Sadly Jofm5, the Goverment is not interested in this, and whatever their ulterior motive, based on its previous actions in all manner of things, being heard to say the right thing is more important than actually doing the right thing. Therefore proclaiming that issuing an id card will improve aviation security when in fact it will play no greater part in the security process than allowing people to be issued a CRB check is an expensive joke.
I quite agree the government seems misguided on this issue and that an ID card will in no way improve security. It does smell somewhat of a big brother tactic but sadly in the not distant future I can see such a card will be required (in general life).
Before we all jump the gun and say no, I will relate to you my experience over the last week. I was in a position where I had to move homes and rent in a different town - the agents for the property I am now renting wanted quite rightly to prove who I am. For this I needed proof of adress of where I was currently living, i.e. the two utiliy bills and bank statements and recognised photo ID. This actually proved quite hard, my BT Bill, Bank, Mobile (not that it counted) and Electric bills were all paperless billing (as encouraged by giving discounts)- emailed to me on a monthly basis. I printed out the last couple of months and these were accepted on face value, probably because I had my passport and driving licence which were both recognised forms of photo ID.
The paperless bills are easy to forge given a bit of time and effort and we have to remember that not everybody has a driving licence or passport. So in essence a national ID card scheme could/may be a requirement in the not too distance future as the current eco drive pushes more billing online.
Back to the subject of crew being used as guinea pigs for such a scheme, firstly its not just yourselves but anyone immigrating to the country also who will be required to have the ID. Secondly with the RFID nature of the card it should be possible for any company to purchase the equipment to verify the identity of the card holder - this in future should lead to a low cost option for all security access points to standardise on one identity cards thus reducing the amount of cards to be held - of course no doubt some will want some visible identity that can be checked at a cursory glance. However like the oyster card used on LRT can be verified on spot using a hand held device so should an ID card be able to as the technology is not dissimilar.
Call100:
Biometric ID's have already been cloned and the Government is aware of this but brush it under the carpet.
Yes a biometric card can be cloned quite easily. You dont have to be that close to a scanner for RFID cards to work, a case in example is the new VISA payWave technology whereby your credit card can be in the general area of the scanner. Like with payWave being validated by you entering your pin a biometric card is validated by checking the biometric details on the card - retina and fingerprint samples are much harder if not impossible to clone. As for just replacing the biometric details to that of the cloner is not so easy due to the nature of the checksum on the card (Please read up on MD5 and SHA256) which bind all the details together into a digital signature which the card number itself is derived from - changing a single character from lower to upercase in the name radically alters the signature so the verification fails as would replacing the biometric details.
md80fantic:
Would you mail to me your bank and credit card information.....if it were protected by the most effective encryption scheme currently known? Strong as it is....would you still trust it in my hands? It's nice that technology advances, but possibility does not necessarily imply necessity. Who benefits? RFID manufacturers and the government, in the form of yet another layer of unwelcome control.
Interesting question... do you use internet banking ?, do you shop online? these all use the same encryption algorithms present in the technology for ID cards so there is little difference. Yes these encryptions can be broken but the time to do this and the processing power required negate this as being too much effort - identity is much easier lifted from the social networking sites and gained using those details.
In summary we can argue to the hilt against the concept of ID cards, it is more the thought of knowng someone is storing something about you and can aggregate data against that ID that is the deterring influence. In reality it is done all the time already - we already have tracking cookies on the internet monitoing your usage and targetting advertising towards you (e.g. google ads) and we already have the likes of tesco buying purchase history from other shopping chains so they can profile you and target your mail shots.
As for the government and how they manage your data (or manage to lose it) in reality they are no different to any other organisation public or not - it is just that the government have a responsibility to make you aware when its lost.
Like I said above - an ID card is not particularly something I want to see, its probably something thats going to be required soon. I think any fight against it will only provide a short term win in the end. The nonsense about national security etc I agree with being the wrong way to justify such a thing however there are alot more reasons to have it at the moment than not.