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The North American Union ID: The Database
Brent Jessop - Knowledge Driven Revolution.com
March 13, 2007
All this trouble over the need for a passport for Canadians to enter the US. So much inconvenience and of course economic ruin. No need to worry. The government has a great solution to the problem they created. New high-tech drivers licences. Complete with all your personal information and fingerprints and a fancy new proximity RFID chip. Convenient. Exciting! Safe?
Ignoring the obvious privacy and safety concerns with the tracking abilities of the RFID chip. Ignoring the fact that this is part of a North American ID card which matches up just so nicely with the new American drivers licences under the Real ID act. Ignoring all of these things there is another major problem. The database.
The new ID cards come with a gigantic database that keeps track of all your personal information and biometric data. How secure are these databases? Lets first look at how well the government currently protects your data.
In July of 2005 the B.C. Ministry of Labour sold high-capacity data tapes at a public auction containing medical information about sexual abuse, HIV status, mental illness and also information from 30,000 refugees. An almost identical incident also occurred in B.C. only four years previous. If you are curious, the tapes netted the government $101. Fortunately this was limited to only patients of one hospital.
Another example of governments not being as responsible with your information as most assume was in September 2006. The US department of Commerce lost over 1,100 laptops including 250 from the Census Bureau containing such personal information as names, incomes and Social Security numbers.
So the government has had some trouble in the past with keeping our personal data personal. But industry with all of their market motivated superiority, surely they must do better?
Recent computer security breaches at the owners of Winners and HomeSense allowed for the release of credit card information of 2 million Canadians and about 20 million people worldwide. The hackers first had access in May before being detected in December.
We were eventually informed after the shopping season in the middle of January. No need to dampen the Christmas spirit (sales) by ugly press about stolen credit card information.
Club Monaco reported a similar breach the very next day.
Shortly after those announcement the CIBC lost a computer file containing information on up to 470,000 Talvest Mutual Funds clients while being transferred between offices. The CIBC previously admitted to inadvertently sending faxes containing confidential information to scrap yards in West Virginia and suburban Montreal in 2004.
So government and industry are completely incapable of protecting your data. What happens if they combine their ineptitude and work really hard together to protect your information?
For those of you that filled out your Canadian Census forms (note that the long forms include age, sex, religion, salary, place of work, etc.) you should be happy to hear that your data was safely collected by war profiteer Lockheed Martin. All of this information can be acquired by the US department of Homeland Security under the US Patriot Act without any obligation to tell you.
So if they work together, it is just easier for everyone to just change the law to allow them to share your information at will.
I think it is pretty safe to say that no matter who is collecting your personal data be it corporations, governments or both that data will be compromised at some point down the road, regardless of how safe they tell you it will be. But if data is stored piecemeal by a wide variety of corporations and government agencies and only for the short time that they actually require it then the chance of a major breach of your personal information will greatly diminish. If you coalesce everything into one nice big database it is only a matter of time until all your data gets stolen. If you think it is tempting for hackers (or any other type of thief) to target one store or one agency just imaging the effort that would be put into stealing data from one mega database.
But again, this is only part of the problem with our soon to be North American ID cards.
Related Articles:
The North American Union ID: The Data
The North American Union ID: Old Idea; New Sales Pitch
Language in the North American Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
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