Well, I did promise to stop yammering on about aliens…
For those of you not in the UK, ID cards have been simmering away in the background of British politics for several years. They are expected to be in the hands of every UK citizen (and some visiting non-UK citizens) by around 2011: trial issuings are occurring as we speak, with 3,500 individuals registered.
I was somewhat bemused by them initially: why do we need ID cards? We have passports and driving licences. A glance at the Identity Cards Act (2006) reveals what is really unique about them: the concentration of information. The NO2ID organisation seize on the first sentence of the Act:
An Act to make provision for a national scheme of registration of individuals and for the issue of cards capable of being used for identifying registered individuals…to make provision facilitating the verification of information provided with an application for a passport; and for connected purposes.
This National Register will constitute a list of all individuals in the UK with an ID card (i.e. everyone who’s supposed to be here), and collate up to (and not limited to) fifty individual pieces of information (according to NO2ID), including your passport, national insurance and driving licence numbers. Needless to say that if your ID card (keyed to access this information) is stolen, then it makes for extremely efficient identity theft.
Even with these apparently obvious reasons against ID cards, I find myself strangely ambivalent. I could see how collating information about me is useful: I expect that the Government could collect this information from several departments, with my details becoming garbled a la Chinese Whispers (which could be dangerous!), and I would rather they obtained them more reliably. The theft of this data is somewhat unsettling: but no more unsettling than having an entire wallet stolen (which has the majority of this data in individual pieces), which can happen right now. And there is the classic “I have nothing to hide” which admittedly only holds while the Government’s data requests remain innocent (Are you doing your exercises, Winston?).
What does worry me is the possibility that an ID card can be cracked, says the (ahem, excuse me, sorry, I have to say it) Daily Mail. The Government vigorously denies that it is possible for the security expert Adam Laurie to…
using just [a mobile phone] handset and a laptop computer, electronically [copy] the ID card microchip and all its information in a matter of minutes.
Although I must say the security expert’s finesse in adding “I am entitled to benefits” (classic Mail fodder) and a message stating “I am a terrorist. Shoot me on sight” to the card is amusing if macabre. Now, if you’ve read this far, I’m finally getting to my point. If these ID cards are as (in)secure as is suggested, then we need proof : whether you are against them, and want this whole opulent scheme (£5bn according to the Mail, and other sources seem to agree) nipped in the bud; or if you are for them (or you are the Government), and want your card to be safe; or if you’re on the fence like me, and need convincing. It’s all very well stating that you cracked the card in a newspaper, and give a layman’s explanation, but it’s not enough. I’ve not seen a wisp of what I would consider to be proof: a peer-reviewed academic publication of how the card was cracked, detailing the exact method. Then either the Government or the Mail will be forced to show that they are blackwhite (to flog the Orwellian horse once more, doubleplusbad).
Adam Laurie, Jeroen van Beek, what do you think? If you’ve already published it, then ignore this prolefeed.
It’s quite possible such an academic article would be illegal, Duncan, under current terrorist/computer-misuse/copyright laws.
(In case you think I’m being far-fetched with that last example, I’m not. The DMCA has had a chilling effect on mathematics research into encryption in the ‘States.)
Pity comments can’t be edited, I got carried away with the word ‘mathematics’ there.
OK, just wikipediaed (is that a verb?) DMCA. You’re right of course, Brendan, but this is madness: surely to prevent infringements of DMCA, legislators should be made aware of how infringements can occur?
If the technology has holes, don’t use the technology. We need proof that the technology has holes to dump it. The scientific method is the best system we have right now to provide proof.
Aargh…this is actually doublethink in action…
In fact, Brendan, they can be edited. I have taken your comment as granting permission for us to do this.
Duncan, I don’t think an invigilant attitude is the best you can muster. There could be, as you point out, considerable efficiency and convenience benefits from having a consolidated database of information. But it seems to me that there are many gains to be had from anonymous information as well, and the government is not really making moves over this. For instance, collating test scores from school students paired with relevant anonymous semantic data, like household income; yet this isn’t done, which might lead one to believe that these sorts of arguments are being trotted out simply to justify the ID card programme.
The mention of wallets also puzzles me. The issue is not one person losing their data, but many. There are reports, you would agree, ~ every few months about ~ 10^5 people having a particular piece of information made (potentially) accessible to criminals after a theft or accidental misplacement of data. Having all the data in one place makes theft on a grand scale more likely; phrased another way, it makes the chance of your wallet being stolen much, much higher.
That said, I am under-informed on this issue, though less so for having read this post. Australia also considers a programme like this from time to time, but it just seems so unnecessary.
“OK, just wikipediaed (is that a verb?) DMCA. You’re right of course, Brendan, but this is madness”
Yes.
“We need proof that the technology has holes to dump it.”
No. We need proof that the technology is secure to adopt it.
In any case, this sounds like another case of “freedom, but only if…”. You’ll have complete freedom of movement in Britain, but only if you carry all your personal information around with you (in a format not disclosed to the public?). You have complete freedom of expression in Britain, but only if you don’t want to take and publish photos that might be “likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing to commit an act of terrorism”.
I may have completely misunderstood the situation in Britain, but here in New Zealand, in the last 10 months before the most recent of our triennial elections, we had complete freedom of expression, but only if we were prepared to disclose our name and physical address whenever we publicly expressed our political opinions. (This is a simplified version; there were exceptions I haven’t mentioned, but there were also added burdens I haven’t mentioned.)
The “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” argument doesn’t convince me. You may well have something to hide that isn’t illegal. You may be discouraged from exercising your freedom of religion, for example (even your freedom to preliminarily investigate various religions), if you think your disapproving family might find out. Do you know anyone who can access government-held information about you? Can you be sure that no-one you know will ever have access to government-held information about you? Can you be sure that no-one you and your disapproving family will meet in future has access or will have access to government-held information about you?
Finally, even if you can trust the current government, and even if you can trust the next one, can you trust the government you’ll have in a dozen years’ time? Three dozen? Five dozen?
Tim, I would agree on the last two points: the “nothing to hide” argument is weak at best (probably more like fatally flawed). Trusting governments is never the best idea either…
You’re right as well about adopting secure technology rather than dumping insecure technology: my feeling was in reality the latter option is easier to legislate…technologies are only secure until a counterproof is found, and then they become unsafe. Absolute proof of security is much harder to obtain.
Berian, what you say about actual identity thefts is correct – I suspect most theft occurs from cloning cards or online interception rather than low-tech five finger acquisitions.
Going back to trusting governments again: I’m not sure we’ll have a choice…our generation will be increasingly reliant on digital avatars to conduct our daily lives (whether they’re a facebook profile, an online bank account or your passport data), so we should be sure that we have checks and balances against governments should they become untrustworthy. What those checks and balances are I leave to better men
Whatever the outcome, I feel that our digital personae are at least as important as our physical form, and that the ethics of personal data misuse should be considered just as carefully as the ethics of personal genome misuse.
“Absolute proof of security is much harder to obtain.”
Yes, such proofs are hard to obtain, but not necessarily non-existent, if we look hard enough.
For my Master’s research, I’m using a proof-verification program called Isabelle. The last chapter of its tutorial is called Case Study: Verifying a Security Protocol. (I haven’t actually read this chapter yet, but I was interested in its existence.)