Future Surveillance Will Get Under Your Skin
Pastor Dale Morgan
Future Surveillance Will Get Under Your Skin*
Added: Nov 21, 2006 1:18 PM
Surveillance is really getting under my skin
This unique human chip implant was supposed to protect me - but it just
makes me more vulnerable
Henry Porter
The Observer
The most shocking part of Britain's frantic rush towards a fully fledged
surveillance society is not so much the threat to personal liberty,
although that is important; it is the lack of security in the systems
that are confidently held up to be the solution to the problems of
21st-century crime and terrorism.
While each of us is required to give more and more information about
ourselves to the government's various centralised databases, and submit
to increasing surveillance in our daily lives, almost no one seems to
consider the risk to us if these systems are breached.
For some time now, I have been warning about the menace that these
systems may come to represent in the hands of future governments, the
nature of which we cannot know. But having spent the last few months
making a film, Suspect Nation, with the director Neil Ferguson - about
the growth of surveillance since 9/11 - I realise that the threat exists
in the present. Both of us were astonished at the gaps in security that
we found and the insouciance of government.
It is difficult to know whether this comes from ignorance or a failure
of imagination, but as the barriers are swept away by science,
ministers, few of whom have the slightest technical knowledge, place
increasing faith in surveillance technologies.
What they do not grasp is that when you pool records on a national
database, you are also creating a very attractive target. And sooner or
later, someone will find the unmarked back door.
We spent some time in America investigating these new technologies with
a sentence from Jay Stanley of the American Civil liberties Union
ringing in our ears. 'There is a lot of room,' he wrote, 'for the United
States to become a meaner, less open and less just place without any
radical change in government. All that's required is the continued
construction of new surveillance technologies and the simultaneous
erosion of privacy protections.' That seems to describe perfectly the
process that is underway in Britain.
One of these new technologies is RFID (radio frequency identification),
which are inexpensive microchips that give out information when
activated by a scanner. They are used by shops to track their products
and now increasingly in identification of all sorts, from building entry
cards to driving licences. The problem is that it is difficult to
protect the chip you are carrying from transmitting your personal details.
Take the new passport. Pressed by the US, countries around the world are
introducing a passport containing an RFID chip which transmits all the
particulars of your passport together with your photograph when it is
scanned at a national border. But these new, 21st-century passports may
be rather less secure than the 20th-century version.
In an experiment conducted for Suspect Nation, security expert Adam
Laurie took just a couple of weeks to write a programme and add a
scanner which would read any new British passport without it being open.
The possibility of a passport being read by someone who needs only to
brush against you with a version of Laurie's equipment is obviously
alarming, yet a Home Office spokesman seemed relaxed about the lack of
security. 'It is hard to see why anyone would want to carry out the
procedure described. Other than the photograph, which could be obtained
easily by other means, they would gain no information that they did not
already have, so the whole exercise would be utterly pointless.'
If the Home Office hasn't got the point, authorities in the US have,
which is why they have included a metal shield in the design for their
new passport. What they probably realise is that the covert reading of
passport could represent a considerable threat, especially to those
whose nationality terrorists want to target or those who may represent
rich pickings for criminals.
The technology used in the ID card is likely to be very similar to that
in the new passport. It is true that all the information you will be
forced to submit to the government in the ID card scheme will be stored
on a central database called the National Identity Register, but our
experiment reading passports must at least open up the possibility of ID
theft. Once something has been read, it is that much easier to clone it.
Looking through the ID card debates in Hansard, it becomes obvious that
most MPs simply didn't understand that the threat comes not just from
pooling everyone's information in one database, but from creating a
single trusted identifier which is bound to become a irresistible
challenge for criminals.
Everywhere you turn in America, there are frantic efforts to make
Americans more secure. One solution that is gaining currency in the US
is the use of an RFID implant which is shot into the body by means of a
large hypodermic needle. The chip can be read when a scanner is passed
over the area where it lurks in the fatty tissue below the surface of
the skin.
It is promoted by the sinister sounding VeriChip Corporation of America,
which is pioneering the implants (originally developed to tag animals)
as a way of identifying immigrants, military personnel, casino workers
and patients who suffer various degenerative diseases such as
Alzheimer's. We attended a surgery run by a Dr J Musher in an anonymous
Washington suburb and I was duly injected with a chip bearing a unique
number. I am probably now the only living creature in Britain, other
than prize cattle and show dachshunds, to be tagged in this way. I have
a hint of Blade Runner about me: half-man, half-transmitter.
But it turns out that this futuristic device is rather unimpressive. It
took Adam Laurie no time at all to pass a scanner over my arm, extract
the information and clone the RFID.
You can see the attraction of such gimmicks. The same instinct is busy
consigning us all to centralised databases and promotes the use of
number-recognition cameras to track our movements. In the face of the
great threats of the modern world, our leaders have become mesmerised by
the promise of total and inviolate security.
But there is no such thing. Indeed, there is every reason to suppose
that this technology and the huge centralised databases, with their
multiple points of access, mean that we will become exposed to the very
threats they seek to protect us from.
The truth is that as soon as a piece of security technology is
introduced, its existence inspires an equal ingenuity among those who
wish to break it. Caught in the middle of this security arms race are
you and me, seen as suspects by one side and as fair game by the other.
· Henry Porter and Neil Ferguson's film, Suspect Nation, can be seen on
More4 at 9pm tomorrow