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The following editorial was published in the latest Economist:
The ability to recognise people automatically by analysing bodily characteristics such as fingerprints, faces and eyeballs – collectively known as biometrics – has long been a goal of technologists and governments alike.
Plans for large-scale projects to incorporate biometric scans into passports, ID cards and visas are now under way in several countries. From January 5th, America will begin scanning foreigners from particular countries as they arrive at its airports. Both America and Europe plan to start issuing biometric passports as soon as next year. Biometric ID cards are being adopted in Hong Kong and Oman, and Britain plans to follow suit. Politicians seem to be transfixed by the technology.
Typical was the recent declaration by David Blunkett, Britain’s home secretary, that biometrics “will make identity theft and multiple identity impossible – not nearly impossible, impossible”. This claim is absurd. Current biometric technology is not the answer to the world’s security fears.
→ Continue reading: Economist throws doubt on the current value of biometrics
Says Dave Barry of this apprehended spamster: “Let’s see how large his penis is.” Ho ho. And I know the feeling. I’m sure we all do.
A man alleged to be one of the world’s most notorious spammers was arrested yesterday in North Carolina, accused by Virginia prosecutors of falsifying the origin of e-mails that pitched low-priced “penny” stocks and home-mortgage schemes.
Jeremy Jaynes, also known as Gaven Stubberfield, of Raleigh, was charged with four felony counts as prosecutors seek to increase the heat — by bringing criminal penalties — on spammers for deceptive e-mail marketing.
The case marks the first time Virginia’s criminal provisions for spam have been invoked.
This anti-spamming activity has to be watched, I say, precisely because so many people are crying out for it, flaming torches in hand. What if they make a law which ends up making my Brian’s Fridays list illegal? This is the one that gets you invited to my last Friday of the month soirées. You know, just to make sure they get all the bad people. There are lots of complaints doing the rounds already that what Europe is doing about spam now is not enough.
They wouldn’t do that! Of course not. Ah but they might. More realistically, what they might do is make Brian’s Fridays list a bit illegal (like, I have to “register” it or something), and then they do me for not registering it when I say something truly hurtful about them, on a completely different subject. Or, I get scared that this might happen and refrain from my criticising. And other potential nuisance makiers do the same.
The Home Affairs Select Committee met last night to consider Big Blunkett’s plan to impose compulsory National Identity Cards on innocent British citizens. They interviewed some of the Home Office officials who have accepted responsibility for disassembling our civil liberties by implementing the cards.
Of particular interest to the Committee was the cost of the scheme. Despite being asked no less than seven times, the Home Office officials repeatedly refused to answer the question saying only that it would be between 1.3 thousand million and 3.1 thousand million pounds. As Committee Chair John Denham pointed out, a range of 2 thousand million pounds is unacceptably broad. And that’s assuming that the project remains on budget!
This unwillingness to talk openly about cost suggests a possible weak point within the Government. It is probably worth pressing this when contacting your MP or the media.
It’s especially ironic that the reason given for refusing to answer was “commercial confidentiality”. It seems that civil servants expect to have their privacy protected whilst they invade ours.
Full story in The Guardian
Cross-posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe
Those wacky guys at b3ta.com, or one of their many photoshopping friends, did a paranoid, Robocopish rethink of how speed cameras might soon be operating. The pictures may still be there (left hand side – scroll down) but will soon be gone if they aren’t gone already. It’s that kind of site.
If you can’t find anything speed camera related, I’ve stuck the pictures up on my Culture Blog, so that White Rosers can give the matter some more prolonged thought. (I don’t think I’m allowed to stick up pictures here, which is probably a good thing.)
Today’s NYT on moves to restrict freelance surveillance:
CHICAGO
WHAT grabbed my attention,” said Alderman Edward M. Burke, “was that TV commercial when the guy is eating the pasta like a slob, and the girl sends a photo of him acting like a slob to the fiancée.”
The commercial, for Sprint PCS, was meant to convey the spontaneity and reach afforded by the wireless world’s latest craze, the camera phone. But what Mr. Burke saw was the peril.
“If I’m in a locker room changing clothes,” he said, “there shouldn’t be some pervert taking photos of me that could wind up on the Internet.”
Accordingly, as early as Dec. 17, the Chicago City Council is to vote on a proposal by Mr. Burke to ban the use of camera phones in public bathrooms, locker rooms and showers.
Trouble is, how are such infringements to be detected?
Most will assume this to be a surveillance debate. But might it instead not be a ‘too many laws’ debate? I have in mind a world in which everyone will break the surveillance laws routinely, but only Enemies of the People will be prosecuted for it. Just wondering.
Wired has an article about the Supreme Court hearing on whether the federal government should reimburse individuals whose sensitive data was disclosed illegally, even if no harm can be proven.
At issue before the court, according to privacy advocates, is how valuable privacy really is. The Privacy Act of 1974 prohibits the government from disclosing private information intentionally, without the individual’s consent, and provides for a $1,000 minimum fine if the individual is “adversely affected.”
Marcia Hoffman, staff counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, argues that Congress preset the penalty precisely because it is so hard to put a price on an abstract concept such as privacy or to prove damages in absence of others’ misuse of that data.
If your Social Security number is disclosed, there is a real potential harm from identity theft.
Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, argues that if the government has to pay damages in the case of any improper release of someone’s Social Security number, then reporters will not get information from the government that they need and are entitled to.
In the spirit of releasing as much information to the public as possible, we think he should have to prove damages. If every time you release information about an individual, you are going to be threatened with this $1,000-per-record fine, you are going to have agencies so nervous that they are going to err on the side of not turning over something. Government guardians of information are going to be way overly cautious.
And we would not want the government agencies nervous, would we…?
ComputerWorld reports on the U.K. government set to consider legislation next year for the establishment of compulsory biometric identity cards and a central database of all U.K. subjects.
The information that the government is considering for inclusion on the card includes personal details such as a person’s home address and telephone number, his National Insurance number (the equivalent of the U.S. Social Security number), medical information and criminal convictions, as well as the biometric information, most likely in the form of an iris, fingerprint or palm print scan.
The ID cards would be rolled out in two stages, beginning with the biometric identifiers being included on renewed and newly issued passports and driver’s licenses. Also as part of the first phase, once the national database was available, the government would issue identity cards to European Union and foreign nationals seeking to remain in the U.K., and would also offer an optional card for those who do not have a passport or driver’s license. As part of the second phase of the program, to be implemented five years after its launch, the national ID card would become compulsory.
The government estimates that residents will be charged about $41 for the card and that setting up the basic system will cost taxpayers $215 million, and up to $3.59 billion to fully implement.
In a speech to the House of Commons on Nov. 11, Blunkett asserted that the development of technology that recognizes specific personal identifiers, or biometrics, “would mean that identity could not be forged or duplicated.” But the government’s own feasibility study on the use of biometrics issued in February said such methods “do not offer 100% certainty of authentication of individuals” and went on to warn that the “practicalities of deploying either iris or fingerprint recognition in such a scheme are far from straightforward.”
Bart Vansevenant, director of security strategy at Ubizen NV, said his company sees no real value for adding biometrics to ID cards, especially since it wouldn’t stop terrorism or fraud. Ubizen has been working on Belgium’s electronic ID card scheme, the first in Europe to move beyond the pilot stage, according to Vansevenant. The Belgian ID cards, which should be fully rolled out in three to four years, use digital certificate technology, which is cheaper and more reliable than biometrics, Vansevenant said.
There is no reason that is good enough to explain the use of biometrics. It is still a very immature technology, plus you have the additional costs of equipment, support and administration problems… Vansevenant also expressed serious doubts about the security of a national database. It is a pretty bad idea, especially the database, which would be an ideal target for hackers and terrorists.
Perhaps the U.K. and the U.S. [which is proposing the use of biometric data on U.S. passports] are using biometrics and related databases from a marketing point of view and trying to position it as the big solution to the problem of terrorism. But even then, it’s still a bad idea.
Quite.
There’s a Reason online article here, and comments about it all on the Reason blog here, about this:
One night a few weeks ago, I was half-watching a black-and-white, early ’60s episode of The Andy Griffith Show on TV LAND (Episode 60, “The Bookie Barber”), when, all of a sudden, the homespun wisdom of Griffith as Sheriff Andy Taylor touched on today’s heated debate over how to balance individual privacy with security. Andy responded to a suggestion by his deputy Barney Fife by saying: “You can’t ask a private citizen to become a police spy. It’s too dangerous. Something could go wrong.” The statement jolted me, and I thought, if only Sheriff Taylor had been there to offer this profound piece of advice to the Republicans and Democrats writing the USA PATRIOT Act.
Title III of the act, which contains provisions to counter money-laundering, requires a host of private businesses to become “police spies” on their customers. These little-known provisions of the much-talked about law draft a substantial number of private-sector employees as citizen soldiers in the war on terrorism as well as on the broadly-defined crime of “money laundering.”
Says commenter James Merrit:
A free people, empowering a government that acts consistent with the ideals of freedom, will have the minimum to fear from terrorists. It won’t be a perfect world, or a world without danger, but it will be the best we can hope for. We need to reject the fear-based policies and concentrate on freedom-based ones, starting as soon as possible. Do not empower the fascists; do not empower the socialists. We’ve seen where their roads lead. Empower those who uphold the principles of freedom in word and deed. Making a good start really is as simple as that.
We have similar money laundering stuff here in Britain as well, as David Carr explains.
And turning traders into government stooges has also been here a long time. If you buy a TV, the shop you buy it from has long wanted to know who you are so that it can tell the government and the government can check that you’ve got a TV license. If you refuse to say who you are, you are liable to end up not buying the TV, as Michael Yardley explains in the latest Spectator:
They changed tack. ‘You’ve got to give us your name and address or you can’t have the television.’ ‘But I’ve paid for it.’ ‘You can’t have it.’ At this point, perhaps I should have walked out of the shop with the television and risked prosecution for some unspecified offence in Kafkaesque Britain. I went for the less dramatic option. ‘Well, I’ll have my money back.’ The first response from the shop staff was that this was impossible. They backed down when I pressed the point. I was directed to ‘customer services’. A credit was made to my card. I left without a television. What a palaver.
Driving home, I thought back to the last time I had bought a television, ten years or more ago. I had a dim memory of being asked for my name and address ‘for the guarantee’. It wasn’t for that purpose, I now knew. It was a ploy to get the information for the faceless ones. …
Guy Herbert finds this is a bit worrying.
The BBC reports that six people suspected of terror activities have been re-arrested on lesser charges. All six were originally arrested under section 41 of the Terrorism Act, on suspicion of involvement in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism. They were released under terror laws but re-arrested on other matters such as bank fraud and immigration offences.
What’s wrong with this picture? Under the Terrorism Act reasonable suspicion is not required to arrest or search. Therefore it has potential to be used for fishing expeditions – police arrest you and search your property without proper cause. Of course, they’ll have an actual cause, such as being uncooperative with officials or some such pretext, and give themselves a week to find something on you. Once they have found something on you, their actions are justified in the eyes of the Lawn Order brigade.
Given the state of the criminal law and bureaucratic reach, I sincerely doubt there is anyone in the country who could not be charged with some crime after a week of interrogation and search, even among those whose lawns are in perfect order and believe they have nothing to hide.
Both us civil libertarians and our critics are in the habit of arguing that technology, especially in the hands of government, never works properly, so either (civil libertarians): it should never be relied upon – or (anti civil libertarians): why are civil libertarians making such a fuss about it if it’s so useless? My own opinion is that this stuff is getting inexorably cleverer, and that to assume permanent techno-incompetence, in these times of all times, is ridiculous. Bureaucratic and legal confusion can be relied upon to continue indefinitely. But technology can be depended upon to improve.
Here’s a BBC report today, about the inexorable development CCTV software:
Visitors to a South Yorkshire science centre are helping the FBI in a project to improve CCTV evidence.
Scientists from the University of Sheffield were asked to help the US law enforcement agency develop a way of identifying often blurry faces caught on video footage.
Now 3,000 volunteers at the Magna Centre in Rotherham are to have their heads scanned to form a three-dimensional image which can then be compared with enhanced CCTV footage.
Researchers at the university’s department of forensic pathology hope the resulting technique will revolutionise the way CCTV evidence is used in court cases on both sides of the Atlantic.
“Magna” eh? Anything to do with Magna Carta?
Over at the Adam Smith Institute Blog, Mark Griffin says they’re about to legalise spam, by defining it, incompetently. That means whatever dodges its way around the definition ain’t spam, right? So by trying to stop it they are going to allow it.
Patrick Crozier’s Transport Blog is steadily becoming a blog to be reckoned with. And yesterday and today, Patrick posted two White Rose Relevant bits, on the new law against mobile phones in cars, and (this presumably being kit that will also help to enforce the new phone law) surveillance cameras for spying on speeding motorists.
On mobiles in cars, Patrick agrees with David Carr. Bad new law. On the cameras? Well, his piece is entitled: “It’s not the speed cameras that are to blame – it’s the law”.
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