|
Homeland Security dismisses Real ID
privacy concerns
CNET | March 21, 2007
By
Anne Broache
ARLINGTON, Va.--A senior U.S.
Department of Homeland Security official on Wednesday said he finds
privacy concerns prompted by the proposed Real ID regime puzzling.
Stewart Baker, the department's
assistant secretary for policy, said a forthcoming system of uniform
national identification cards will not put more personal information
into the hands of motor vehicle administrators or result in a
massive centralized database that's more susceptible to hackers.
In fact, Baker said, the
controversial law will improve Americans' privacy. "You can never
foresee the future, but every indication is that Real ID is actually
going to make it less easy for people to engage in identity theft,"
Baker told the Homeland Security Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory
Committee at its quarterly public meeting here.
Real ID has been a target of
criticism since Congress enacted it three years ago as part of an
"emergency" Iraq spending bill. Although Homeland Security has tried
to defuse criticism by extending deadlines, the law still requires
states to reconfigure their drivers licenses and share data. If they
don't agree to comply by this October, their citizens won't be able
to use their driver's licenses to board planes or enter federal
buildings starting on May 11, 2008.
Baker said the process is
privacy-protective because it will require Americans to produce
legal documents like birth certificates, whose authenticity will be
verified, before they can receive a card that meets Real ID
protocol. That approach would allow, for instance, airport officials
to be more confident in the identity of travelers when it comes time
to check them against government watch lists, Baker said.
Some states, including Maine, have
rejected Real ID on cost grounds, however, and privacy advocates
worry about what will happen to data on the IDs' mandatory bar code
when it is scanned by banks, bars and other businesses. DHS ruled
earlier this month that the data will not be encrypted because of
"operational" concerns, such as police being able to easily scan the
data from the backs of licenses during traffic stops.
Baker said Wednesday that the
department would consider requiring encryption as it writes the
final rules, but added: "If you impose encryption requirements that
make that exchange of information difficult, you're undermining, not
improving, security associated with driver's licenses, we don't want
to do that."
Several members of the committee,
composed of security companies, academia and nonprofit groups who
make policy recommendations to Homeland Security privacy officials,
raised concerns about the new system at Wednesday's meeting.
"With what happens now in
airports, it doesn't look like it would matter how hard the document
was to fake because no one looks at it closely enough to even think
about that question," said committee Chairman J. Howard Beales, a
George Washington University professor and former Federal Trade
Commission official. "Is there a more elaborate process that's
envisioned here?"
Baker said Homeland Security was
considering taking over the identification check process and putting
in stricter controls. Right now, people who check IDs in airport
security lines are not generally government employees, he said.
Earlier in the meeting, Jonathan
Frenkel, a senior policy adviser with Homeland Security, complained
about what he called a rash of "misinformation" about draft national
standards for ID cards.
For one thing, he said it's "utter
nonsense" that the U.S. government is planning a "Big Brother kind
of system" to track American citizens' every move through the cards,
as one Missouri state legislator suggested this week.
Frenkel said that if the
government really wanted to track cardholders, it would force all
citizens to carry the cards. "Since no one is ever required to carry
a Real ID...it makes no sense that the government would track
something that (a person) doesn't have to carry," he said. (Many
nations do require their citizens to carry such documents, and some
Real ID critics view the law as the first step toward such a
system.)
It also isn't true that only a Real
ID card will allow a person to board an airplane or enter a federal
building, Frenkel said. A U.S. passport issued by the State
Department--new ones have RFID tracking chips embedded--would also
qualify.
Privacy groups took issue with the
agency's assertions. "It is not ridiculous to say that Real ID will
create a national identification system that will allow people to be
tracked," said Melissa Ngo, director of the Identification and
Surveillance Project at the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
"Real ID is ostensibly voluntary, but that just isn't true."
Barry Steinhardt, director of the
American Civil Liberties Union's Technology and Liberty Program,
said the practical effect of the rules will be a "uniform" card with
a machine-readable zone whose information can readily be harvested
by outsiders.
|
