RFID Passports

Folks,

As you can imagine, I believe our govt is approaching the USA security exactly
backwards,
and one product area I dislike is the national identification cards. They will
do no good, since
bad guys will buy forgeries from government workers, who have a long history of
selling the
real McCoy to bad guys anyway. Higher level technology just raises the price of
the illegally
issued identification cards; making them more expensive, not too expensive.
News stories
about govt staff who issue identification illegally, like state drivers licenses
and USA
Passports, are common.

And really, I am a big believer in good manners, not security cameras.

The newest proposed USA identification will contain RFID, and USA citizens do
not want it.
The ACLU has spotted the US fedgov doing policy laundering...

http://www.policylaundering.org/about/

One of their people “...describe(s) how " policy laundering " works. The Feds
want every
American to carry electronic I.D. cards, but the proposal fails domestically. So
U.S. officials
prod an international agency to adopt the new standards for machine readable
travel
documents , aka biometric passports. In this case the feds went to an obscure
agency known
as the International Civil Aviation Organization ( ICAO ). The feds then return
saying, "We
understand the concerns that American citizens have about I.D. cards, but it's
out of our
hands now. We are just complying with international standards.”

Here is story on the new passports...

Internet News, 23 October 2006
http://www.internetnews.com/wireless/article.php/3639411

Here is story on credit cards that already have RFID, and what a problem they
are:

New York Times, 23 October 2006 (registration req'd)
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/23/business/23card.html

Wonderful things happen... just as the Feds get close to destroying our freedom,
the
relatively free market shows us all what a bad idea the plan is. I doubt the
total info
awareness ID will ever see the light of day.

John

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