Loss of Privacy

Claiming to be working on behalf of the States, DHS Secretary, Michael Chertoff, has extended the deadline for REAL-ID for a second time this year.

Chertoff had earlier announced that DHS would waive the original May 2008 deadline and set a new target of 2013 for getting all 245 million U.S. driver’s licenses to comply with a national standard. Now, DHS may extend the original deadline by a decade, to 2018 for drivers older than 40 or 50 to reduce the costs associated with a projected surge of customers at state motor vehicle departments, the officials said.

While not quite in its death throes, this is good news.  However, American citizens must continue to keep pressure on lawmakers if REAL-ID is to be completely defeated.

Timothy Sparapani, senior legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said DHS is weakening the program in a desperate bid to keep it alive. The ACLU and conservative libertarian groups that oppose Real ID view it as a de facto national ID with Orwellian implications. Eight states have passed legislation to opt out of the program, nine others have passed resolutions in opposition, and more will consider doing so this winter.

One of the key retractions is that Americans will be able to board planes, even if they don’t have a REAL-ID.  This eliminates a key component of REAL-ID.  With this latest “compromise,” REAL-ID is a shell of its former self.

DHS is at pains to point out that REAL ID is not a national identity card program but a set of regulations that direct states how to create their drivers’ licenses and state ID cards. The program mandates digital photos, bar-coded information, and more stringent document checks, and it directs all states to link their databases with one another.

They can stress all they want that it’s not a national identity card, however, reality is something different.  If your REAL-ID/Driver’s license is required everywhere from bars to grocery stores, then once the liquor store scans your information, it’s in their database.  Same with the bar, the grocery store, or a big box store.  What happens when these databases are linked?  Don’t think they will be?  Where do you think your loyalty cards are stored?  Now, take that information and add REAL-ID and “more stringent document checks” and tell me again how this isn’t a national identity card?

Remember, REAL-ID is being rejected by the States because of financial concerns, not because the states really care about your privacy.  REAL-ID is intended to track everything.  It takes your driver’s license and turns private information about you, against you.  A driver’s license is supposed to be just that, a license to drive.  It is proof that you passed a test in order to drive a car, nothing else.

The DHS also wants to share information from your REAL-ID with Europe, Canada, and Mexico.  Though only a few states have signed the Driver License Agreement (DLA), they must comply and share your information.  How exactly is that not violating your privacy?

REAL-ID is gasping for breath in a desperate attempt to stay alive, while the DHS continues to tell Americans that it’s a great program and everything is going fine.  Americans must keep up pressure to completely retract REAL-ID and prevent it from popping up later under another name.

Created by the ACLU, the Surveillance Society Clock counts down the “encroachment of government” and the erosion of privacy.

“The false security of a surveillance society threatens to turn our country into a place where individuals are constantly susceptible to being trapped by data errors or misinterpretations, illegal use of information by rogue government workers, abuses by political leaders — or perhaps most insidiously, expanded legal uses of information for all kinds of new purposes,” the report says.

The clock can be seen here.

As if it wasn’t bad enough to have a jacket that can track your child’s every movement, parents now think it’s a great idea to put RFID chips in their children’s school uniforms so they can keep track of them even when they’ve taken off their nifty Blade Runner jackets.

Clare Rix, the marketing director, said: “As well as being a safety net for parents, there could be real benefits for schools who could keep a closer track on the whereabouts of their pupils, potentially reducing truancy levels.’

Uh, no.  You can still be skipping school while your buddy has your blazer, wristband, whatever in school.  Better yet, you can leave your shirt in a locker room, the hallway, a garbage bin, your locker, etc., and the school will still have no clue where you are.

Keeping track of your every moment from the time you are a small child only facilitates the transition to a surveillance society.  If you know nothing other than being tracked, how will you ever decide that it is wrong?  How will you be able to discern how much surveillance is too much?  Or will these children grow up to completely distrust everyone and everything, creating constant warfare?

An amusing response by the user, byte, appears on Bruce Schneier’s blog.

From the text; advantages are

- “speedy retrieval and analysis of data.” Erm… why does a school need fast retrieval and analysis of data? Sonds to me like they had some database salesman convinve them.

- “additional benefit of reduced costs in replacing school uniforms that have gone astray” I don’t get it – You add something and it costs less to replace it?

- “limit access to doors for certain people at certain times, including shutting the main doors of a school to pupils during classtime.”

Great. I assume all of you work with software or hardware of some sort. So you know both can have bugs and fail. The more complex, the more likely. Imagine a fire breaking out and the reader at the door denies your kids getting out due to a programming error…

- “it provides immediate registration of the pupil as they enter the classroom. This supports staff as they are getting to know pupils.”

Oh. So there’s this big LCD above the door saying *bing* “Rheanna Myers” or something like that? I didn’t know that staf not getting to know their pupils was that bis of a problem…

“We believe the system will work equally well in corporate and commercial scenarios and we’re now seeking backing to help us attack a huge potential market, including the £300m annual school clothing spend.” A-ha. So, they use pupils as test-scenario for tracking employees

If you want to play some jokes (or test the system), clone some tags and attach them to random pupils. Lets see how “speedy” the analysis gets the fact that some pupils attend 6 classes at the same time…

Even better, swipe the tag of a pupil missing during a test – a test missing means trouble…

Somehow this reminds me of the ear-tags used to track cattle…

Even prisoners aren’t tracked this much.  This will do nothing to protect the security of the children.  It will catch smokers, skivers (those who skip class for my fellow Americans), and those that are tardy.  Columbine, Dunblane, and all the other nutty people who shoot up schools would still have been able to enter school on those fateful days.  They still would have been able to kill and no RFID chip is ever going to change that.

If the school officials don’t trust the teachers or the students, how about they wear these RFID tagged blazers as well?  Wouldn’t it be great if we could track their every move?

Given the fact that teenagers are overly rebellious, this might actually be fun to watch the many ways they discover to circumvent this system.  This is doomed to fail, but at least the children will get a few laughs while “testing” the system.  That is, until the schools install those Battle Royale type collars.

Just when the British were wondering if their Orwellian society was complete, a company, called Blade Runner, has devised a jacket to monitor every single step your child takes.

But it’s the technology that is likely to appeal to the people who are buying it, because at £250 – or an extra £80 if you want it with a Kevlar lining – and a monthly £10 satellite tracking charge, it is not cheap. It is simple, though. It runs off a web-based system, so there’s no software to load or minimum PC requirements; you just get your own user login and you’re up and running.

Great.  So for about $800 you can put your child’s life into the hands of whatever freak hacks the system and uses it for nefarious purposes all the while neglecting your duties as a parent.  You can then blame the technology instead of your own irresponsibility.  After all, there aren’t any dangers to such a system.

Also, if your child takes the jacket off or loses it, well, not only are you out a buttload of cash, your system is now worthless is tracking your children.  I can see little Johnny giving Billy his coat while he skips school.  Then again, parents today seem to enjoy the appearance of safety so they’ll probably just believe Johnny was a good boy today.

It sounds ideal for a certain type of over-protective, borderline paranoiac parent with too much time on their hands, and Adrian Davis, Blade Runner managing partner, admits that is part of the target market. “There are parents who are very concerned about their child’s safety,” he says diplomatically, “and this will give them peace of mind.”  But he is also keen to point out there are wider applications. “If your kids are doing adventure sports, like snowboarding, you can always know where they are. And if they get into difficulties, they can set off an alarm that tells you their location.”

So, they are marketing to crazy, paranoid parents.  Wider applications or not, this is Big Brother attached to your jacket.

The small rechargeable device – it has a 15-hour battery – fits neatly into a pouch inside the jacket. You switch it on when you leave the house and what you get is nothing less than the ability to know where someone is – within four square metres – anywhere in the world. You can watch them move, check where they’ve been and get updates every 10 seconds. You don’t even need to be permanently logged on to your computer, as you can have email alerts sent to your Blackberry or text messages to your mobile.

Aw, isn’t that sweet.  We can spy on our kids 24/7 instead of raising responsible children.

Yet despite these Big Brother overtones, Martin Taylor, sales director of AMS, suggests the benefits can cut both ways. “Kids want their independence,” he says, “and parents might be more willing to allow them to go out more on their own if they could check up on where they were from time to time and know they would be immediately informed if there was any trouble.” Yet despite these Big Brother overtones, Martin Taylor, sales director of AMS, suggests the benefits can cut both ways. “Kids want their independence,” he says, “and parents might be more willing to allow them to go out more on their own if they could check up on where they were from time to time and know they would be immediately informed if there was any trouble.”

Okay, I’m going to sound really old right now, but, back in the 1980s, we had this things called telephones that we’d notify our parents on when we got into trouble or to come and get us before trouble got out of hand.  Our parents let us *gasp* go outside and play all day long.  They knew where we were, who our friends were, and what we were up to.  They practiced a little thing called parenting in which a jacket that spied on you was unnecessary.

All this jacket does is continue to place parenting into the hands of technology and wussify our children.  This jacket will be added to the myriad other types of tagging being done to our children.  Personal companion, Personal Locators, Toddler Tags, Loc8tor plus, and various under the skin RFID tags are all conditioning our future generations to a world filled with constant tracking.  Shoving a leash up their asses at birth will be the next step.  And all they had to do was tart up the jacket so kids thought it looked cool.

Blade Runner says that such a jacket will give children more independence, but how can that be true when it updates every ten seconds?  Do you really feel free and independent in those nine seconds before you’re tracked again?  Parents have indeed sold their children’s souls for a momentary peace and their children looking cooler than the neighbor kid.