Chipping Away at Privacy

...Worse, the government might someday place automated RFID sensors on roads and sidewalks and monitor all of us...

...As if pointing out all the tech flaws will somehow preserve our liberties and, one presumes, protect us from people who crash airplanes into buildings...

...A legislative committee considering the addition of a "smart" chip to the state's driver licenses opted for another twelve to eighteen months of study rather than advance the bill for passage...

...Not to mention that our GPS-equipped cell phones track our exact movements day and night by satellite...

...Driver licenses would include the usual height, weight, age, and address information, but also digitized biometric identifiers such as a fingerprint, photo, or eye scan...

...Therefore, if you can't fight it, join them...

...Employers, landlords, mortgage brokers, direct mailers, private investigators, and a lot more interested parties would use the ID and try to tap into the database, they predicted, "further eroding the privacy that Americans rightly expect in their personal lives...

...Why shouldn't we have uniformity in requiring the right background documents...

...Are super databases a threat to privacy...

...How many more compromises in privacy are required in the age of terror...

...A data troller casually standing by a doorway with a pocket reader could surreptitiously read the driver's license of everyone who walks into the room...

...And he feels it's inevitable that serious malefactors-hijackers and worse- would cleverly hack the system and fashion falsified e-identities...

...Scarcely a month goes by in which we don't read about some new high-tech method for invading privacy, from face recognition to implantable microchips, data-mining to DNA chips, and now RFID identity tags," he said...

...The explosion of computers, cameras, sensors, wireless communication, GPS, biometrics, and other technologies in just the last ten years is feeding what can be described as a surveillance monster that is growing silently in our midst," he told a House committee last July...

...But he sounds frustrated with Dershowitz...

...If we keep fighting for no monitoring, we're going to lose...

...But few ideas stick as much in the craw of liberty lovers on both the right and the left...

...Not one was challenged by border guards...

...The medical records that an emergency medical responder taps into should be off limits to police and commercial entities, he says...

...This may sound far-fetched, and I hope it stays that way," he said...

...Savvy retailers, meanwhile, could secretly deploy RFID readers to determine who exactly was browsing their aisles or walking by without looking up...

...Dershowitz and the ACLU, often comrades in arms in the fight for civil liberties, couldn't be further apart...

...Just put your thumb on this reader, sir, and we'll see...

...We have to lead them...

...Similarly, there's something not quite right about states considering a "smart" driver license as a security palliative...

...Our luggage is searched, our bodies patted, we're forced to answer questions-and never, ever do we crack certain jokes...

...Where are the laws that protect this information...

...Progressives "don't get the inevitability of the information age," he adds...

...Licensure is fragmented fifty different ways...

...Ain't nobody's business" what she did in her private life, she famously sang...

...As Paula Bruening, staff counsel of the Center for Democracy and Technology, told Congress last summer: "The freedom to move freely and without being monitored is basic to the American concept of individual autonomy...

...Fraudulent birth or Social Security data simply becomes part of the database, Calabrese points out...

...Driver licenses, it now seems clear, function as de facto national ID cards...

...You would never know that you had been robbed...

...passports will also have the chips...

...Smart" driver licenses ratchet the game up even higher...

...Why would certification that you're able to drive to the right of the white line, execute a Y turn, and parallel park become a frontline defense in the war on terror...

...Does the thumbprint of the driver match the one embedded in the card...

...A nationalIDcould require all Americanstocarryaninternal passport at all times, compromising our privacy, limiting our freedom, and exposing us to unfair discrimination based on national originorreligion," they wrote...

...I hate it when I see the smiling, smug civil libertarian who says, 'Oh, we're not giving up anything when we take our rights to the extreme,'" says Dershowitz...

...But planes are vulnerable to hijackers, bombs, and unspeakable mayhem, so we silently (sometimes resentfully) comply...

...Which prompted Virginia State Senator John Watkins to raise another issue for his colleagues: Shouldn't the federal government, and not the states, be addressing the problems of foreign terrorists crossing our porous national borders...

...Today, we willingly (or is it meekly...

...Push for better encryption...

...They want safety and security, but they also value our privacy...

...Imagine the cross-tabbing that could be done if a single database could be compiled containing the retail habits, political activities, medical history, and financial transactions of each and every one of us...

...Lawmakers faced a dilemma: Would embedding scannable ID information as a security measure backfire and inadvertently open the door to identity theft and privacy violations...

...The problems with this scheme, and there are many, outweigh any purported gain in security, says Chris Calabrese, counsel for the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Program...

...Even the nascent move to biometric IDs is already splintered...

...But if we at the ACLU have learned anything over the past decade, it is that seemingly distant privacy invasions that sound right out of science fiction often become real far faster than anyone has anticipated...

...Why would we want to maintain the inefficiency of the current system...

...Historically, he argues, there's always been a balance struck between security and freedom, and in perilous times the balance shifts to security...

...If we put the heavy burden on the government to justify monitoring in particular situations, we may win...

...Dershowitz asks: "Why shouldn't we have more secure driver licenses...

...They would be equipped with RFID (for Radio Frequency ID) tags that broadcast stored data when they receive a radio signal from an RFID reader...

...Of course, that balance is going to shift depending on the situation...

...No doubt there is a problem...

...Why not, instead, just issue a nationalID card...

...Such tags are being eyed by mass marketers like Wal-Mart to track inventory movement...

...He sees such databasing as part of our steady drift to a maximum surveillance society...

...Just as worrisome, he says, the licenses can be scanned by anyone with a reader from as far as thirty feet away...

...No common standard exists...

...from Canada, Jamaica, and Mexico...

...That's healthy...

...He calls it "civil liberties by default"-the implicit belief that our freedoms will be protected only "if we go back to the days of yonder when we didn't have technology...

...Five states require fingerprints: California, Colorado, Georgia, Hawaii, and Texas...

...There's no better example than airport security...

...We're leaving it to the government and the people who want to take away our civil liberties to decide what the technology should be...

...The privacy/security issue must be engaged...

...The Fourth Amendment itself calls for a balancing test...

...We have to recognize that...

...Once government databases are integrated through auniform ID, access and usesof sensitive personal information would inevitably expand...

...Colorado, West Virginia, and Washington, D.C., are all using facial recognition technology...

...They should be...

...Whether it's at a mosque or gun show, anyone with reader technology could find out exactly who's at the event," Calabrese says...

...And the prospects for data-mining are staggering...

...Then require firewalls to isolate information...

...If you're going to talk about controlling technology, show me those controls...

...Begin with the fact that the chip information is no more accurate than the source information initially presented to the license examiners...

...Visitors are free to come and go without any screening at all...

...If you have an emergency, like a riot, police have a right to call a curfew, as long as there is a real danger and it's reasonably understood...

...This is a firecracker of an argument...

...We're protected against unreasonable searches and seizures, not all searches and seizures...

...Go figure...

...But how smart is that...

...This is Dershowitz's argument, as well...

...Legislators realized that smart chips were a much bigger issue than they thought," says Aimee Perron, legislative director of the Virginia branch of the American Civil Liberties Union...

...The problem, according to Karen Chappell, Virginia's deputy commissioner of motor vehicles, is that, "in the absence of biometric standards, many states are reluctant to invest in biometric technology, fearing that they will choose one that is later irrelevant or that the collection measures they are using will not match those of other states...

...The petitioners didn't quote Billie Holiday, but they might as well have...

...The city hall I cover in Madison, Wisconsin, has a costly weapons screening system that is left unstaffed at low-use hours...

...Technology pushed and pulled to do the job...

...Many civil libertarians see the technology as flawed, easily hacked, and part and parcel of what they warn is the growing American surveillance state...

...Walking around without being monitored has become a matter of degree...

...The assumption, apparently, is that they can be trusted not to bring guns and knives into the building, while mere taxpayers need to be scanned and scoped...

...check our civil liberties at the gate...

...Since when do Americans have to prove their citizenship and identity to the cops...

...Watkins likes the idea, and Dershowitz has argued publicly for one since 2002,inthe form of a nationwide uniform driver license...

...We already leave multiple electronic trails of our comings and goings (as well as of our private quirks and secret fancies), thanks to our traceable credit card purchases, phone records, website visits, supermarket discount-card purchases, tollbooth speed passes, ATM withdrawals...

...Fraudulently obtained driver licenses are a touchy issue-seven of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers carried them as part of their cover...

...I think they were kind of scared by what's out there, which is OK...

...Marc Eisen is Editor of Isthmus, the weekly newspaper of Madison, Wisconsin...

...Dershowitz is so-o impatient with this attitude...

...But in the age of terror it may be...

...New U.S...

...Make no mistake, the technology is coming-with civil libertarian input or without it, Dershowitz warns...

...A block away, in Wisconsin's busy and beautiful Capitol, screening is not an issue...

...In early 2002, an unusual coalition of forty-two left and right advocacy groups (from the American Conservative Union and the Eagle Forum to the ACLU and People for the American Way) wrote President Bush urging him to oppose attempts to create a national ID card through standardized driver licensure...

...If that's his point, where are his laws...

...That's what's pernicious, the critics say-how silently personal information can be lifted from smart licenses...

...The civil liberties community has been sitting on its ass in not demanding more technology protective of civil liberties," says the Harvard law professor...

...In a late 2002 and early 2003 test, the Government Accounting Office equipped twenty-five undercover agents with faked driver licenses to use as IDs as they entered the U.S...

...When push comes to shove, they'll shove that job on the states," he says...

...Distinctions made, lines drawn...

...Barry Steinhardt, Calabrese's ACLU colleague, finds the prospects frightening...

...Well, good luck on that...

...No matter what we say or do, government is going to develop the technology...

...Fourth Amendment rights always depend on context," says Donald Downs, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist and author of Nazis in Skokie: Freedom, Community, and The First Amendment...

...They don't exist...

...The ACLU's Calabrese doesn't necessarily disagree...

...Proponents say the chips would make it easier for authorities to verify identities...

...It was more than they expected to get into...

...I much prefer an approach where we recognize that technology is inevitable, and that we use that technology to protect our liberties aggressively," says Dershowitz...

...That's the essence of Dershowitz's argument...

...Of course, a lot of malarkey is peddled in the name of security...

...The days of living life incognito are long past, he advises...

...The answer, suggests Virginia State Senator Watkins, is that federal officials, having failed miserably to secure our borders, want the states to scoop up illegal visitors during traffic stops...

...Identity thieves, Calabrese warned Virginia officials, could "secretly and electronically pickpocket your information right through a wallet, pocket, backpack, or purse...

...Several thousand public employees, meanwhile, have swipe-cards allowing them to bypass the inconvenience of screening...

...For Harvard's Alan Dershowitz, the Virginia episode is a necessary skirmish in what he argues is an overdue debate on the use of biometrics-the technology of authenticating identity-to enhance civil liberties and reduce terrorism...

...The ACLU howls at the thought...