No Security System Exists That is Perfect

Yet again, there’s been another swipe of the axe at the great lumbering hulk of the UK’s ID Card scheme.  Surely it must be ditched as the biggest monstrous waste of money and eroder of personal freedoms for normal folk ever seen in history?

Hijackers escape with bundles of UK passports: Guardian

Blank passports stolen from van: Press Association

3,000 passports and visas stolen: BBC

………and others screamed away trying to get the “angle” on the news as put out by the various departments of UK.gov

Two conflicting statements by UK.Gov in the various reportings of the story struck me as odd…..

• The Foreign Office admitted a serious breach of security over the loss of the passports and visa stickers
• The passport service said the stolen documents could not be used by thieves because of their hi-tech embedded chip security features

So in a nutshell, that’s it.  Or more exactly, it isn’t!

They can’t both be right.  Either the passports are secure or they are not.

The recent failure of the London Underground card system, the Oyster cards, proves that electronic system security is always fallible.  The card security was cracked and forged.  A similar thing could be done to the ID Card Scheme.  This post, 3000 passports & visas stolen: Can their ID chips now be hacked? makes it clear as does this one from the same website.  Follow the links through.

So for normal law abiding people, the ID Card system is an expensive burden, that leaves them open to more data loss, inconvenience and the over-riding increase of fear and xenophobic tendencies.

For criminals, they’ll just find a way to write data to the chips (it’s called reverse engineering), stick a fingerprint and retinal scan to match the person requiring the document into the document, and take the money and run.

They’re criminals for fucks sake.  It’s what they do!  And they must have certainly thought it worthwhile and possible to go to the trouble of hijacking a van on a main road of a major British city.

Which means they already have the technology to write data to the chip!

You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to work that one out.

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