re: cheap latent fingerprint kits, they're more readily available than the one you've referred to. I was in Japan in May, and picked up a "toy" (but perfectly servicable) latent fingerprint kit from a vending machine for about Y300.

http://nmg.livejournal.com/

DNA evidence will create a new kind of "forensic voodoo" where DNA "evidence" is planted at a crime scene to implicate someone who may not have been there. Want to get back at someone later? Better collect samples now, when they don't suspect you.

The burglar's friend: a pocket vacuum of the kind marketed for cleaning crud from under your keyboard. Half an hour hoovering the seats on an under-occupied bus and you've got enough genetic white noise to implicate half a city.

(Assuming your buses have fabric-covered seats. If not, pick a transportation medium that does.)

And don't forget the strong suspicions that fingerprint matches are less reliable than is believed -- not the problems of the same finger not matching itself, but the possibility that the processes will match two different fingers.

Without any trickery.

I can't help wondering if gloves will become fashionable for other reasons. It would also be a pretty useless response to avian flu scares, but "pretty useless" has never stopped the fashion industry yet.

Another thought: DNA testing depends on fairly routine DNA duplication in the lab. Use the tech to replicate large quantities of your own DNA, and make sure it gets everywhere. Do it with the noise-DNA as well. Saturate the city with that mix, and your DNA is part of the background.

Edited by author 10-08-2005 07:12 PM
The fashion industry never does anything for purposes of practicality. In fact, practicality is a good predictor that something will be deeply unfashionable.

While there's no actual laws against owning or using lock picks in the UK (and you can buy a set for about GBP 30 at Northern Tools). But it can be counted as "going equipped" if you don't have a lawful reason to be walking about with them.

How long before it's the same for vacuum cleaners?

Right--ever see the movie Gattaca?

ceramic terylene bourkas
Drool ... Teflon coated on the outside, obviously ...

I’d rather just have RedTacton-based Personal Aura Networking: hold my hand over a scanner at the checkout, it hooks up to the 10 megabit network of devices on my body, and I authenticate the payment through my wristwatch. (But I’m damn well going to have some extreme security on that network: I’d hate to catch a computer virus from walking through a crowded room!)

Oh yes, in case it hasn't come up yet. The really terrifying thing about using biometrics for this sort of authentication is that once they are stolen or pirated, they're practically impossible to revoke and reissue.

Best back-of-a-fag-packet cost estimates for the British biometric ID card as planned by our benevolent overlords is about a hundred quid each. Revoking and reissuing these cards will cost people time as they will have to attend a secure Government office somewhere (during regular office hours, of course) to have their biometric signatures resampled and pay over their hundred quid for their replacement card. Until it arrives in the post a week later, they are SOL if they need it to buy something or prove their identity, of course.

 This card is a one-stop shop for criminal identity theft; the card *is* the owner as far as the rest of the world is concerned. If the ID scheme does come to pass I will certainly not be carrying it around with me as a matter of course, it will stay safely locked up at home 99.9% of the time just like my passport.

How to make fingerprint molds for real cheap:

1. Print out target fingerprint on transparency film.
2. Use transparency to expose pre-sensitized copper printed circuit board. (Sunlight or desklamp will be fine.)
3. Develop photoresist and etch copper to suitable fingerprint depth.
4. Start molding with gelatin or liquid latex.

This entire setup could not cost more than $100. I don't know if commercial PCB materials will support the required resolution. One might have to do some experimenting with other photoetching processes, but I can't imagine that it's a problem that hasn't been solved.

In fact it's a problem that's been solved and used in a 80-year old novel. (R. Austin Freeman, The Red Thumb Mark, featuring Dr. Thorndyke, up on Gutenberg.). De-skilling and commodifying the process is the new part.

While there's no actual laws against owning or using lock picks in the UK (and you can buy a set for about GBP 30 at Northern Tools). But it can be counted as "going equipped" if you don't have a lawful reason to be walking about with them.

Given the family business, I and most members of my family are 'going equipped' - in some cases, to get into a building through the wall if we have to, and it's surprisingly quick and easy to get through a brick wall in ways that going through a steel door ain't - any time we're in our cars. However, a surprising number of common household items can be used for break-and-enter work, an ordinary cheap multitool will do. It's one of those charges that basically amounts to 'I lifted the suspect on account of not liking the face of 'im, sarge,' of which any jurisdiction has a fair few on the books.

More generally, I've only known two serious fraudsters well enough to speak to (and one of 'em, if I'd listened to him and gone along with it, would probably have had me farting through silk in some unextraditable beauty spot along with him by now, curse my suspicious nature) and, yes, well-crafted ID is a very basic tool to such men. The more official, the better, and I don't doubt that National ID will take a lot of work out of their trade.

Of course, for the really BIG frauds - reinsurance scams are the ones I'm personally familiar with - you use your own identity and rely on getting out with a win that amounts to fuck-you money in whatever spot you pick for your declining years.

So given a possibly imminent singularity, how long will it take us to reach a Culture-like state where material resources are in effect free by virtue of their abundance...and future criminality becomes somewhat limited in material scope?

AC: I tend towards the view that criminality is socially defined. Thus, it's unlikely that material abundance alone will ever have much effect on crime -- if someone steals the free local newspaper you're reading by grabbing it from your hands, it doesn't matter that its' replacement value was zero, the event is still an act of robbery insofar as your person is involved. Again, total abundance of all material and intellectual goods doesn't do jack to abolish crimes against the person (such as rape, assault, or murder).

Whenever money and covetousness will cease to exist.

Whenever money and covetousness will cease to exist.

Not at all! As pointed out - social circumstance can dictate much of the crime that continues today. The violence and bloodshed in Northern Ireland, for example, more boils down to deep rooted religious idiocy than a real desire for money or land.

A complete removal of scarcity would help reduce crimes, but only a real social reform in the way people think and undestand one another could completely eradicate crime.

And even then - sheer stupidity can often result in crimal negligence.

As a species that dictate law and demand, there will always be some form of crime. If we lived in a 'Utopia' then there would be thought crime, or a crime against malcontents who bad mouth the government.

..Wait a second...

At the office, they've installed a hand "print" reader (I suspect that it really reads the shape of your hand.)

I expect this sort of thing to become more popular.

Now

1) Mandatory contact with surfaces to conduct business

2) Influenza Pandemic.

Discuss.

At the office, they've installed a hand "print" reader ...

Groan.

Someone give 'em a copy of "The Coming Plague" by Laurie Mann, or something similar ...

A touching faith in fingerprints, but there are drawbacks they don't mention:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/04/fingerprint_merc_chop/

A Malaysian businessman's finger was chopped off by thieves who wanted to get into is biometrically protected Mercedes.

The Coming Plague is by Laurie Garrett. She also wrote Betrayal of Trust, which is even more disturbing (if a bit drier).

Interestingly the Stross meme was confirmed in its infectiousness with a throwaway in the Guardian where Terry Pratchett on listing his ten favourite objects confessed that he had been severely evangelised on the subject of personal organisers by Mr S. and that he had used a foldaway keyboard, pocket-PC combo to write a good part of his latest novel (Thud!),

-- Andrew

I hope this is sceicne fiction...

I've been watching a recording of Ultraviolet, a British TV series from the late nineties about vampire hunting in the modern world. They're not seen in mirrors, not are they seen by TV cameras and X-rays, or heard by microphones. "The free-range days of humans are over."

And it struck me that, in that version of the vampire-verse, they can't pass a biometric ID check. Even if the old human ID still matches, those sensors which scan their eyes or their fingers can't see them

They don't exist.

I really hope this isn't the reason for pushing biometric ID.

(But an experienced vampire-hunter using a night-vision scope?)

You might not be able to by a Lexus with biometrics in the USA, but you can over here (assuming you want to buy a Lexus in the first place)

I'm an insurance claims investigator as a dayjob and I hear a lot of ways of paying for cars (cash is a constant one and over a certain amount I always suspect money laundering - used to be in offshore banking so I know a . . . little bit . . . more than most about that subject - but 'finance' is the usual answer) Even so, I have lost count of the times I've been told 'I flashed the plastic', and we are talking serious motors here - Merc SLKs, 7 series BMWs and even the odd Lexus. And these are NOT biometric cards, or even Chip & PIN ones mostly (not yet, anyway) Recently had to deal with one celebrity whose £130000 Merc went walkabout from outside the house, and he bought another one on plastic before he even reported the claim to us!

Why bother? Well, the more fraud there is, the less I get in my profit sharing and the more you pay in motor insurance premiums (industry figures say up to 1 in 4 motor insurance claims are fraudulent, from claiming a pair a Raybans you haven't got to cover your excess to claiming for a car that doesn't exist and, even if it did, was never on your driveway) Me? I think industry figures aren't telling the whole truth.


And before you think its Jack the Lad defrauding his big, bad rip off insurance company, we recently saw a gang convicted for stealing and shipping £50m of high value cars to the Middle East. The leader's brother has just been convicted of people smuggling, and has another charge pending of putting those people into prostitution. These aren't nice people and if id cards can help put a spoke in their wheels, they are worth considering.

Of course, the really big boys in the business just buy off the local cops and politicians ('George, Osama here, now about my family . . .)

Its 1066, you're living on a piss poor, freezing little island on the farthest edges of civilisation. You'd worry about where your next meal was coming from, if you could remember what a meal is.

What's that noise?

Its William the Bastard coming to steal what little you've got, and your country too, by force of arms.

Plenty will reduce the crimes of acquisition? I'd like some proof before I buy that particular bottle of snakeoil.

I want to see the movie of the ATM collapse and the brave little barrister, from a screenplay by Mr. Stross, and the fraud traced to a feudal alternate world, or super secret anti-demon forces, or the eschaton!

I attended a speech given by the previous Privacy Commissioner this week. He's moved into the private sector on has a pragmatic view about technology.

While noting that finger prints can be compromised - and we only have 10 digits - he was more positive about irises. There are unique IDs that can be generated by multiplying two of our iris metrics. But because there are a number of metrics that can be taken from our irises, each institution with which we deal can be presented with a different number. And the compromising of one number need not invalidate our number with a different institution.

Problem I can see with iris scans, is that if you're getting on a bit I do believe that the orbs begin to 'deflate' a little (an muscle tension goes.

Even if that doesn't cause an issue, I'm sure cataracts would. Yet another fine chance to starve and freeze our elderly population.

The idea about multiplying identification factors to get more biometrics misses the point. It's a very good analogue of using hashed passwords. It reduces the impact of compromises of the server, but if you can watch someone type the damn thing in, it's all over.

Similarly here, all the multiplication in the world is irrelevant if the capture/theft happens at the point of the reader, or at the point of a biometric ID which presumably contains all of this information.

"And unlike a PIN, your bank can't issue you a new set of fingerprints or iris patterns if your biometrics are compromised"

Forget everything else. That one thing should torpedo the idea.

"I need a new pair of eyeballs. I've already had my meds for immunosuppression while the new optic nerves knit."

"Okay, would you like blue, brown, green, or the hot new stylings of violet? And have you chosen a steganographic password?"

So the whole thing is actually a scam backed by the body part trade.

These issues worry me, perhaps more than is healthy for me.

-Will ID thieves steal (literally) body parts from their victims?

-Will ID issues lead to an overregimented society where you have to produce all sorts of identification documents/cell samples/tests just to buy chewing gum?

-Will banks finance death squads to track down and eliminate ID thieves? (I figure if the regular police proves inadequate, private enterprise will step in... at a price.)

-A.R.Yngve
http://yngve.bravehost.com

> -Will ID thieves steal (literally) body parts from their victims?

I understand there has already been a case in Malaysia of car thieves chopping off a finger of the owner of a car with a fingerprint lock.

References: Larry Niven's organlegger stories; GATTACA. Or even --

"Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury, I put it to you that the identity theft alleged could not have taken place, as they used a full DNA scan before handing over the attache case of numismatically unique lunar platinum coins."

"To the contrary, a autophagous short-lived GATTACA virus could have altered the criminal's DNA to pass as the victim's, changed it back, and been metabolized away before the evidence was gathered at the crime scene..."

JvP: something like this has already happened -- Bone marrow donors risk DNA identity mix-up: IT SOUNDS like an open-and-shut case: a clear DNA match is made between semen from a serious sexual assault and a blood sample from a known criminal. Yet in a recent case from Alaska, the criminal in question was in jail when the assault took place. And forensic scientists had already matched the crime sample to the DNA profile of another person who was their prime suspect. It was only after careful detective work that the mystery was solved: the jailed man had received bone marrow from the suspect many years earlier.

Charlie, your latest comments about the big weakness -- the identity the biometrics are attached to -- reminds me of the early books of Frederick Forsyth. In particular, The Day of the Jackal and The Odessa File. One uses the dead baby trick (and it's implied that it was the standard way to get an officially-issued fake passport), while the other uses the subversion of the procedure of issuing the critical document that all others can be derived from.

I was reading in the Guardian *today* about a VAT fraud, where those involved used a circular set of companies and generated identities using the dead baby mechanism...!

I had always assumed that that loop-hole would have been
plugged years ago and left in place as a honey-pot to trap naive fraudsters...which seems unlikely given how much cash these guys generated.

Interesting, in my country dead baby mechanism (or dead soul mechanism) in use in many places. For example in mining.
airlines

You can't plug the dead baby mechanism -- not unless you tag every citizen at birth and every foreigner as soon as they enter, and track them for life. I suspect that's a chunk of the motivation behind the UK government ID card initiative.

Trouble is, you can by-pass it by leaving the country, going somewhere with a more relaxed attitude to documentation, bribing the right official, and re-entering the country, to then establish a new identity as a foreigner. To make it work, you need to enforce such an identity registration on a planet-wide basis, and you need to cross-check a given user's biometrics against the six-billion odd other records in the global database, rather than simply using their biometric signature to authenticate the identity they're currently using.

This is what the techies call a Hard Problem, or alternatively, a Money Hole.

There obviously is not a perfect key or a perfect castle so I really don't think any key method is perfect although I understand biometrics on a global scale would be too much as for the people who are looking for the 'silver bullet.'
Hmmmm, about chopping off hands and such; sounds messy, but crime is crime. Only issue I have with that is forcing people to use a certain key method which in turn I think creates crime. It doesn't fit the profile.
Biometrics is pretty good for ease of use (luxary) so you don't have to carry a password or key around. I essentially don't think any ONE key is completley safe. That would be materialism.

This is also reminding me of cyberspace and how people could alter their DNA but also the DNA database in South Korea. Would DNA be managed so that it couldn't happen? It would be a speed issue though of how fast the crime was committed. Like crimes in cyberspace could be committed almost at the speed of light so no matter how much management even still the speed of light can't be breached so there is always a back door. This is also why organics (biospace or meatspace) is still needed and not just cyberspace because of speed variations.

Or else we need Frank Herbert's BuSab to slow things down...

Frank Herbert was the originator of some very original ideas.

Whipping Star had a genuinely alien background and the concept of BuSab is an idea whose time has come...conceptual equivalents turning up in Vinge's Deepness in the Sky to
mention but one.

To come back to 'criminal futures' I'd mention that locks and encryption are simply delaying measures...

Incidentally, if you think the moral of that story is that PINs are no good, you're wrong -- the real issues it exposes are that (a) banks are horribly exposed these days, and (b) any central database that is responsible for the transfer of money is a target for attacks on its authentication mechanism. (Moving to biometrics, in my view, merely creates a central authentication database full of authentication tokens that will attract criminals like a honeypot. And unlike a PIN, your bank can't issue you a new set of fingerprints or iris patterns if your biometrics are compromised.) BeLief

jeff: I'm with you 100% on that.

Clarkson Engineer And 'Spoofing' Expert Looks To Outwit High-Tech Identity Fraud

"Eyeballs, a severed hand or fingers carried in ziplock bags. Back alley eye replacement surgery. These are scenarios used in recent blockbuster movies like Steven Spielberg’s 'Minority Report' and 'Tomorrow Never Dies' to illustrate how unsavory characters in high-tech worlds beat sophisticated security and identification systems..."

"... Schuckers’ biometric research is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Office of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense. She is currently assessing spoofing vulnerability in fingerprint scanners and designing methods to correct for these as part of a $3.1 million interdisciplinary research project funded through the NSF. The project, “ITR: Biometrics: Performance, Security and Societal Impact, ” investigates the technical, legal and privacy issues raised from broader applications of biometric system technology in airport security, computer access, or immigration. It is a joint initiative among researchers from Clarkson, West Virginia University, Michigan State University, St. Lawrence University, and the University of Pittsburgh...."

Source: Clarkson University
Date: 2005-12-20

From slashdot today:

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Sunday February 05, @01:43PM
from the new-face-theft-ring dept.
rts008 writes

"eWEEK is reporting that NIST has published the biometric data specs on the new Federal ID cards for employees and contractors that will be issued in October. From the article: 'Specifically, the guidelines state that two fingerprints must be stored on the card as "minutia templates," mathematical representations of fingerprint images. [...] Guidelines require that all biometric data to be embedded in the CBEFF (Common Biometric Exchange Formats Framework) structure. This ensures that all biometric data will be digitally signed and uniformly encapsulated. This format will apply not only to PIV cards, but also to any other biometric records kept by federal government agencies.'" The published standards [PDF] are also available from the NIST web site."

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