Subscribe to the Free Print Edition!
Celebrating 25 Years

GCN Home > 05/22/06 issue

State to DHS: Take a pass on using long-range RFID

Technical commitee backs claims about security shortcomings

By Jason Miller, GCN Staff

The State Department has learned the hard way over the past year that choosing long-range radio frequency identification for moving people across the border is fraught with peril. The hullabaloo over development of its electronic passport made that clear.

Now, State officials are trying to pass those tough lessons on to the Homeland Security Department as the two agencies debate how to construct the People Access Security Services card. DHS officials, however, say they’re determined to stick with RFID.

Their determination to do so, however, faced a new obstacle last week as a DHS technical committee issued a report via the department’s Privacy Office condemning the use of RFID technology to identify and track humans because of privacy and security concerns.

State will issue the PASS card by January 2008 to U.S. citizens who frequently cross the borders with Canada and Mexico. It will help DHS meet the requirements of the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative.

“At the end of the day, we are colored by our experience with e-passport,” Frank Moss, deputy assistant secretary of State for passport services in the Bureau of Consular Affairs, said at a recent Smart Card Alliance conference in Arlington, Va. Privacy experts worried that someone equipped with a card reader close to the passport holder could intercept, or “skim” personal data.

Their concerns were featured in a draft report written by a DHS technical committee and issued by the department’s Privacy Office that strongly condemned the use of RFID systems to identify and track people.

The draft report, titled The Use of RFID for Human Identification, cited the privacy and security risks the technology poses. The report went on to propose specific security and privacy safeguards and best practices.

The DHS Emerging Applications and Technology Subcommittee of the Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee, which drafted the report, said that RFID systems’ small reduction of the time need to process people at checkpoints was far outweighed by the technology’s privacy risks.

Privacy concerns raised by nongovernmental organizations eventually drove State’s Consular Bureau to reinforce the documents’ data security.

More news on related topics: IT Security, Authentication / Identity Management, Homeland Security, Management



GCN Popup