If I wanted to print US Dollars at home, I’d need the printing equipment, the paper stock on which to do it, and the magical ink. To thwart me, the government controls access to the printing plates, blank paper stock, and ink. This, of course, hasn’t stopped people from trying to print money, but their produced fake money can be detected as fake because they do not have access to the real plates, stock, and ink. Because the government tightly controls access to the original materials and the flow raw materials into the printing process, our money can be trusted. (Financial crisis and the government’s predilection to just print heaps of dollars not withstanding.)
The government has not implemented the same model in the case of identification systems: passports and REAL ID driver’s licenses.
Consider this article from the Washington Times. The raw materials to make a new RFID passport, namely, the blank covers with RFID chips in them, originate in Thailand. They are then shipped here for printing and binding. The control over access to this supply-line seems to be very weak.
The new RFID passports are part of a chain of trust. Border Control allows me to re-enter the country if the passport is trustworthy and valid. Cloning passports has been demonstrated to be a trivial process. So one trustworthy passport can become an infinite number of trustworthy passports. The chain of trust extends from me and the INS at the airport, back to the passport issuance office, to the State Department, to Thailand, and back to Europe where the RFID chips are made. If any link along the chain cannot be trusted, then the entire chain of trust breaks. And this seems to be the case.
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