Lizzie pointed me to the Guardian’s interesting article on passport security—digital passports make it easier to pose as someone else. No need to steal someone’s passport when you can duplicate it and travel as someone else. Also interesting from a privacy angle: broadcasting passport data via RFID “up to a few meters […] depending on the chosen radio frequency and antenna design/size” (according to Wikipedia). But even if that length isn’t often repeatable, the reliable length is certainly long enough to stand next to someone whose passport data you’d like to gather.

Consider this scenario: A postman involved with organised crime knows he has a passport to deliver to your home. He already knows your name and address from the envelope. He can get your date of birth by several means, including credit-reference agencies or from the register of births, marriages and deaths (and, let’s face it, he delivers all your birthday cards anyway).

He knows the expiry date – 10 years from yesterday, give or take a day, when the passport was mailed to you. That leaves the nine-digit passport number. NO2ID says reports from its 30,000 members up and down the country are throwing up a number of similarities in the first four digits of the passport number, so that reduces the number of permutations, potentially leaving five purely random numbers to establish.

“If the rogue postman were to take your passport home, without opening the envelope he could put it against a reader and begin a ‘brute force’ attack in which your computer tries 12 different permutations every second until it has the right access codes,” says [thebunker.net‘s Kent] Laurie. “A five-digit number would take 23 hours to crack at the most. Once all those numbers were established, you could communicate with the RFID chip and steal all the information. And your passport could be delivered to you, unopened and just a day late.”

Thanks to Lizzie for the tip.

According to many on CommonDreams.org, this US mid-term election just passed was a referendum on Iraq, even if you had no genuine referenda on your ballot specifically asking about Iraq.

According to the AP/Edison exit poll, it would be more accurate to say this election was a referendum on the economy and the Iraq war weighed in at number 4 in the ranking below “Corruption” and “Terrorism”.

Sure, the money spent on the war adversely affects Americans and “Terrorism” could describe what the US is doing in Iraq, but Iraq was specifically mentioned yet didn’t rank at #1.

Also, since the Democrats didn’t offer anything for anti-war voters (who are now a majority in the US), it might be more fair to put the emphasis on the Republicans losing and the Democrats winning anything because America is a two-party country where independents and third parties only began to show up as challengers in some districts (Rich Whitney, Green party candidate for Illinois governor, had low double-digit support in early counts while the Democratic incumbent was hearing his Republican competitor concede the race to him). News reporters on TV last night said Whitney took more votes from the Republican candidate than the incumbent, which they said was odd.

When you’re trapped in a duopoly, the only other competition you’re allowed to hear from doesn’t have to offer you anything. You’ll be told to vote for them because “where else are you going to go?”. In two years it will be even more important to tell both corporate parties that you’ll leave them for independent and third party candidates.

I think it’s this one which is a functional mirror rather than an exact copy of the old fake boarding pass generator. The new site has been reworked to run as a Javascript (so it runs entirely in your browser, very little server-side software needed). This alone means more mirrors are sure to pop up. Time to update the old post on this topic.

Another Counterpuncher pointing out how distant some anti-war voices are from their words; Lance Selfa writes about the Progressive Democrats of America:

[T]he majority of liberal candidates the PDA backed in Democratic primaries lost to more conservative Democrats–many of them backed by the party establishment. Many of the winners–especially those, like Illinois candidate Tammy Duckworth, who were recruited and promoted by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and its pro-war leader Rep. Rahm Emanuel–are pro-war themselves.

This has put the PDA in the same position as previous formations like it: working for the election of Democrats who not only don’t share their views on the war or health care, but are actually opposed to them. Yet in the interests of party unity and a broader outlook, the PDA has urged its members to work for these candidates.

Selfa doesn’t mention Cindy Sheehan, but I’m reminded that Sheehan is a member of the PDA Board and widely known as an anti-war voice (probably the one person credited with keeping the anti-war movement going on a national stage). But I have to wonder what does she really stand for? In her essay “Supporting Hillary” she told us that she “will not make the mistake of supporting another pro-war Democrat for president again: As I won’t support a pro-war Republican.”.

PDA supports Democratic Party candidates. But the Democrats are the loudest voices against progressive candidates, telling voters how voters are wasting their vote on third-party or independent candidacies, excluding third-party and independent candidates from debates; in short, encouraging voters to forgo their values and adopt the values of the corporations that fund the Democratic Party.

If you give them the opportunity, the Democrats and their agents (MoveOn.org, PDA, etc.) will sell your interests down the river. Don’t buy into the two-party trap.

Following up on a previous post, Rep. Markey has admitted that he made a mistake in calling for Soghoian’s arrest:

On Friday I urged the Bush Administration to ”˜apprehend’ and shut down whoever had created a new website that enabled persons without a plane ticket to easily fake a boarding pass and use it to clear security, gain access to the boarding area and potentially to the cabin of a passenger plane. Subsequently I learned that the person responsible was a student at Indiana University, Christopher Soghoian, who intended no harm but, rather, intended to provide a public service by warning that this long-standing loophole could be easily exploited. The website has now apparently been shut down.

Under the circumstances, any legal consequences for this student must take into account his intent to perform a public service, to publicize a problem as a way of getting it fixed. He picked a lousy way of doing it, but he should not go to jail for his bad judgment. Better yet, the Department of Homeland Security should put him to work showing public officials how easily our security can be compromised.

It remains a fact that fake boarding passes can be easily created and the integration of terrorist watch lists with boarding security is still woefully inadequate. The best outcome of Mr. Soghoian’s ill-considered demonstration would be for the Department of Homeland Security to close these loopholes immediately.

Boing Boing quotes Avi Rubin saying Soghoian’s approach was a bad way to go about alerting people to the fact of no real security in Continental’s boarding passes (perhaps all airline boarding passes); Rubin called it “a real lapse in judgement [sic]“.

But there’s a huge problem here which isn’t being addressed by the comments thus far.

Rep. Markey has sufficient power in the US government to create a real problem for anyone by linking them to terrorism in the way he did Soghoian when he called for Soghoian’s arrest. The US government isn’t above holding people indefinitely, without charges, without representation, and torturing them. If we’re going to start challenging people’s speech on the basis of what might happen afterwards, I think Markey’s words and demonstrated US government behavior to date ought to weigh more heavily than someone possibly using a fake boarding pass to upgrade their seating from coach to first class (as Soghoian’s website suggested one could try doing with the website-generated boarding pass).

Jeff Taylor writes in Counterpunch:

The Bush administration has overreached. Years of incompetence, deceit, and hypocrisy have caught up with it, and the President’s lackeys in Congress are going to pay a price on Election Day. If Democrats take over the House and/or Senate, it will be by default. It will be because Republicans deserve to lose, not because Democrats deserve to win. In fact, both parties deserve to lose, but at the moment Republicans more richly deserve to lose. Also, with a two-party system there is no easy way for Americans to register their displeasure with the tweedledee party in power other than voting for the tweedledum party out of power.

When you lose competition, you lose leverage. The Democrats and Republicans know how and when to collude to frame a debate and survive. Please investigate write-in candidates, so-called “third party” candidates, and independents in all races. Take their candidacies seriously and tell the Democrat/Republican alternatives why your vote shouldn’t be taken for granted.