Friday, November 17, 2006

Biometric ID Passports "cracked"

Your identity under threat

Those who have long campaigned for the introduction of a secure ID card containing our biometric details should be dismayed by the news today of a further success in "cracking" the RF ID chip on newly issued British Passports.

Liberal democrats are already calling for the repeal of a host of recently introduced laws and include the abolition of ID cards. Today in the Guardian it is revealed that the new passports are far less secure than originally thought, and that anyone with a knowledge of RF encryption, bluetooth, and computer systems can readily read the details from the chip embedded in a passport and prepare to clone a new one with your identity. This will make it extremely easy for criminals or terrorists to pass through the most stringent of border controls. Far more worrying is the apparent lack of concern from the Home Office to the charge that the encryption used is far less secure than it needs to be.

Those in the SayNo2ID campaign will be bolstered by this news, and those libertarians amongst us should be raising the profile of this issue. The risks of having virtually all of your necessary identity details embedded into the chip on one identity card are enormous, the risks of losing this identity to someone of criminal intent grow daily, and yet the government still want to tell us it is all for our own good!

We need to tell them that it is our identity, not their's to gamble with, and that we intend to keep it for ourselves!

Links

The Guardian
NO2ID

# posted by Curly : 9:57 am