-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://www.lrz.de/~ui22204/">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBMTO: N48 04'14.8'' E11 36'41.2'' http://www.lrz.de/~ui22204 57F9CFD3: ED90 0433 EB74 E4A9 537F CFF5 86E7 629B 57F9 CFD3 ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2001 08:57:54 -0500 From: David Farber <dave@farber.net> Reply-To: farber@cis.upenn.edu To: ip-sub-1@majordomo.pobox.com Subject: IP: Risks of belief in identities: [risks] Risks Digest 21.74

Date: Sat, 10 Nov 2001 11:54:17 PST From: "Peter G. Neumann" <neumann@csl.sri.com> Subject: Risks of belief in identities

For those of you who might believe that national ID cards might be a good idea, check out the December 2001 *Commun.ACM* Inside Risks column by me and Lauren Weinstein, previewed on my Web site http://www.csl.sri.com/neumann/insiderisks.html in anticipation of a U.S. House hearing next Friday on that subject.

It is not just the cards themselves that would entail risks, but even moreso all of the supporting infrastructures, widespread accessibility to networking, monitoring, cross-linked databases, data mining, etc., and particularly the risks of untrustworthy insiders issuing bogus identification cards -- as happened a few years back on a large scale in the Virginia state motor vehicle agency (RISKS-11.41).

The latest item on the ease of getting phony or illegal or unchecked identification papers is found an article by Michelle Malkin (Creators Syndicate Inc.), which I saw in the *San Francisco Chronicle* on 10 Nov 2001: Abdulla Noman, employed by the U.S. Department of Commerce, issued bogus visas in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in one case in 1998 charging approximately $3,178. The article also notes a variety of sleazy schemes for obtaining visas, in some cases without ever appearing in person and without any background checks, and in other cases for ``investments'' of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The article concludes with this sentence: ``Until our embassy officials stop selling American visas blindly to every foreign investor waving cash, homeland security is a pipe dream.'' I'm not sure that conclusion is representative of the full nature of the problem of bogus identification, but the problem is clearly significant. A driver's license or a passport or a visa or a National ID card is not really proof of identity or genuineness or anything else.

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