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Hello again everyone. If this is to be a regular column, I need help with a name for it. As an incentive to get your help I’ll offer a free book from the DACS Library to anyone whose suggestion is incorporated into the final name. DACS Website Committee Anna Collens and I have started a group to redesign the DACS Web site. Last Tuesday at Anna’s Web Design SIG, we started the process with a brain storming session on what we would like to see in a new Web site. So far, we are just talking prototype, and no one has started to code anything, so this is your chance to get involved from the very beginning. Our Web site has about 150Mbytes of content. Now the PDF versions of past newsletters are a good part of this, but 150Meg is a lot of content in anyone’s book, and most of this was written by our own members. It’s no wonder that DACS.DOC has earned so many awards over the years. The primary goal for the new site is to make this content more accessible and easier to use. At this point, we do not know how we will accomplish all this, but we do know that we have a lot of work to do and we’ll have a lot of fun doing it. If you would like to be a part of the process, join the Website_DACS email list on Yahoo Groups. The easiest way to do this is to send an empty email message to Website_DACS-subscribe @yahoogroups.com. Be sure to send it from the address where you want to receive messages from the list. What? Me worry? Once again our Congress people have been busy. Only a week or so ago, President Bush signed the Real ID Act into law. Actually he signed an appropriation bill to fund the war in Iraq into law; the Real ID Act was an amendment that came along for the ride. So what is the Real ID Act? Billed as anti-terror by its supporters, the bill requires states to meet a new set of standards when issuing drivers licenses. Some of these requirements include that the state verify the person’s address and that the person is in the US legally. Additionally, this information is to be made available to all other states in an unspecified national database. And at least the basic information on the drivers license is to be “machine readable”. Naturally, our Luddite (this is as benign a label as I can possibly use) Congress people have left the details of all this to be defined by bureaucrats at the departments of Homeland Security and Transportation. So should you be worried? Yes, you should. Why? Because this is just one more sliver as they slice and dice your civil liberties. Let’s jump right to the nightmare scenario. Let’s assume that Real ID is implemented using the same technology presently being considered for the new electronic passports. After all, why require law enforcement agencies to buy two devices when one will do? This technology is based on a radio frequency ID (RFID) standard. While the government has stated that these passports will be readable only from very short distances (centimeters), the demonstrated reality is that scanning is possible from several feet and the technology will only get better over time. Transfer this to your driver’s license and you can see how anyone, not just law enforcement, could determine your identity without your being the slightest aware. Encryption? Sure, the information will be encrypted. How long do you think it will take for this to be broken? I bet two weeks. Law enforcement (and others as we have seen) could, of course, go much further and query all sorts of databases to determine your employment, credit rating, and anything else about you stored by government agencies and those “very secure” data aggregators like Lexis-Nexis and ChoicePoint. In fact, this type of lookup could be done on every person walking down an airport terminal. The kind of search that presently requires probable cause could instead be done by default on every person walking past a scanner. Not scared yet? Certainly, you have nothing to hide beyond your credit card balances, so why worry? Ok, now let’s combine this with the security camera system being implemented right now in Chicago. The first part of this city-wide system is planned to go live in 2006. It includes software that allows the system to spot people walking aimlessly in public places or send an alert if someone sets down a bag and walks away. As good as this sounds for preventing terrorism, we only need one little addition to turn it into the monitors of Orwell’s 1984 – the RFID tag in your drivers license. Add a scanner to each camera, and now the system can not only monitor behavior but know the identity of every person in view. Combined, these systems would be able to always know where you are and where you have been and store this information forever. If you have an EasyPass on your car, the government already knows where and when you drive thru any toll plaza in the northeast – so they know where your car is now, the rest is just gravy. Right? Now factor in the inevitable errors and other anomalies we see every day. Any bets on whether these systems will be running on Windows servers? Still not worried?
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Jim Scheef is former DACS president. All other information is Classified. |
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