"Biometrisch paspoort ongefundeerd"
WRR-publicatie nr. 46 van mr Vincent Böhre d.d. oktober 2010 zegt wetenschappelijk wat Privacy First altijd al gezegd heeft, namelijk dat de nieuwe paspoortwet broddelwerk is. De publicatie heet "Happy Landings? Het biometrische paspoort als zwarte doos". Download het WRR-document HIER en lees HIER wat de ambtenaren er zelf over zeggen. Privacy First krijgt onafgebroken soortgelijke reacties uit de samenleving.
Inmiddels zijn er Kamervragen over gesteld.
Jelte haalt vingerafdrukken
In september 2009 zond Veronica een filmpje uit over de verplichte opslag van vingerafdrukken voor een nieuw paspoort. Om de overheid een handje te helpen ging CQC-verslaggever Jelte bij de opening van het Utrechtse filmfestival alvast de vingerafdrukken van bekende Nederlanders verzamelen. Hij laat zien hoe gemakkelijk dat gaat.
F.B.I. and States Vastly Expand DNA Databases (USA)
Centrale databases waarmee overheden van hun burgers kunnen determineren wat ze zijn, doen en willen, ontstaan niet van de ene dag op de andere. Er zijn vele tussenstappen die gemaakt moeten worden voordat het ideaal van een centraal computergestuurde staat mogelijk is. Het artikel hieronder wordt hier gepresenteerd als voorbeeld van hoe zo'n tussenstap wordt gedaan.
SOURCE: The New York Times, Solomon Moore, April 18, 2009
Law enforcement officials are vastly expanding their collection of DNA to include millions more people who have been arrested or detained but not yet convicted. The move, intended to help solve more crimes, is raising concerns about the privacy of petty offenders and people who are presumed innocent.
Until now, the federal government genetically tracked only convicts. But starting this month, the Federal Bureau of Investigation will join 15 states that collect DNA samples from those awaiting trial and will collect DNA from detained immigrants — the vanguard of a growing class of genetic registrants.
The F.B.I., with a DNA database of 6.7 million profiles, expects to accelerate its growth rate from 80,000 new entries a year to 1.2 million by 2012 — a 17-fold increase. F.B.I. officials say they expect DNA processing backlogs — which now stand at more than 500,000 cases — to increase.
Law enforcement officials say that expanding the DNA databanks to include legally innocent people will help solve more violent crimes. They point out that DNA has helped convict thousands of criminals and has exonerated more than 200 wrongfully convicted people.
But criminal justice experts cite Fourth Amendment privacy concerns and worry that the nation is becoming a genetic surveillance society.
“DNA databases were built initially to deal with violent sexual crimes and homicides — a very limited number of crimes,” said Harry Levine, a professor of sociology at City University of New York who studies policing trends. “Over time more and more crimes of decreasing severity have been added to the database. Cops and prosecutors like it because it gives everybody more information and creates a new suspect pool.”
Courts have generally upheld laws authorizing compulsory collection of DNA from convicts and ex-convicts under supervised release, on the grounds that criminal acts diminish privacy rights.
DNA extraction upon arrest potentially erodes that argument, a recent Congressional study found. “Courts have not fully considered legal implications of recent extensions of DNA-collection to people whom the government has arrested but not tried or convicted,” the report said.
Minors are required to provide DNA samples in 35 states upon conviction, and in some states upon arrest. Three juvenile suspects in November filed the only current constitutional challenge against taking DNA at the time of arrest. The judge temporarily stopped DNA collection from the three youths, and the case is continuing.
Sixteen states now take DNA from some who have been found guilty of misdemeanors. As more police agencies take DNA for a greater variety of lesser and suspected crimes, civil rights advocates say the government’s power is becoming too broadly applied. “What we object to — and what the Constitution prohibits — is the indiscriminate taking of DNA for things like writing an insufficient funds check, shoplifting, drug convictions,” said Michael Risher, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union.
This year, California began taking DNA upon arrest and expects to nearly double the growth rate of its database, to 390,000 profiles a year from 200,000.
One of those was Brian Roberts, 29, who was awaiting trial for methamphetamine possession. Inside the Twin Towers Correctional Facility in Los Angeles last month, Mr. Roberts let a sheriff’s deputy swab the inside of his cheek.
Mr. Roberts’s DNA will be translated into a numerical sequence at the F.B.I.’s DNA database, the largest in the world.
The system will search for matches between Mr. Roberts’s DNA and other profiles every Monday, from now into the indeterminate future — until one day, perhaps decades hence, Mr. Roberts might leave a drop of blood or semen at some crime scene.
Law enforcement officials say that DNA extraction upon arrest is no different than fingerprinting at routine bookings and that states purge profiles after people are cleared of suspicion. In practice, defense lawyers say this is a laborious process that often involves a court order. (The F.B.I. says it has never received a request to purge a profile from its database.)
When DNA is taken in error, expunging a profile can be just as difficult. In Pennsylvania, Ellyn Sapper, a Philadelphia public defender, has spent weeks trying to expunge the profile taken erroneously of a 14-year-old boy guilty of assault and bicycle theft. “I’m going to have to get a judge’s order to make sure that all references to his DNA are gone,” she said.
The police say that the potential hazards of genetic surveillance are worth it because it solves crimes and because DNA is more accurate than other physical evidence. “I’ve watched women go from mug-book to mug-book looking for the man who raped her,” said Mitch Morrissey, the Denver district attorney and an advocate for more expansive DNA sampling. “It saves women’s lives.”
Mr. Morrissey pointed to Britain, which has fewer privacy protections than the United States and has been taking DNA upon arrest for years. It has a population of 61 million — and 4.5 million DNA profiles. “About 8 percent of the people commit about 70 percent of your crimes, so if you can get the majority of that community, you don’t have to do more than that,” he said.
In the United States, 8 percent of the population would be roughly 24 million people.
Britain may provide a window into America’s genetic surveillance future: As of March 2008, 857,000 people in the British database, or about one-fifth, have no current criminal record. In December, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Britain violated international law by collecting DNA profiles from innocent people, including children as young as 10.
Critics are also disturbed by the demographics of DNA databases. Again Britain is instructive. According to a House of Commons report, 27 percent of black people and 42 percent of black males are genetically registered, compared with 6 percent of white people.
As in Britain, expanding genetic sampling in the United States could exacerbate racial disparities in the criminal justice system, according to Hank Greely, a Stanford University Law School professor who studies the intersection of genetics, policing and race. Mr. Greely estimated that African-Americans, who are about 12 percent of the national population, make up 40 percent of the DNA profiles in the federal database, reflective of their prison population. He also expects Latinos, who are about 13 percent of the population and committed 40 percent of last year’s federal offenses — nearly half of them immigration crimes — to dominate DNA databases.
Enforcement officials contend that DNA is blind to race. Federal profiles include little more information than the DNA sequence and the referring police agency. Subjects’ names are usually kept by investigators.
Rock Harmon, a former prosecutor for Alameda County, Calif., and an adviser to crime laboratories, said DNA demographics reflected the criminal population. Even if an innocent man’s DNA was included in a genetic database, he said, it would come to nothing without a crime scene sample to match it. “If you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to fear,” he said.
Next Article in US (2 of 17) » A version of this article appeared in print on April 19, 2009, on page A1 of the New York edition.
Vingerafdruk wellicht weg uit paspoort
Genève, 15 juli 2009. Minister Hirsch Ballin (Justitie, CDA) sluit niet uit dat op termijn de vingerafdrukken in paspoorten worden vervangen door irisscans. Dat zei hij gisteren na afloop van de eerste zittingsdag van het Mensenrechtencomité van de Verenigde Naties in Genève, waar hij vragen moest beantwoorden over de situatie in Nederland. Vanuit dat VN-comité kwam kritiek op de nieuwe paspoortwet die onlangs in de Eerste Kamer werd aangenomen. Ook in Nederland waren politici en deskundigen kritisch. Zij vrezen dat de database met vingerafdrukken voor andere doeleinden wordt gebruikt ...
lees hier verder
Vingerafdruk Duitse minister gepubliceerd
Zoals gepubliceerd in tijdschrift The Register in 2008.
Het ging om de inister van Binnenlandse zaken Schauble, altijd een fervent voorstander van biometrische kenmerken opnemen en daarbij het diplomatieke corps en de regering en hun familieleden daarvan uitsluiten.
Duitse blad Die Datenschleuder nr. 69 is volledig van de markt gehaald en niet meer downloadbaar. Het Engelse issue is nog de enige bron. In nr. 69 stond niet alleen zijn vingerafdruk, en die van anderen, maar ook hoe die nagemaakt kon worden.
Hacktivists collect fingerprint of fingerprint collector
A hacker club has published what it says is the fingerprint of Wolfgang Schauble, Germany's interior minister and a staunch supporter of the collection of citizens' unique physical characteristics as a means of preventing terrorism.
In the most recent issue of Die Datenschleuder (http://ds.ccc.de/), the Chaos Computer Club (http://www.ccc.de/?language=en) printed the image on a plastic foil that leaves fingerprints when it is pressed against biometric readers.
No-one from the Germany-based group has been able to test the foil to see if it can fool a computer into believing it came from Schauble. But the technique has been shown to work with a variety of other people's prints on almost two-dozen readers, according to a colleague of the hacker who pulled off the demonstration.
Last two pages of magazine issue that published Schauble's fingerprint. The plastic film can be seen on the top middle of the right-hand page. (Click here for larger view. NL: klik hier.)
"The whole research has always been inspired by showing how insecure biometrics are, especially a biometric that you leave all over the place," said Karsten Nohl, a colleague of an amateur researcher going by the moniker Starbug, who engineered the hack. "It's basically like leaving the password to your computer everywhere you go without you being able to control it anymore."
Nohl, a graduate student at the University of Virginia, acted as an English translator for Starbug, who speaks German. The two recently released research showing how to crack the encryption of a widely used smartcard in a matter of minutes.
Schauble's fingerprint was captured off a water glass he used last summer while participating in a discussion celebrating the opening of a religious studies department at the University of Humboldt in Berlin. The print came from an index finger, most likely the right one, Starbug believes, because Schauble is right-handed.
Easily fooled
The print is included in more than 4,000 copies of the latest issue of the magazine, which is published by the CCC. The image is printed two ways: one using traditional ink on paper, and the other on a film of flexible rubber that contains partially dried glue. The latter medium can be covertly affixed to a person's finger and used to leave an individual's prints on doors, telephones or biometric readers.
Nohl said Starbug has used the same film to store his own fingerprints and has successfully fooled 20 different biometric readers, including those deployed in Germany's own passport offices. The machines, made by a
company known as Cross Match Technologies, are in the process of being rolled out by German customs officials at border checkpoints, Nohl said.
Schauble is a big proponent of using fingerprints and other unique characteristics to identify individuals.
“Each individual’s fingerprints are unique," he is quoted as saying in this official interior department press release announcing a new electronic passport that stores individuals' fingerprints on an RFID chip. "This technology will help us keep one step ahead of criminals. With the new passport, it is possible to conduct biometric checks, which will also prevent authentic passports from being misused by unauthorized persons who happen to look like the person in the passport photo."
The magazine is calling on readers to collect the prints of other German officials, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, Bavarian Prime Minister Guenther Beckstein and BKA President Joerg Ziercke.
"The thing I like a lot is the political activism of the hack," said Bruce Schneier, who is chief security technology officer for BT and an expert on online authentication. Fingerprint readers were long ago shown to be faulty, largely because designers opt to make the devices err on the side of false positives rather than on the side of false negatives.
Few readers, he said, have ways to verify the input path to prevent spoofing, and yet politicians frequently see them as a panacea for all kinds of complicated security problems.
"This minister guy, what is he going to do now?" Schneier asked. "His fingerprint is going to be known for all time." ®
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