Biometric Passports Agreed To In EU 217
An anonymous reader writes "The European Parliament has signed up to a plan to introduce computerized biometric passports including people's fingerprints as well as their photographs, despite criticism from civil liberties groups and security experts who argue that the move is flawed on technical grounds. (Back in 2005 Sweden and Norway began deploying biometric passports.)"
Betting Pool. How long before it's a torrent (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually two betting Pools.
How Long before all the data is on torrent?
Which country will have the offending sloppy official?
Re:dumb sheep (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, as if choosing one of a set of crooks would actually solve anything...
What we need is a good old revolution. And I mean one with a new form of government following it.
I propose metagovernment.org [metagovernment.org], for lack of a better form of it (for lack of having time to create one myself. :( ).
Dear EU government officials (Score:1, Interesting)
Dear EU government officials,
As a loyal EU citizen, in his mid 30's, who remembers a time when fingerprinting was only associated with criminals (you know, watching German detectives on TV... Derrick, Der Alte), I am again surprised by utter waste of EU tax money by a group of people who need to get out of in the real world.
I am just curious to know if this is a knee-jerk reaction to terrorism, simply blindly following USA regulations, or yet another "Please think of the children" action.
However, this is yet another costly measure for EU citizens: New passports for all children.
Furthermore:
1) Fingerprinting does not stop terrorism, since they can be easily faked (according to Japanese research, please Google for it)
2) Yet another way for identity theft will be created, resulting in more innocent people being falsely accused of crimes committed in their name
3) Does not stop the source and cause of child trafficking, just puts another avoidable barrier in place for the criminals and yet another expensive airport/land border check to be implemented
Be a responsible EU official and stop wasting our tax money.
With best regards,
A concerned, honest and loyal EU citizen
And the Swiss will vote in May (Score:5, Interesting)
as the parlament changed the law to introduce biometric passports, a group of citizens sucessfully launched a referendum.
As a result, they're going to vote on this in May, so this will be a good indicator as the people will directy decided.
And before other people jump on the democracy aspect and representation in the EU, don't forget that many EU government/parlament (including mine) already introducted biometric passports and are directly elected.
It will be also difficult to guess what the swiss result will be as they already 'confirmed' different EU decision in such referendums.
Re:dumb sheep (Score:5, Interesting)
I wish I lived in Belgium since they don't have a government there.
As my Belgian friend said, Belgium is the best example that a government isn't necessary.
Re:dumb sheep (Score:3, Interesting)
Revolutions just bring a fresh group of crooks that also have guns. Voting is not the only way to have your say in democracy's. In fact i would claim its the least important. Many democracy's have all sorts of things you can to stop or change laws at local levels and higher. For example in NZ if you can get a petition with 10% of the registered votes there must be a referendum on the issue. I do know there are many things in place in most EU counties that are similar.
However if voting is too much effort then anything else is probably asking too much. Otherwise I think Demarchy [wikipedia.org] would be a good choice.
Re:And the Swiss will vote in May (Score:4, Interesting)
As I'm sure you know, Switzerland is not part of the EU.
They are also a fantastic country to live in, because everyone is armed, and has done military service.
It's the perfect example of "Government being scared of its people, not people being scared of their government"
If the Swiss government ever tried to do the sort of crap you regularly see in the UK, Ireland or America, they'd be quickly taken out and shot.
Re:Political? (Score:5, Interesting)
``I think the risk of misappropriation of bio-information is worth it, weighed up against the risk of terrorist or criminal activities which it seeks to mitigate.''
Now this is how we should look at it. In most discussions, all I ever hear is "X is bad, because of Y" or "X is good, because of Z". Usually, both sides are right. But that's not what we want to know. We want to know, considering all the benefits and all the drawbacks, if we'd be better of with or without X.
With the current generation of passports issued in the Netherlands, I am down on the "X is bad" side. This is because the government haven't done their homework (or they have and are trying to mislead us all). The chip that's on them allows anybody who wants to to read the information on it, and this can be done from a few meters away without us knowing about it, let alone consenting to it. Government publications say this is not the case, which I take to mean "that's not how we intended it". That's why I say, even if you are in favor of the government collecting the data that is on those chips, you should still be against the current generation of chips.
Given that the government is lying about these chips, I think much closer scrutiny is warranted. What do they _really_ want to achieve, and what is _really_ being achieved? Also, I want my money back, because all of my money that has gone into implementing the current system has gone into a system that is, at best, dangerously flawed, and at worst intentionally dangerous. Both of which aren't something I want to pay for, nor even get for free.
Underneath all this, however, is the important question of "suppose the system were implemented the government would have you believe it is, would it then be a Good Thing?" It will never be perfectly secure, but it can be a lot better than it is now. And I am convinced we can do better checking of people against passports with additional data stored on the passport than without it. My question is: how cost effective is it all? How much would it cost to implement a decent biometric identification system, and how much would that save us?
Re:dumb sheep (Score:4, Interesting)
metagovernment sounds like a very interesting idea, but I suspect some groups of people will (choose to) interpret it differently, then we will end up with some groups using it (and gaming it) for their own gain.
A similar concept, (but much harder to game), is something called a "Demarchy". It can be thought of as a stochastically sampled Democracy. (It removes the need for career politicians and so also removes the potential for corrupt career politicians using and gaming the system for their own gain).
Imagine if you random choose say 1% the population and for one month, they vote on how to run the country. Its effectively like being chosen for jury service, where for one month, your vote (instead of career politicians votes), decides how to run the country. The point is, 1% of the population is a large enough number of people, to prevent corruption becoming a major biasing factor (certainly far less likely than is possible now). Its also not so dissimilar to the concept we have used for centuries in jury trials, but in this case, the jury is vastly larger (so its a much better sampling quantity).
With a sampling rate of 1% of the population, then statistically once ever 100 selections you have a chance of being randomly chosen to run the country, (so on average once every about 8 years on average). If the country chooses to sample at say 4% of the population, then it means everyone gets randomly chosen on average about every 2 years. So a suitable sampling amount is somewhere between about 1% and 4% of a population. (Plus by randomly sampling the population, no group can be profiled to workout if and how to game that group (by for example, waiting for a group more statistically more favorable to be in power) before they get to vote on something. Also, it wouldn't be a sudden change of everyone once per month. It would be new people being prepared to start each day, while others ending their month long run of government, so everyones starts and ends on different days of the month, and so its smoothly distributed, instead of sudden changes of groups of people).
The concept of Demarchy is literally a stochastically sampled Democracy, which cuts out the political middle men. People vote not for middle men, they vote as the middle men once did. Centuries ago, such a system wasn't possible, due to the paper work needed for dealing with so many votes, but with modern technology, its entirely possible, plus then we don't need the career politician middle men anymore. Their archaic system of government and arrogant corruption can finally be consigned to the history books.
Re:dumb sheep (Score:3, Interesting)
Now if you could come up with a secure and open form of meritocracy you might be onto something.