Although those of us opposed to the idea of reliance on technology to overcome human problems have always been aware of the potential weaknesses in such “solutions”, the government; obsessed with new technology and therefore blinded to those weaknesses has forged ahead regardless. Now, that bastion of government propaganda and dumbing down, the BBC has openly broken ranks with its masters in Whitehall. It dares to contradict the notion that electronic wizardry is the solution to all our problems:
The ePassport is one of the many measures pursued by the United States and governments internationally after the horror of 11 September.
It will, we are promised, keep the unwanted and dangerous outside our borders, while streamlining entry for those welcome to come and visit.
But as the implementation of the scheme gets underway it is becoming clear that there could be serious problems with it.
Well, yes, you don’t need to be a technogeek to work out the obvious; that which is manufactured by man can be replicated by man. That any lock will sooner or later be picked.
The good thing about RFID chips is that they emit radio signals that can be read at a short distance by an electronic reader.
But this is also the bad thing about them because, as Lukas demonstrated to me, he can easily download the data from his passport using an RFID reader he got for 200 Euros on eBay.
Indeed. This was entirely foreseeable. Foreseeable that is by everyone but government ministers. Remind me, just what is it we pay these buffoons for?
Now for the clever bit. Thanks to a software he himself has developed, called RFdump, he downloads the passport’s data onto his computer and then onto a blank chip.
Using a standard off-the-shelf component you can just buy at a component store you can have a cloned ePassport in less than five minutes.
…
When the cloned ePassport is read and compared to the original one it behaves exactly the same.
Et voila a cloned passport. The Home Office is belligerent, though.
The UK Home Office however dismissed the ability to get hold of the information on the chip.
A spokesman said: “It is hard to see why anyone would want to access the information on the chip.”
“Other than the photograph, which could be obtained easily by other means, they would gain no information that they did not already have – so the whole exercise would be pointless: the only information stored on the ePassport chip is the basic information you can see on the personal details page.”
Presumably for the same reason that people forged the old type passports – to sell them to people who desired to pass themselves off as someone else. Why else?
He said: “Being able to copy this does not mean that the passport can be forged or imitated for illegal or unauthorised use.”
“British ePassports are designed in such a way as to make chip substitution virtually impossible and the security features of the passport render the forgery of the complete document impractical.”
Oh, give over, please. It’s bad enough that these people are blinded by technology, that they would seek to impose insecure data management on us, that they are so ignorant and arrogant that they treat our personal data with barely concealed contempt, but this is taking patronising us to new levels. Any document produced by the authorities is forgeable and there will always be someone who will seek to profit from doing exactly that.
It is almost like writing your pin number on the back of your cashpoint card.
Indeed. Why would anyone want to do that?
…If not, the danger is obvious – that a scheme, the declared aim of which is to increase our security, could well do the exact opposite.
Given government incompetence so far, that’s a highly probable scenario. Just as well I renewed mine early and got myself an old style paper version.