What price security?

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

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What price security?
By Nathan Cochrane 
May 6 2003 


A visiting Canadian academic reminded us last week that the reasons for the
1986 defeat of the Australia Card are still valid despite the increased fear
of terrorist attack.

Andrew Clement, an information studies professor at the University of
Toronto, said the international push in the past two years to tag citizens
with unique identifiers should be resisted because we would give up
essential liberties for the illusion of increased security.

Clement said the reasons for national identity cards have more to do with
funding what US author and National Security Agency biographer James Bamford
called the "security-industrial complex" - the nexus between government and
private security systems contractors - than with creating a safe society.

"It would lend a false sense of security if people thought it (a national
identity card) was going to be effective," said Clement, who spoke at the
Baker Cyberlaw Centre in Sydney while a guest of the Institute for
Information and Communications Technology at the University of Technology
Sydney.

"Government agencies see them as a way of avoiding fraud, dealing
efficiently and even offering better services. The security forces ... are
also looking for technological solutions that will both have the appearance
of being effective and convey messages of being modern and sophisticated.

"If (the private security contractors) can persuade a government to embark
on this, the financial benefits are enormous.

"And then there's a deeper, almost ideological orientation that sees the
apparent ability to track and detail peoples' movements as a basis of social
control. There's a growing acceptance that if you have nothing to hide you
have nothing to fear."

Ironically, when Clement tried to uncover the business relationship between
the Ontario Government and smartcard makers, he was stymied by "invisible
barriers" at every turn, he said. He has spent the past two years trying to
access documents under freedom of information.

An independent e-business consultant in the areas of security and privacy,
Roger Clarke, was among those who led the charge against the original
Australia Card, which saw it defeated in the Senate in 1986. He says
Australia has wound up with privacy-invasive technologies (PITs), such as
the Tax File Number, data-matching, caller-ID and location of mobile phones
that together may be more dangerous than the original Australia Card
proposal.

''The kinds of technologies that are available are far more threatening than
they used to be,'' said Clarke, an associate at the Baker Cyberlaw Centre.'

'And, despite that, public servants are just as ignorant of their risks as
they were in the mid-1980s, and just as gung-ho on simplistic
pseudo-solutions to complex problems.'' Clarke said that the Federal
Government's inclination to blindly follow the United States and Britain,
which is introducing a ''voluntary'' national card, means the concept may be
reincarnated here.

He said one of the ''nastiest threats'' to Australians' liberties is the
''US-driven project'' to add a biometric identifier to our passports which
verifies a traveller based on face and iris scans. A trial of the readers
started at Sydney airport in January. The Government plans to introduce new
biometric passports within two years.

National ID cards won't make countries any safer because those intent on
terrorist acts will get them anyway, Clarke said.

Clement accuses companies such as Oracle, which makes databases, and
computer systems maker Sun Microsystems of ''opportunism'' as they tried to
capitalise on fear in the wake of the terrorist attacks on September 11,
2001.

Oracle offered to ''donate'' core technologies to a US national identity
card system, while Sun's Java smartcard was named by the US Federal Aviation
Administration for its transportation workers' card, the first national
identity card for US transport workers.

It is also being used by the US defence department for its 4.3 million
personnel and civilian contractors, as Taiwan's equivalent of our Medicare
card for its 24 million citizens, and from this month will be issued to
residents of 11 Belgian cities - the first step to a mandatory electronic
national ID card for those over the age of 12.



This story was found at:
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/05/05/1051987641182.html
 

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