[citation][nom]Silmarunya[/nom]I know anti-government fanatics will oppose this no matter its merits, so I wonder why I'm writing this post. Still, here goes.Many European countries have been using electronic ID cards (yes, we have those and we aren't being oppressed by the evil government yet) that also serve as an internet ID like the one proposed by Obama.So far there are no reports of it being exploited, hacked or otherwise used for malicious purposes. On the contrary, it has reduced preying by paedophiles (as many online chatrooms attended by young users now require you to use such an ID, thus preventing you from lying about your age), has increased the security of online banking and so on.The costs are extremely low (we get readers and ID cards for free, but even if you had to purchase them, costs are just a few dollars), the security improvements massive and the amount of private data stored minimal (the government can hardly use your age, area of residence and other such basic facts to oppress you in anyway, as they already have these anyway)[/citation]
Maybe it isn't that anti-government fanatics will oppose it no matter what, maybe it's that some people value privacy more than others. Or possibly that big government fanatics let the governments of the world lead them like cattle.
Your post assumes too much, and defeats itself in those assumptions, because as assumptions tend to be, they are incorrect.
A) that American and European cards would have anything significant in common outside of age. If they do it should probably be even more scary.
B) Anyone who has your age, access to your passport, SSN (in America) and DoB can get just about whatever they want.
C) You kind of assume you even know everything that the European card stores. A brief google search actually shows different cards store different data.
P.S.
The Daily Mail reports that a security expert cloned and programmed one of your "secure" cards in 12 minutes. So does it really stop pedophiles or just give them an avenue to create fake "legitimate" ids? It's kind of like (and I've lived in the UK, South East London actually) the UK thinking outlawing guns would reduce gun crime. Gun crime has actually gone up 387% since they outlawed them. All they really did was disarm people from defending themselves bc the law breakers are going to break the law anyway. Bass ackwards thinking.
And the UK ID does contain all of your insurance data concerning your benefits and 49 other categories of information about its citizenry, including biometric data.
D) European RIHD (like the ones used in Germany) are actually very easily cracked, its called a trojan horse that contains a keylogger, even IF (and thats a HUGE 'if') there are no other security vulnerabilities. However, the Plusminus hacking group has already exploited the cards on national tv in Germany so that big IF will never really mean anything but insecurity. I remember a time when they said WEP, 128 bit SSL, and RFID were "secure" and couldn't be cracked. Oh, and the German version also stores banking and biometric data, how do we know the American version wouldn't be more similar to this?
When is it that people (it seems particularly rampant in big government people) figure out this has NOTHING to do with privacy and EVERYTHING to do with control? In fact, I would argue it takes most crackers more than 12 minutes to steal, change, and forge an entire identity...well at least until the introduction of the European ID card, except this way they can make it so you never existed in that centralized database that doesn't exist (in those same 12 minutes).
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