IP: Risks of belief in identities: [risks] Risks Digest 21.74 (fwd)

Eugene Leitl Eugene.Leitl at lrz.uni-muenchen.de
Wed Nov 21 03:38:10 PST 2001




-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://www.lrz.de/~ui22204/">leitl</a>
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2001 08:57:54 -0500
From: David Farber <dave at farber.net>
Reply-To: farber at cis.upenn.edu
To: ip-sub-1 at 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 at 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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