. it runs directly contrary to my basic right to privacy. Who I am matters not, I am a private free citizen, who is not convicted of any crime - that is all you need to know. If you wish to prove I am other than that, then go ahead, prove it.

Very righteous.

Very very naive. Money talks. A true free person need not prove anything. A true free person will not pay taxes and be totally self sufficient. No law enforcement requirement. No refuse collection. No electricity requirement. No Euro/ WHO trade dependency.

We rely on the Gov't to help us. They control us.

Very submissive

[Digsby]

My take on this is very simple

I am a free citizen in a democracy.

therefore, the State is employed by me, as is the Police Force, the Army and indeed all the other various bits and bobs that go along with it

Therefore, the police, army and other paraphanelia of government may be required, should I, or indeed any citizen so request, to prove who they are . However, I am under no obligation to prove to anyone that I am anyone, as I am a free citizen, until such time as it can be proven, beyond reasonable doubt, that i am a criminal.

therefore, should I be required to carry an ID card then, in all seriousness, I would set fire to the thing. it runs directly contrary to my basic right to privacy. Who I am matters not, I am a private free citizen, who is not convicted of any crime - that is all you need to know. If you wish to prove I am other than that, then go ahead, prove it.

Very righteous.

Very very naive. Money talks. A true free person need not prove anything. A true free person will not pay taxes and be totally self sufficient. No law enforcement requirement. No refuse collection. No electricity requirement. No Euro/ WHO trade dependency.

We rely on the Gov't to help us. They control us.

They control you if you let them.

They provide those services for you, on your behalf.

If you don't like the way they deliver those services, then as a free man you have the option of taking away their right to deliver them.

[villanfromluton]

My employers always require two forms of ID before employing anyone now as we did a purge on cleaners employed and 17 were illegals.

I see nothing wrong with an I.D card if you have nothing to hide.

then you wont mind being locked up for forgetting it

Read PB's post, he sums it up perfectly........THEY work for US

I presume you know 100% how it will work then?

As for PB, he is entitled to his opinion, I am entitled to mine. I would have no problem about being asked to show who I am. I think it would help in cracking down on some of the fraud going on in this country.

[drat01]

Who I am matters not, I am a private free citizen, who is not convicted of any crime - that is all you need to know. If you wish to prove I am other than that, then go ahead, prove it.

except when you use a passport or a drivers license or you need ID to open a bank account or setup a financial setup or join a library or get a credit card or get foreign money from a BDE or register to vote or get married .............

[bickster]

Yep thats right, the fraud going on in this country is vastly more important that the the civil liberties of all citizens, how can you be so naive, really?

And you don't really believe that rubbish do you? I wouldn't believe it for a minute

World officialdom makes faking passports easy

If biometric passports were designed with the security of the document and the holder in mind, fraud wouldn't be such a problem

All comments (11)

Guy Herbert

guardian.co.uk, Wednesday August 06 2008 15:30 BST

Article history

According to the Identity and Passport Service:

We are determined that the British passport will remain one of the most secure in the world, and a document that can be relied on by British travellers wherever they go.

How can we reconcile that with the story in the Times today with the headline "Fakeproof" e-passport is cloned in minutes? Or with other reports when NO2ID demonstrated with the Guardian that scanners built in hours from cheap components bought off the internet can pick up, translate and copy the contents of an e-passport and, for the Daily Mail, how the encryption can be cracked and the data read from an e-passport – without even opening the envelope in which it leaves the Passport Office?

Why does anyone still maintain the things are secure? Why should we want our identities verified by them, or the same techniques embodied in the Home Office's beloved ID cards?

It depends what you mean by "secure". The IPS's concept of security is net security of the state. Its concept of identity is that it knows who you are and can tell its friends. The document should be separate from the person. But the Home Office model of personal identity is that the infallible file determines the person, and the official document is a magic fragment of the file.

The e-passport standard was pushed through the International Civil Aviation Organisation in the first part of this decade. It was largely devised by the US and UK authorities. New passports of all participating countries are designed to do what they have just been demonstrated to do. The whole point is for the chips to be programmable and that they cough up, on proper-seeming demand, everything about you that's on the passport. It isn't a bug; it's a feature. That information is intended to be captured, copied, stored, transmitted and collated. In e-borders schemes it will be automatically compared with ticket data, no-fly-lists, suspect lists and other official lists – in order to, as the UK Border Agency so comfortingly puts it: "keep a comprehensive record of everyone who crosses our border". The same motivation is at work as with passenger name record data-sharing.

A biometric passport designed with the security of the document and the holder uppermost in mind would use the same technology but in a very different way. A digital signature can verify the document without any requirement to take data from it. If there's a biometric template encoded on the document, then in principle it can be verified at the point of checking as matching the person and their passport or visa – without the information being recorded or passed elsewhere. Just as the human immigration officer doesn't need to copy your passport photo in order to check it looks enough like you, neither does an electronic one matching your fingerprints. Doing it that way would be cheaper, much more private from the traveller's point of view, and less easy to cheat than a combination of massive databases of travel movements and personal details squirted everywhere. It doesn't even need the IPS to have a database of passport holders – though one for lost passports would be unexceptionable.

If you must have a watchlist then that can work the same way. Does this name/picture on the separately verified document match the list? If no, do nothing – no information need be kept – if yes, perform more checks.

The trouble is not technology. It is not expense. It is that world officialdom would much rather track us all around, so that if the detail of our movements might be useful to someone in authority one day, it will have been secured.

Fakeproof passport cloned in minutes

From The Times

August 6, 2008

‘Fakeproof’ e-passport is cloned in minutes

Steve Boggan

New microchipped passports designed to be foolproof against identity theft can be cloned and manipulated in minutes and accepted as genuine by the computer software recommended for use at international airports.

Tests for The Times exposed security flaws in the microchips introduced to protect against terrorism and organised crime. The flaws also undermine claims that 3,000 blank passports stolen last week were worthless because they could not be forged.

In the tests, a computer researcher cloned the chips on two British passports and implanted digital images of Osama bin Laden and a suicide bomber. The altered chips were then passed as genuine by passport reader software used by the UN agency that sets standards for e-passports.

The Home Office has always argued that faked chips would be spotted at border checkpoints because they would not match key codes when checked against an international data-base. But only ten of the forty-five countries with e-passports have signed up to the Public Key Directory (PKD) code system, and only five are using it. Britain is a member but will not use the directory before next year. Even then, the system will be fully secure only if every e-passport country has joined.

RELATED LINKS

IN DEPTH: how a baby became bin Laden

ANALYSIS: an essential tool for terrorism

Some of the 45 countries, including Britain, swap codes manually, but criminals could use fake e-passports from countries that do not share key codes, which would then go undetected at passport control.

The tests suggest that if the microchips are vulnerable to cloning then bogus biometrics could be inserted in fake or blank passports.

Tens of millions of microchipped passports have been issued by the 45 countries in the belief that they will make international travel safer. They contain a tiny radio frequency chip and antenna attached to the inside back page. A special electronic reader sends out an encrypted signal and the chip responds by sending back the holder’s ID and biometric details.

Britain introduced e-passports in March 2006. In the wake of the September 11 attacks, the United States demanded that other countries adopt biometric passports. Many of the 9/11 bombers had travelled on fake passports.

The tests for The Times were conducted by Jeroen van Beek, a security researcher at the University of Amsterdam. Building on research from the UK, Germany and New Zealand, Mr van Beek has developed a method of reading, cloning and altering microchips so that they are accepted as genuine by Golden Reader, the standard software used by the International Civil Aviation Organisation to test them. It is also the software recommended for use at airports.

Using his own software, a publicly available programming code, a £40 card reader and two £10 RFID chips, Mr van Beek took less than an hour to clone and manipulate two passport chips to a level at which they were ready to be planted inside fake or stolen paper passports.

A baby boy’s passport chip was altered to contain an image of Osama bin Laden, and the passport of a 36-year-old woman was changed to feature a picture of Hiba Darghmeh, a Palestinian suicide bomber who killed three people in 2003. The unlikely identities were chosen so that there could be no suggestion that either Mr van Beek or The Times was faking viable travel documents.

“We’re not claiming that terrorists are able to do this to all passports today or that they will be able to do it tomorrow,” Mr van Beek said. “But it does raise concerns over security that need to be addressed in a more public and open way.”

The tests also raise serious questions about the Government’s £4 billion identity card scheme, which relies on the same biometric technology. ID cards are expected to contain similar microchips that will store up to 50 pieces of personal and biometric information about their holders. Last night Dominic Grieve, the Shadow Home Secretary, called on ministers to take urgent action to remedy the security flaws discovered by The Times. “It is of deep concern that the technology underpinning a key part of the UK’s security can be compromised so easily,” he said.

The ability to clone chips leaves travellers vulnerable to identity theft when they surrender their passports at hotels or car rental companies. Criminals in the back office could read the chips and clone them. The original passport holder’s name and date of birth could be left on the fake chip, with the picture, fingerprints and other biometric data of a criminal client added. The criminal could then travel the world using the stolen identity and the original passport holder would be none the wiser.

The Home Office said last night that it had yet to see evidence of someone being able to manipulate data in an e-passport. A spokesman said: “No one has yet been able to demonstrate that they are able to modify, change or alter data within the chip. If any data were to be changed, modified or altered it would be immediately obvious to the electronic reader.”

The International Civil Aviation Organisation said: “The PKD ensures that e-passports used at border control points . . . are genuine and unaltered. In effect it renders the passport fool-proof. However, all states issuing e-passports must join the PKD, otherwise that assurance cannot be given.”

Going biometric

1999 International Civil Aviation Organisation begins study into possibility of worldwide use of travel documents carrying biometric data

2002 After 9/11 US announces all passports issued from 2006 and used to enter the country must contain biometric information or holder will require a visa

2006 Britain and many EU countries introduce biometric passports

2008 45 countries have introduced biometric passports. 100 million have been issued globally

Sources: Identity and Passport Service, US Government

How many banks and other institutions that are subject to fraud carry the machines to check these passports ?

What makes you think the ID cards are going to be any different, hold on why do we need both?

[snowychap]

I would have no problem about being asked to show who I am.

Who are you, then?I guess that's not your name. So, as you have nothing to hide, why don't you actually tell us who you are?

Whilst you're answering that, you could answer some or all of the following:

Where were you yesterday?

Where are you going tonight?

What are you doing talking to him?

How much do you earn?

Who did you vote for last election?

Why do you think what you think?

What laws have you broken?

[snowychap]

except when you use a passport or a drivers license or you need ID to open a bank account or setup a financial setup or join a library or get a credit card or get foreign money from a BDE or register to vote or get married .............

What form of ID does one require to register to vote?

What form of ID does one require to join a library?

To get 'foreign money', I walk into my local post office (where there still is one) and present my pounds sterling and ask the nice lady or chap behind the counter to exchange it for me.

They are awfully sweet about it and now do so without asking for a commission payment. They certainly don't ask me to justify my existence....

[drat01]

Yep thats right, the fraud going on in this country is vastly more important that the the civil liberties of all citizens, how can you be so naive, really?

Hang on Pete comes on here and says he wont provide ID - all I was doing was showing how and when you do that now, so to say you wont is somewhat silly and naive?

Where were you yesterday?

Where are you going tonight?

What are you doing talking to him?

How much do you earn?

Who did you vote for last election?

Why do you think what you think?

What laws have you broken?

Sorry Snowy but that is a totally different thing. The ID card would not have any sort of tracking device in it so those questions surely have no relevance

The point being made is a fair one, there are various times in modern life where ID is needed and currently you have to provide it. Like anything in life there will always be a risk of forgery and if an ID card was just a piece of laminated card with a photo on it then this would be easy and simple to copy.

[drat01]

What form of ID does one require to register to vote?

Well for a start a birth certificate

What form of ID does one require to join a library?

Well that one surprised me I must admit, but Derbyshire libraries insisted on Photo ID before setting up a card. Acceptable versions of the ID were passport and / or drivers license

To get 'foreign money', I walk into my local post office (where there still is one) and present my pounds sterling and ask the nice lady or chap behind the counter to exchange it for me.

Nope - you have to provide ID in any Bureau De Exchange (you know the travelex) etc when paying by card. If you pay by cash it is not needed

[villanfromluton]

I would have no problem about being asked to show who I am.

Who are you, then?I guess that's not your name. So, as you have nothing to hide, why don't you actually tell us who you are?

Whilst you're answering that, you could answer some or all of the following:

Where were you yesterday?

Where are you going tonight?

What are you doing talking to him?

How much do you earn?

Who did you vote for last election?

Why do you think what you think?

What laws have you broken?

Very dramatical, but well over the top.

You are always asked for id anyway. Do you know how Maxine Carr was found to be lying, it was from her tesco loyalty card. She was shown to have bought loads of cleaning material. Thats bad as well, I suppose.

Do you honestly think you are going to be stopped in the street every day to show this ID card? Must admit I have not read into it as not fussed, but if it stops people coming into this country and working when they are not entitled, amongst other things, I am quite happy. Furthermore, it will stop some fraud, me thinks.