Brits split on ID cards
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Not getting any more popular The British public is evenly split on ID cards - 47 per cent think they're a good idea while 50 per cent think not.â¦
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Comment is free: Timothy Garton Ash: I'd go to jail rather than accept this kind of ID card
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Plans for a wider rollout of identity cards to British nationals appear to have been delayed for two years.
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UK.gov's own facebook The Passport Office has stopped 600 fraudulent passport applications using a facial recognition system it rolled out as a pilot across its fraud units last year.â¦
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DMV officials tell colleagues that now's the time to start plotting ways to counteract negative messages about the forthcoming ID cards.
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Conservatives put big business in its place The IT industry has found itself in a handbagging spat with shadow home secretary David Davis over the Conservative party's plans to ditch ID cards should they win power from Labour.â¦
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Tony Blair is expected to make the case for compulsory ID cards during his regular news conference on Monday.
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That plastic card, the one with the lousy photo that's jammed into your wallet or purse, isn't just a license to drive. It's the green light to buy a drink, the ticket to federal benefits, the must-have document to get aboard airplanes.
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LONDON Invoking a global threat of terrorism, the British government announced plans on Tuesday to introduce national identity cards for the first time since the Second World War.
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Ooh, too risky... Experienced risk management professionals seem reluctant, for some strange reason, to sign up with the Identity &amp; Passport Service for a job risk-managing the ID cards programme. Too risky? Well, if that's what they reckon, they're the people you'd expect to know.â¦
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Eight make the cut Eight companies have got through the first stage of the Identity Card Scheme procurement process.â¦
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NEW HAVEN, Connecticut  - As many U.S. cities and states arrest illegal immigrants in raids and toughen laws against them, a Connecticut city is offering to validate them under a controversial, first-in-the-nation ID card program.
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(InfoWorld) - A security expert has cracked one of the U.K.'s new biometric passports, which the British government hopes will cut down on cross-border crime and illegal immigration. The attack, which uses a common RFID (radio frequency identification) reader and customized code,Â siphoned data off an RFID chipÂ from a passport in a sealed envelope, said Adam Laurie, a security consultant who has worked with RFID and Bluetooth technology. The attack would be invisible to victims, he said. "That's the really scary thing," said Laurie, whose work was detailed in the Sunday edition of the Daily Mail newspaper. "There's no evidence of tampering. They're not going to report something has happened because they don't know." The British government, which began issuing RFID passports about a year ago, eventually wants to incorporate fingerprints and other biometric data on the chips, although privacy activists are concerned over how data will be stored and handled. Currently, the chip contains the printed details on the passports, the person's photograph, and security technology to detect if those files have been altered. The attack was executed while the passport was still in its original envelope used to send it from the passport service, since RFID chips can be read from a few inches away, Laurie said. He used a passport ordered by a woman affiliated with No2ID, a group that opposes the U.K.'s biometric passport and ID card programs. The data on the passport's chip is locked until an RFID reader provides the encryption key, Laurie said. The encryption key is calculated using a combination of the person's personal data, such as date of birth, and is contained in the "machine-readable zone" (MZR) -- the string of characters and digits on the bottom of the passport's first page. At an immigration desk, the optical character reader scans the MZR and gets the key. The RFID chip is unlocked, and the information on the chip is matched with that on the passport. However, Laurie was able to do this process himself. He analyzed ICAO 9303, the standard from the International Civil Aviation Organization that been adopted worldwide for machine-readable passports, to see how the MZR is organized. Laurie also knew some of the woman's personal details -- used to calculate her passport's key -- and found out more through Internet research. He then wrote what's known as a "brute force" program, which repeatedly tries different combinations of data to discover the key. After about 40,000 attempts by the program, he cracked the key. To scan the chip, he used a common RFID reader from ACG ID, now part of Assa Abloy Identification Technology of Germany. The attack could then let Laurie begin the process of making an exact copy of the woman's passport. "[The biometric passport] has been sold to us as something that increases the security of the passport, but so far I don't see anything about it that increases my security," Laurie said. The greatest weakness with the passports is using relatively easy-to-find data to compose the encrypted key, Laurie said. It would be better to include more random elements that would render brute-force style programs nearly useless, he said. Laurie's work spawned from concern over how users can know what's on their passport's chip. "At the moment, if you want to see what's in your own passport, you have to go to passport office," Laurie said. "With my code, you can do it at home." Laurie has published a library of open-source tools written in the Python programming language that will run on RFID readers made by ACG and by Frosch Electronics, based in Austria. Â
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Invoking a global threat of terrorism, the British government announced plans on Tuesday to introduce national identity cards for the first time since the Second World War.
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The U.K. government sees a national identity card now making its way through Parliament as a way to fight terrorism, but opponents see it as an expensive waste of time. By Wendy M. Grossman.
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Plans for a new compulsory ID card scheme are unveiled during the Queen's Speech.
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British Prime Minister Tony Blair won a  key vote Monday in his bid to reintroduce identity cards, seen  by the government as a key weapon in its anti-terror campaign.