People’s belief in technology is amazing. They bank on the Internet; trust ATMs; think debit cards are the best things since money was invented; trust their vote to a machine (built by the ATM guys…); use simple passwords; download trouble; leave their credit card data permanently on some company’s server; allow their shopping habits to be recorded by their loyalty discount card; allow DoubleClick daily access to their computers… People do it without thinking.
Perhaps the most menacing demand made by one human to another is “Papers!” It smells of Nazis, Stalin, repression in general, and when we allow it to become the norm it means that we are accepting the lowest common denominator of human life. It suggests a governance by fear, that we don’t know what the result of being unable to provide satisfactory papers will be. It is totalitarian.
And it is how we have been living for at least the last years. With a government secretly recording our telephone conversations and e-mails. Most of us probably heard about Room 641A in San Francisco and its colleagues in Denver and other cities, where our phone providers had given the government access to our privacy. It didn’t need
Mark Klein, former AT&T technician, to whistle-blow on the spliced fiber-optic cables with the splits going into the created 641A at 611 Folsom Street, but it felt good that somebody had the courage to be on the side of the American people.
In the UK, the number of warrants issued to tap into central offices and ISPs has
dramatically increased over the last years, and instead of just the security services (and how many of those are there?) there are over 795 agencies allowed to get such warrants, and they are granted readily and very nearly 10% of the time.
I suppose it is nice that the British government has openly leaked its plans to spend billions of pounds to
listen in on 100% of its population’s communications, but it sure in hell is not the country that I grew up in, where even a photo on a driver’s license was regarded as intrusive.
Well before all the changes that have been introduced to combat our fears – with the fears spread by those who seek to help us combat them – and well before the European Community existed, I remember making a trip to Switzerland and forgot to take one of my passports with me. When I got back to Heathrow I explained that to the officer at the barrier and he just looked at me and said, “Not a problem, sir, don’t make a habit of it.” Nowadays, I suspect that I would have been carted off to secondary inspections, tertiary interrogation and what else I don’t know.
But we are so scared of ourselves that we think technology can save us. Biometric passports are being issued right now. They include an RFID chip that has all the citizenship information on it plus the passport data itself. Of course, when the
shipping label of the package with your new passport in it contains everything you needed to know about you that is seriously stupid.
There is also
evidence that cloning your biometric passport is going to be a piece of cake, and it is only a matter of time before somebody finds a way of changing the data in that clone.
One of the only smart things that biometric passport countries have adopted is a tin foil RF impedance such that the RFID can only be read when the passport is open. Such protection is not being offered on the enhanced (enhanced can be such a wonderfully interpretable word…) driver’s license being produced by the likes of the Province of Ontario as a cheaper solution than a passport for crossing into the US. That border crossing requires a passport for air travel but still only (officially) requires a driver’s license for a road or ferry crossing, for the moment. (If you don’t have a passport for the latter you will, reportedly, be just a little hassled.)
A problem is that the enhanced license can be read while the vehicle you are in is
many hundreds of feet from the border agent, so your privacy just went out the window.
All this just puts me even more in the mood to go into a Wal-Mart with a 250 W pulse transmitter in my pocket and blow all their RFID tags at one go. Then on to Peace Arch at Blaine to picnic in the park with my little box, and cause total confusion, perhaps?
I don’t think so, but how many people do you think take the four-hour Detroit-to-Buffalo shortcut through Ontario any more? Even Cleveland is attractive these days…
