FC: Privacy villain of the week: G8 nations

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

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Date: Fri, 09 May 2003 17:38:32 -0400
From: J Plummer <jplummer () consumeralert org>
Subject: NCP: Privacy Villain: G8

Privacy Villain of the Week:
G8

Word from Paris this week is that the G8 nations <http://www.g8.fr/> -- the 
governments of France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United 
States, Italy, Canada, and Russia -- have agreed to develop a biometric 
passport system, perhaps complete with barcode, eye scan, and fingerprints.

Taking the lead on working out the details of the scheme will be the US 
government and its purported nemesis, the French. 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17566-2003May5.html> They 
may disagree on the proper level of violence to utilize in engineering an 
international takeover of a third-world country, but have had an evident 
meeting of the minds on the necessity of tracking and tracing their own 
citizens in the most Orwellian ways possible. The two countries hope to 
have the details worked out by the end of the year and to roll out the 
brave new papers by the end of 2004.

And leave it to the United Kingdom, the homeland of Big Brother, to use the 
plan as a pretext for mandating such identification papers for all their 
citizens, not just those who have the temerity to travel. Home Secretary 
Jack Straw told the London Daily Telegraph that the new passports would be 
an excellent mechanism to do just that. 
<http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/05/06/npass06.xml&sSheet=/news/2003/05/06/ixnewstop.html> 
No doubt the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators is 
salivating at the idea of similarly bootstrapping their plan to 
biometrically ID all Americans via their drivers' licenses. 
<http://www.nccprivacy.org/handv/011206villain.htm>

The international track-and-trace scheme will of course be justified by 
invoking the terror bogeyman. If the leaders of these nations are so afraid 
of terrorists, it might be a better idea for them to just watch who they 
let enter their countries and grant citizenship to, rather then subjecting 
the personal details of their own citizens to the whims of international 
bureaucracy. The Patriot Act and other measures have in the past two years 
set up a number of programs to track who is enteing the United States. Yet 
apparently this is not enough for the US government, as its delegation in 
Paris, led by Attorney General Ashcroft, has decided to take the lead in 
designing a system to biometrically catalogue Americans. This is akin to 
the scheme that has the Canadians telling Homeland Security about every 
American who egresses the US by the Northern border -- while the Southern 
border is virtually wide open -- no retina scan required! 
<http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20030410.uimmi0410/BNStory/National/?query=border>

It would be a miracle if such a card system were made to work without 
saving the biometric data in government databases, as a pilot program at 
Amsterdam airport is purportedly doing. 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/25/international/europe/25AMST.html> Some 
US states already require submission to a fingerprint database in order to 
get a driver's license.

What can we expect from the massive new database ostensibly designed to 
prevent identity fraud? Well, we already know that fingerprint scans can be 
forged with gummi worm technology. <http://cryptome.org/gummy.htm> As 
Congressman Ron Paul (and numerous others) point out, "transformation of 
the Social Security number into a de facto uniform identifier . . . 
facilitates the crime of identity theft." 
<http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/congrec2001/cr052201.htm> A recent GAO 
report provided a handful of the many examples of poor security practices 
the federal government uses in protecting SSNs. 
<http://govt-aff.senate.gov/031103prescouncilrpt.pdf>

All of this is because Congress has increasingly acquiesced to, or indeed 
mandated, the widespread use of the SSN as an identifier by government and 
business. If France, Ashcroft, and the G8 push this scheme through 
Congress, can we expect any better in the future. Today, when one punches 
"SSN" into google, at the top right of the results is a little ad selling 
personal information based on nothing more than the government-issued 
number. How long will it be before a similar ad pops up when you search on 
fingerprints? You might ask the gaggle of Privacy Villains in Paris.

By James Plummer


The Privacy Villain of the Week and Privacy Hero of the Month are projects 
of the National Consumer Coalition's Privacy Group. Privacy Villains and 
Heros audio feature now available at FCF News on Demand. <www.fcfnews.com> 
For more information on the NCC Privacy Group, see www.nccprivacy.org or 
contact James Plummer at 202-467-5809 or jplummer () consumeralert org .




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