Category: 
Another country has started to form a biometric database. Israel, welcome to the club!
The motion is attacked and debated. So what are the claims of the bill advocates?
1. Biometrics will prevent faking of passports and identity cards
2. To provide fast authentication and verification means to police officers
3. To allow fast identification of injured or dead
What do we hear from the opposite side?
1. Forming such a database would harm the citizens’ basic right to privacy
2. There is risk associated with keeping of such information. It is even more dangerous if this database reaches wrong hands
3. No other western democratic state has such database
What do I think?
1. The Interior Ministry of Israel has no idea what do they need biometrics for, how will they use it and what are consequences of this use. Their understanding of technology is a bit limited.
They say they will have a centralized database. They say they will keep personal information in the ID card. They say they will provide authentication “on-the-go”; every police unit will be equipped with means to verify the identity of biometric ID holder in a second.
2. Israeli authorities will soon find out that faking digital information on a card is even easier than faking a printed paper ID.
3. Information on biometric passports with RFID chips can be copied and rewritten without any problem. “The whole passport design is totally brain damaged,” said Mr Grunwald to Wired.com.”
Let us assume that Israeli ID will not use RFID chips and will implement an ISO 7816 contact type smartcards. Not a big deal to hack there as well, but besides security problems they will also need higher budget for readers’ maintenance.
4. Yes, it is dangerous to keep such information. There will be attacks on the database and it is hard to prevent leakage. However it looks like the least important problem.
5. Who will benefit from this? Not Israelis, neither Israel authorities will enjoy it. Looking back at the US visa project and EU biometric project you can see a clear picture of an interested body – the Cross Match Technologies, Inc. – a general and approved supplier of fingerprint solutions for governmental sector. I believe they will win Israeli project as well. I think that BioKey will also dent a bit of Israeli biometrics, providing mobile authentication modules.
6. Problems that they will face.
a. They will have to use optical sensors. RF, thermal or capacitive sensor cannot be used because of skin types.
b. The prism of optical sensor rubs out, providing more and more distorted image. Therefore false rejection will be a common issue.
c. Staff. They will need to train lots of employees that are far not computer gurus to collect biometric samples.
d. Time. Issue of biometric passport in EU takes 4 weeks, biometric sampling takes 3-10 minutes/person. This time costs a lot.
So, what will be the bottom line? Israel will spend a fortune to form biometric database and another fortune to protect it. Israel authorities will face lots of problems. At last, in few years we will see lots of faked Israeli ID cards, much more than there were before implementation of biometrics.
But, Israelis go even further… They form the DNA database for police… Looks like they are trying to substitute brains and professionalism with technological articles. They used to be much more smart in the past.
Government is the Beast
The fact that elements of that satanic mark scheme are easy to get realized, causes us to take it seriously. The following discussion provides a few different viewpoints in regards to the privacy and dignity violations area, which is the idea of potential threats or risks.
“We have built our database to be about 90 million fingerprints, and it’s now time for us to transition from the two to the 10 fingers”… “As the database grows in size we need more information” (Robert A. Mocny, Director, US-VISIT Program, Department of Homeland Security)
In the near future, the government shall take all measures to force us to take our shoes off and deliver our toesprint …
Biometric technologies have extremely serious implications for human rights in general, and privacy or dignity in particular. The term “Biometric” is a “Sterilized” expression for Human Body/Organ Specimens mark. Preserving unique human body specimens in a “national body’s dataset” by governments is an explicit violation of human dignity and privacy. Some fundamental part of human dignity requires privacy. Privacy is part of the claim to personal autonomy. It supports the various freedoms that democratic countries value.
The current Biometric authentication methods present a serious threat in a manner that many people regard it as demeaning. The Biometric scheme represents the kind of closed-minded society that the Soviet Union created, and which the free world decried.
According the basic human dignity law: “There shall be no violation of the life, body or dignity of any person as such”: Human Dignity transcends any social order as the basis for rights and is neither granted by society nor can it be legitimately violated by society.
As free individuals, living in a free country, we have the right to control our own body identifiers and our own physical characteristics. “We are not animals, we are human beings - our body and its lineaments are NOT a Blob of Tissue … Biometric is referring to ‘Vital body organs measurement, derived from the Greek words Bio (life) and Metric (to measure). From a democratic and legal point of view, an individual has the right to manage his own bodily identifiers (body, dignity, markers, and privacy - Intrinsic cut off characteristics) as the conceptual basis for human rights.
The biometric matters that touch upon the limits of what is and isn’t “human body” is not relevant. As long official authorities are forcing a cut down, of unique human body specimens or other body marks from their own citizens… moreover are preserving those autonomous bodily identifiers in a “National Human Organs Datasets” for roundup, or future snoop, surveillance or comparisons, which can consider compulsory as a violation of human rights and privacy. Biometric technologies do not just involve collection of information about the person, but rather information of the person, intrinsic to them.
Biometrics should enhance rather than conflict with individual privacy and dignity.
As stated by the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): “Human beings should never be treated as merely means to an end” -Namely, ‘Human beings must not be sacrificed to fulfill other purposes’.
Hi Micha,
I have no objection to leave my fingerprints to government database. You have done it before, when you served in the army. I do not want some private company keeping them. And I also want vendors to be smarter. Using RFID in a biometric passport is a crime, while fingerprinting is fine with me.