The answers my friends- are blowin’in the wind….

The Guardian, a newspaper in London, ran a story last week that touched on the identity and tracking issues we discussed in class.  Recently the UK launched biometric passports for all its citizens, a trend that will surely make its way to the US very shortly I’m sure, the launch however, has not been without its problems.  It seems that just as fast as governments create new technologies, hackers find a way to ruin them… In this case all it took was a newspaper staff and a few months, bringing the UK’s rollout to a screeching halt. 

The hoopla all began after the Guardian conducted an investigation of the new passports and found that according to the article, “the 3m micro-chip could be electronically attacked and cloned with a £174 microchip reader and that biometric data was transferred to a PC after gaining access to the chips in three passports.”  Now the government is facing angry demands to recall all the passports- which cost British citizens a pretty pound to purchase in the first place…

The Identity and Passport Service in Brittan has already spent £60m on the new passports, first introduced in March, apparently it wasn’t enough.  The article quotes Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, as demanding a full recall. “Three million people now have passports that expose them to a greater risk of identity fraud than before,” he said.

It truly astonishes me that as a society we continue to put more and more sensitive data out there and yet seem completely incapable of protecting it… These new passports were supposed to make identity theft harder, instead they basically give you the name with the face and the biometric data to back it up- literally.  

In fact- the newspaper that conducted the test used a computer expert “who spent just 48 hours writing software designed to suck information from the chips.”  This begs the question of will there ever be a truly un-hackable solution- a document so secure that it can never be counterfeited?  It seems to me that the more technological the solution the easier it is to break into… Perhaps we should go back to the good old days of hand written documents- at least then forgers had to learn multiple different sets of hand writing- rather then being able to write one program that could then hack everything…