FC: Privacy villain of the week: G8 nations

From: Declan McCullagh (declanat_private)
Date: Fri May 09 2003 - 15:22:28 PDT

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    Date: Fri, 09 May 2003 17:38:32 -0400
    From: J Plummer <jplummerat_private>
    Subject: NCP: Privacy Villain: G8
    
    Privacy Villain of the Week:
    G8
    
    Word from Paris this week is that the G8 nations <http://www.g8.fr/> -- the 
    governments of France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United 
    States, Italy, Canada, and Russia -- have agreed to develop a biometric 
    passport system, perhaps complete with barcode, eye scan, and fingerprints.
    
    Taking the lead on working out the details of the scheme will be the US 
    government and its purported nemesis, the French. 
    <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17566-2003May5.html> They 
    may disagree on the proper level of violence to utilize in engineering an 
    international takeover of a third-world country, but have had an evident 
    meeting of the minds on the necessity of tracking and tracing their own 
    citizens in the most Orwellian ways possible. The two countries hope to 
    have the details worked out by the end of the year and to roll out the 
    brave new papers by the end of 2004.
    
    And leave it to the United Kingdom, the homeland of Big Brother, to use the 
    plan as a pretext for mandating such identification papers for all their 
    citizens, not just those who have the temerity to travel. Home Secretary 
    Jack Straw told the London Daily Telegraph that the new passports would be 
    an excellent mechanism to do just that. 
    <http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/05/06/npass06.xml&sSheet=/news/2003/05/06/ixnewstop.html> 
    No doubt the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators is 
    salivating at the idea of similarly bootstrapping their plan to 
    biometrically ID all Americans via their drivers' licenses. 
    <http://www.nccprivacy.org/handv/011206villain.htm>
    
    The international track-and-trace scheme will of course be justified by 
    invoking the terror bogeyman. If the leaders of these nations are so afraid 
    of terrorists, it might be a better idea for them to just watch who they 
    let enter their countries and grant citizenship to, rather then subjecting 
    the personal details of their own citizens to the whims of international 
    bureaucracy. The Patriot Act and other measures have in the past two years 
    set up a number of programs to track who is enteing the United States. Yet 
    apparently this is not enough for the US government, as its delegation in 
    Paris, led by Attorney General Ashcroft, has decided to take the lead in 
    designing a system to biometrically catalogue Americans. This is akin to 
    the scheme that has the Canadians telling Homeland Security about every 
    American who egresses the US by the Northern border -- while the Southern 
    border is virtually wide open -- no retina scan required! 
    <http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20030410.uimmi0410/BNStory/National/?query=border>
    
    It would be a miracle if such a card system were made to work without 
    saving the biometric data in government databases, as a pilot program at 
    Amsterdam airport is purportedly doing. 
    <http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/25/international/europe/25AMST.html> Some 
    US states already require submission to a fingerprint database in order to 
    get a driver's license.
    
    What can we expect from the massive new database ostensibly designed to 
    prevent identity fraud? Well, we already know that fingerprint scans can be 
    forged with gummi worm technology. <http://cryptome.org/gummy.htm> As 
    Congressman Ron Paul (and numerous others) point out, "transformation of 
    the Social Security number into a de facto uniform identifier . . . 
    facilitates the crime of identity theft." 
    <http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/congrec2001/cr052201.htm> A recent GAO 
    report provided a handful of the many examples of poor security practices 
    the federal government uses in protecting SSNs. 
    <http://govt-aff.senate.gov/031103prescouncilrpt.pdf>
    
    All of this is because Congress has increasingly acquiesced to, or indeed 
    mandated, the widespread use of the SSN as an identifier by government and 
    business. If France, Ashcroft, and the G8 push this scheme through 
    Congress, can we expect any better in the future. Today, when one punches 
    "SSN" into google, at the top right of the results is a little ad selling 
    personal information based on nothing more than the government-issued 
    number. How long will it be before a similar ad pops up when you search on 
    fingerprints? You might ask the gaggle of Privacy Villains in Paris.
    
    By James Plummer
    
    
    The Privacy Villain of the Week and Privacy Hero of the Month are projects 
    of the National Consumer Coalition's Privacy Group. Privacy Villains and 
    Heros audio feature now available at FCF News on Demand. <www.fcfnews.com> 
    For more information on the NCC Privacy Group, see www.nccprivacy.org or 
    contact James Plummer at 202-467-5809 or jplummerat_private .
    
    
    
    
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