23 July 2006

The Great ID FUD

When will they ever learn?

Unlike traditional forms of identification, the VeriChip can’t be lost, stolen, misplaced, or counterfeited.

That's what the human-implantable RFID VeriChip site says. And this is what happened at the Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) 6 conference:

two presenters demonstrated the electronic equivalent of making a copy of an implanted RFID or radio frequency ID chip.

The point was to show just how easy it is to fool a detection device that purports to uniquely identify any individual.

So let's just do a quick recap: which technologies are available for establishing identity unambiguously these days?

Irises: nope
Faces: nope
Fingerprints: nope
DNA: nope
Implanted RFID: nope

So, tell me Mr Blair, how exactly you were going to implement this ID card system in a way that it can't be spoofed to hell?

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