The Washington Post reports:
The days when faking driver’s licenses was a cottage industry — often practiced in college dorm rooms by a computer geek with a laminating machine — have given way to far more sophisticated and prolific practitioners who operate outside the reach of U.S. law enforcement.
In an era when terrorism and illegal immigration have transformed driver’s licenses into sophisticated mini-documents festooned with holograms and bar codes, beating the system has never been easier.
Just wire money to “the Chinese guy.”
. . .
The “Chinese guy” — whose e-mail address is passed around on college campuses and among high school kids — is actually a Chinese company that mails untold thousands of fake driver’s licenses to the United States. They have been turning up in states from coast to coast.
To the naked eye — even the practiced eye of most bartenders and police officers — the counterfeits look perfect. The photo and physical description are real. So is the signature. The address may be, too. The holograms are exact copies, and even the bar code can pass unsophisticated scans.
“We’re seeing these false IDs being generated from the same source out of China,” said Steven Williams, chief executive of Intellicheck, which supplies detection equipment to federal agencies, law enforcement and businesses. “There’s a rampant distribution of false IDs . . . from China, from one source.”
The IDs have shown up in various states, each license carrying a mysterious hidden tip-off in the bar code that points directly to the same Chinese company.
There's more at the link.
This news troubles me very much. It's not because kids are getting hold of false ID's - they've been doing that for years. No, there are two more important things to worry about.
- What is that Chinese company doing with all the (genuine) information that purchasers are providing to put on their fake ID's? Isn't this scheme tailor-made for identity theft? Think about it - real names, real birth dates, real addresses, even (I presume) real Social Security numbers, all provided by unthinking teens who will go on to have careers, save and invest money, and so on. What's to stop some canny hacker recording all this information, waiting a few years, then using it to fleece them of their assets? Even worse, what happens if some of these kids become military officers, or work in sensitive areas of commerce and industry? Can their personal information be used to blackmail them in future? "You bought a fake ID when you were younger. That's a felony! Now, either co-operate and tell us what we want to know about your employer, or we'll tell them about your crime."
- Can terrorists and criminals in other countries also get their hands on these fake ID's? If so, they can cross the border already equipped with all they need to move about the USA without suspicion. That worries the hell out of me!
I hope the authorities are working to shut this down. It has too many potentially nasty ramifications to be allowed to go on unchecked.
Peter
Another good reminder that IDs mean absolutely nothing other than the person in front of you matches the picture on the card in your hand.
ReplyDeleteMy father tells a story of a time when he was on guard duty at a base, everything was locked down and there were no scheduled visits for the evening. Apparently some higher up who knew the base commander decided he wanted to pay a surprise visit and rolled up in a jeep, flashing his ID. Of course my father neither knew of or had heard of this guy, and wasn't about to let some random person flashing a mere ID through without verification. There was much protesting, spitting and demands of "DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?", to which the answer is, "No I don't."
A paper ID is only one part of "identification" and it would be a really good idea if we stopped using them as the end all be all of trust.
Responding to the two scenarios separately, for the first I can easily see some dumbass kid tossing a real SSN on a fake id (which of course begs the question why the SSN is on ID in the first place for another rant), but how dumb does the kid need to be to put a real name/birthday on a fake id?
ReplyDelete"Hello. I am Steve McOlderguy, and I wish to purchase this beer because I am 22."
"This says you're Tim Jones, 16."
"Dammit! I could've saved $50 and just used my real one!"
For the second, I've about come down on the position that if a system is that simple to defeat, then my response to those defeating it is good. Do it as often and as flagrantly as possible until the system is re-evaluated with idungeoncrawl's sentiments in mind. "You have the magic token, enter and be blessed, end of story" is non-starting BS for any sort of gate control.
And just to hare off tangentially and try to tie the two together, one would hope there would be bosses in the future that when confronted with blackmail of "Psst, hey, Tim Jones got a fake id when he was 16!" could take a look at older Timmy's track record and after determining that no, he still isn't a security risk, say "That was right clever and proactive of him. Here's a raise."
Then again all of the above work off an assumption that people will be anything other than bone-stupid bipedal conniving and cruel protoplasm, so I'll keep an eye out for Timmy getting busted both now and later.
We should tell China to put a stop to this crap or we're not going to borrow anymore money from them!
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