Canadian Immigration Minister pushes to adopt a national id card

[M Taylor]

[Moderator's note: I edited this to add reasonable line breaks. Also,
the content is only weakly on topic, but... --Perry]

Canadian Immigration Minister Denis Coderre is promoting the idea of a
Canadian national id card, which uses "high tech" biometrics. When
confounded by arguements of security he suggests that it for a good
thing for convience.

I guess my biggest complaints are that it makes a very attractive
single source for a huge reward (of information) for white collar
criminals and organized crime, several single points of failure,
losing all your government issued data on your one card makes it
harder to securely replace, and lastly the failure to demostrate an
analysis that suggests an actual improvement in national security.

On a lesser note, I don't like the idea of handing my digital
"passport, driver's license, social insurance number, and gov't
employee id / security badge" over some bouncer at a bar, clerk at a
car rental counter, or any time in everyday life when asked for
government id by private sector that has lower privacy barriers than
government(s) and federally regulated industries (telecom, banking,
airlines, insurance).

<http://rtnews.globetechnology.com/servlet/ArticleNews/tech/RTGAM/20030207/wxcard0207>

By CAMPBELL CLARK
>From Friday's Globe and Mail

Ottawa Canadians should fingerprint themselves before U.S. border
guards do, Immigration Minister Denis Coderre argued Thursday, as he
asked MPs to consider a national identification card with a biometric
identifier such as fingerprints or eye scans.

Echoing deep concern within the federal government that the United
States will expand its registration and fingerprinting of foreign
travellers to include Canadians, jamming the border, Mr. Coderre
suggested a national ID may be a way to avoid the brunt of tighter
U.S. entry-and-exit measures.

Mr. Coderre appeared before the House of Commons immigration committee
to formally ask for their recommendations on a national ID card, but
made it clear he favours it. He told MPs the time when they could
cross the U.S. border with a driver's license "may well be over."

...

Mr. Coderre said that a so-called off-line biometric system one where
a fingerprint or eye is checked only against the coded scan on the
card, but not against a central database would be less invasive than
keeping a central registry of the fingerprints of all Canadians.

However, Andrew Clement, a University of Toronto information
technology professor who has studied national identity cards, warned
that such an off-line system is not much use as a security tool since
someone could obtain a card under another name, but with his own
fingerprint or eye scan on the code bar. A central database with the
fingerprints or eye scans of all Canadians would be needed to make it
work.

Even with a central database, such a card would not be much of a
deterrent for terrorists, he said. Anyone would be able to obtain such
a card by presenting other fraudulent documents such as a birth
certificate.

"That's one of the big flaws," Mr. Clement said. "The creation of the
secure card depends on the presentation of much less secure
documents."


---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at wasabisystems.com