How to win the new war

[Howie Goodell]

Tim May wrote:
> 
> On Friday, September 14, 2001, at 08:53 AM, Howie Goodell wrote:
<snip> 
>      One example: the IDs for airplane crews, and eventually
>      everyone who travels or goes near an airliner, could be
>      "smart cards" containing their owners' biometric identifiers
>      -- like fingerprints, voice, picture, and retinal scan --
>      cryptographically signed by the agency that collected them.
> 
> You are not a friend of ours. This is such a leap into the Surveillance State Void that I am speechless that any member of our list, even Choate or Farr, could advocate it.

Allow me to re-quote the end of my paragraph, and following
paragraph which was the one I really cared about:

> ... In fact the scanners
could be designed without removable storage or
communications links:  after a few days they would erase
their records unless they were read out after a hijacking.

> This last point is crucial.  Most of the debate about
personal identification assumes there is a fundamental
trade-off between being insecure and becoming a police
state; therefore democracies have to settle for some
compromise that is only halfway secure and only halfway
free.  This is not true today.  Electronic and cryptographic
technology like David Chaum's "blind signature" and
"personal representative" lets us design systems with both
strong security and strong protection of privacy and
individual freedom.  (See his August, 1992 _Scientific
American_ article, "Achieving Electronic Privacy".)


My point was that we should sell crypto as a way to achieve
security.  That's a product people are buying this week. 
Cryptographic protocols can square the circle; provide both
privacy and security.  So let's be imaginative and sell,
sell, sell!

These smart cards don't need to be connectable to your
identity; just your body and a responsible party's
signature.  American Airlines and Lloyds put $1B behind my
biometrics being one of an authorised class of pilots or
plane cleaners.  Who I am isn't necessary.  Biometric
scanners can be open source as well as unconnected.  The
signature on the card can be blind (albeit after a
mind-boggling number of Chaumian challenges.)  Databases of
biometrics can be separated from identity and accessed
through remailers.  If we can get the bandwagon rolling our
way, we have a chance to steer it.  If not -- well, you're
better at those metaphors.

Take care!
Howie Goodell
-- 
Howie Goodell  hgoodell at cs.uml.edu  Pr SW Eng, WearLogic
Sc.D. Cand  HCI Res Grp  CS Dept  U Massachussets Lowell
http://people.ne.mediaone.net/goodell/howie
Dying is soooo 20th-century!   http://www.cryonics.org