IP: Risks of belief in identities: [risks] Risks Digest 21.74

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

> Date: Sat, 10 Nov 2001 11:54:17 PST
> From: "Peter G. Neumann" <neumann () csl sri com>
> Subject: Risks of belief in identities
>
> For those of you who might believe that national ID cards might be a good
> idea, check out the December 2001 *Commun.ACM* Inside Risks column by me
> and Lauren Weinstein, previewed on my Web site
>   http://www.csl.sri.com/neumann/insiderisks.html
> in anticipation of a U.S. House hearing next Friday on that subject.
>
> It is not just the cards themselves that would entail risks, but even moreso
> all of the supporting infrastructures, widespread accessibility to
> networking, monitoring, cross-linked databases, data mining, etc., and
> particularly the risks of untrustworthy insiders issuing bogus
> identification cards -- as happened a few years back on a large scale in the
> Virginia state motor vehicle agency (RISKS-11.41).
>
> The latest item on the ease of getting phony or illegal or unchecked
> identification papers is found an article by Michelle Malkin (Creators
> Syndicate Inc.), which I saw in the *San Francisco Chronicle* on 10 Nov
> 2001: Abdulla Noman, employed by the U.S. Department of Commerce, issued
> bogus visas in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in one case in 1998 charging
> approximately $3,178.  The article also notes a variety of sleazy schemes
> for obtaining visas, in some cases without ever appearing in person and
> without any background checks, and in other cases for ``investments'' of a
> hundred and fifty thousand dollars.  The article concludes with this
> sentence: ``Until our embassy officials stop selling American visas blindly
> to every foreign investor waving cash, homeland security is a pipe dream.''
> I'm not sure that conclusion is representative of the full nature of the
> problem of bogus identification, but the problem is clearly significant.
> A driver's license or a passport or a visa or a National ID card is not
> really proof of identity or genuineness or anything else.


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