CS 312 Yevgeniy
Bangiyev
Summary of “National
Insecurity Cards”
This article was written by Schneier who was the subject of the “Homeland Insecurity”
article, so the two articles are very similar. “National Insecurity Cards”
continues on the theme that technology does not bring security and addresses
the Real ID Act. The Act sets standards that ID card issuers have to follow
(what data has to be present on IDs, the documentation that must be required to
get them, the anti-forging measures the cards have to have) for their cards to
be accepted by places run by federal agencies like airports,
national parks, and federal courthouses. (It is predicted that these
cards will become the only form of ID in the future and so will be required
everywhere). The goal is to help better verify the identity of a person when
required and keep track of certain people, making it
harder for illegal immigrants, criminals, and terrorists to breach security. However,
Schneier is not optimistic.
Aside from privacy issues and the
daily interruptions the new identification system will add, Schneier
writes that the new ID cards will be useless and will only create problems. The
cards will be forged no matter what, and there will be a greater incentive to
do so for cards of such importance. Even if very difficult to forge, people could
still get real cards under false names by faking the documents required to get
them. Furthermore, Schneier points out that people
often lose their IDs and so a special scheme will have to be worked out to
issue new cards to people while guaranteeing that the lost ones won’t be
exploited.
However, the greatest problem that Schneier sees with the new ID system is that it calls for a
vast network of databases accessible across the nation. The network will be vulnerable
to hackers, authorized abuses, viruses, and failures. What will happen if it
will go down? A country relying so much on the system needs sophisticated and
expensive back up measures and plans.
Finally, Schneier
questions how the system is supposed to stop threats like terrorism. People who
set out to commit terrorist acts usually have valid IDs and clean records. Therefore,
it is not the identities, but the intentions of people that should be sought
after. He concludes that the nation is better off with “alert guards paying
attention to subtle social cues than bored minimum-wage guards blindly checking
IDs.”