lyte86 wrote:

"I am fully aware that the old style of passport (non-machine readable) can be readily forged, and that it is extremely difficult for a layman such as myself to tell the difference. As it took this bloke, who is apparently some sort of computer God, to break into the new one, might fewer people be able to manufacture a convincing fake?"

Which prompted the following response which I believe should be shared with everybody as food for thought on this VERY serious issue:

At first. The answer turns on provocation, motivation, and pay-off. Is it worth manufacturing a convincing fake? That depends very much on how the government behaves with the information and with such identity control. The trends aren't good: DVLA (the UK's National Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority) has already sold the UK's National Vehicle Ownership databases to as many as it can, from eBay to insurance companies, who all now have access to private and confidential driver information that we as "the people" are not allowed to know but big business interests have a commercial right to purchase and employ.

Those buyers will use this info in ways that benefit them, not us. Like many of Microsoft's current services, the time may come when you cannot use any commercial web-based services, such as eBay, for example, as a UK resident, without being verified or not (and thus allowed or disallowed to trade) because of DVLA info.

Just enough of that kind of behaviour by companies and governments and forging Id's becomes all at once a significant political, commercial, and criminal imperative. Too much control stimulates and breeds counter moves for the kinds of freedoms, or their indirect surrogates, that become distorted and suppressed by such controls.

Hence knowledge like this spreads as much from inquisitive interest as it does from pressures to "breath." And it then spreads in exponential leaps. In a sense, building legal "unbreakable" passports is a product engineering problem caught between cost, technology, and freedom. The simple fact of the possibility of doing so and therefore that doing being undone is a valuable kind of knowledge in itself. And various endeavours will follow from that alone.

It would, for example, cost a lot to build the first "unbreakable" passport (especially as commercial bids would be complicated by either going to the lowest bidder with fat "payoff" margins and not necessarily being the best design, or, oppositely, going to the "best" design but for possibly unbearable unit costs unless paid for by, you guessed it, "us").

But as TAS intimates, "unbreakable" technology always has a certain, finite shelf-life, uncertain only in the length of that life. Whatever is man-made can be unmade. And the more "unbreakable" it is, the more interesting and valuable it will, at first, and possibly for some time, be.

Meanwhile the "teks" for hacking, replicating, and doing digital and physical forging are getting more powerful and more widely available (lower price points), as well as the information and knowledge (e.g. design templates, stamps, watermarks, embeds, etc) required for a successful forgery.

Imagine, therefore, a trend for "jacking" passports which begins because they contain a robust technology that's really useful for doing something else totally different (or closely related) and "important" (to the "jackers" or their customers). All of a sudden, unexpected side effects occur - like a rise in targeted assassinations (because some distinct but now reliably identifiable ethnic or national minority is now scan-able for on these IDs). Not to mention an increase in domestic burglaries, identity theft, and postal mail - as "hot" new generation passports are sought and exploited.

If high-tech passports become "too good" we'll all be in civil straight-jackets that will make Orwell look like freedom's paradise. It is presently more likely that high-tech passports and national IDs are going to be converged in Europe - into an all-in-one "unbreakable" ID intended to achieve the same ends and be for everything and anything from travel, workplace access, payments, driving, and general life transactions: No ID, No Buy, No Travel, No drive, No Life. Revelations fulfilled. Especially as implantable form factors emerge, and are mandated in, at first, a "few" 'useful' and 'critical' applications.

The real "solution" to whatever challenges such ID technologies are intended to engage can't ever be met by mainly technological approaches - or in any practical combination of technology, legal force, and draconian police and social engineering - other than for short, stable control periods. The people thinking about, designing, and deploying such systems neither read history, nor appear to understand it - much less follow its guidelines for complex systems management (not control).

Whenever, in discussing social dynamics, I hear "control", "win the x war," "the war on..," "by force of.." etc, or the like - and technical means - short of complete genocide - are mentioned as a dominant strategy to achieve this kind of control of citizens - I'm tempted to open a Cynics Casino and make an absolute mint from those betting that any linear, top-down, "we read, remember, and re-compile no history" approach will have any success at all.

Like the multi-decade, awesomely expensive and atrociously managed World Bank's Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAP!), there are presently absolutely no successful historical examples of secure mass-market ids and/or systems. None. It's not the way to solve today's social and criminal challenges, but 'good' answers are beyond the attention span and intellectual depth of our current crop and candidates for social leadership. We must look to ourselves.

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Cyspace

"There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible. But in the end they always fall. Think of it. Always. - Be the change you want to see in the world. - What's focused on expands, what's denied remains unhealed."

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