U.S. Considers Microsoft Passport as National ID 764
An anonymous submitter writes: "Ladies and gents, the endtimes have begun. The Seattle Times is reporting that Mark Forman, associate director of information technology at the White House (or 'America's CIO', as he bills himself) has said the feds are considering the use of Microsoft's Passport technology to ID every citizen and every business seeking access to government services online. This is about as scary as it gets." To be fair, it looks very preliminary. Read the article. So many companies have tried to assist the government in providing services over the Net... but I guess if your lobbyists are good enough, you can be heard at the top.
OK guys, for real now... (Score:5, Informative)
sPh
Re:That's it! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:OK guys, for real now... (Score:5, Informative)
Read. The. Article (Score:4, Informative)
The article mentions that is is for online services three times.
Quotes, with revelant words bolded for those of you who haven't finished 5th grade English yet.
"Microsoft's Passport is being considered as a way to authenticate users of the Web sites, said Mark Forman, associate director of information technology at the White House."
"The White House is instead pursuing an "e-identification" initiative, an effort to develop ways to authenticate people and businesses online who already have government identification numbers such as Social Security, business-registration and employer-identification numbers. "
"At the government-leaders conference, attended by representatives of 75 countries, Microsoft presented a blueprint for its "e-government" strategy that suggests they use Passport to verify the identity of visitors to their Web sites. It also suggested that its bCentral business Web site could be used to process business tax payments and that citizens could use its MSN Web site to handle address changes and voter registration"
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Yes, its an amazingly laughable idea -- but its not the Big Brother in cahoots with Evil Bill Gates to steal all our privacy that the orignal poster makes it out to be.
Re:Um (Score:5, Informative)
Nothing to do with the UK government protal? (Score:2, Informative)
The Register has a far better
Write up [theregister.co.uk] then I could ever do.
Some information (Score:3, Informative)
If you're going to write, you should write Mr. Forman and his boss, in addition to your Congresscritters. Be sure to mention that by requiring Passport, the government is effectively forcing its citizens to use Microsoft's technology in order to access the public information. What happens if MS decides to start charging for Passport use? Will citizens then have to pay Microsoft to access public information? This is especially disturbing considering that the government is currently in ligitation against MS. I think part of the problem is that some government departments think it doesn't matter if some OTHER government department is in ligitation with MS. Make sure the people you write understand that you don't make that distinction. Try to equate MS with Enron, by asking if they would be so quick to adopt any of Enron products. After all, both companies used donations to affect policy, both companies have broken the law, and both companies are under investigation by the DOJ.
Re:OK guys, for real now... (Score:4, Informative)
Quickest way to get their attention is for them to know that they are YOUR representative!
Re:OK guys, for real now... (Score:3, Informative)
Interestingly enough, none of the people who prosecuted the Microsoft case (the DOJ) are elected either.
How to participate in a representative government (Score:3, Informative)
Re:OK guys, for real now... (Score:5, Informative)
It's fairly well known now that email is mostly ignored by Congresscritters. They can't tell for sure if the email is coming from one of their constituents, it's too easy to do, and they get too many of them. Faxes are better, stamped snail mail is best.
Actually cold hard cash is best, but we're talking above the table methods here.
Re:so, instead... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:OK guys, for real now... (Score:5, Informative)
- Be civil. Nobody likes to hear flaming, and your representative will almost certainly toss flames in the trash.
- Be brief. These are busy people you're writing to. Heck, even the person hired to read your letter is a busy person, since he gets whole sacks of these things.
- Don't use someone else's words. It's easy to rely on others to write letters for you. But the more identical letters they receive, the more likely it is that they'll feel this is an organized lobbying campaign instead of something from the grass roots. You want people to think your letter is genuine, so proceed accordingly. A relatively small number of sincere, well-written, DISTINCT letters are going to be as effective as hundreds of identical screeds.
- Proofread. This should go without saying, but, judging by what I see on Slashdot, many of us have lost the habit.
- Write a paper letter. They know how easy it is to bat out an email, so they don't give them much weight. In any event, nobody has time to wade through the millions of emails they get, so they sit unread.
- You may even want to hand write it instead of using a computer. That will make it more of a novelty, and it will be obvious you are
/really/ willing to put in an effort. Perhaps "I have to write in longhand so Microsoft's goons won't get me if I do it in Word their spies in Redmond will get it." Okay, that was a joke, but you get the idea.
For this issue specifically, it might be worth checking out how controversial Microsoft Government has been elsewhere. If you want an idea of what this is going to look like, check out this article in The Register (UK) [theregister.co.uk]. You may also want to do a few more searches over there since there's lots of meaty material.Hope that helps.
D
Re:Um (Score:2, Informative)
Every district already has terminals availible for voters. How do you think you vote currently? All this would do is change the lever (hole puncher, pencil, chad maker etc etc etc) into a computer. Not much different than the current voting system.
2) An absolute secure system would need to be built. An online voting system would be priority one for most hackers.
I'm sure any system that we would trust secret government communiqués to, we can trust our vote.
3) A system for insuring that people are who they say they are would be needed. Bioinformatics would have to be involved. Otherwise what is to stop somebody from selling their votes?
Don't you see, that's what the passport would do!
Anyways, the real flaw with instituting a nationwide online voting system is that it's unconstitutional. The rules and regulations, the where, the when, the how of voting for the president is determined by each state. Theoreticaly speaking, a state could have one voting area in the middle of a land fill and the forms could be on paper, marked with crayon. The only reason it isn't like this is because that makes no sense to the state. States want their say in the government, so the more power they have voting wise, the more say they have. Hence they try to make it easier to vote.
Re:OK, take a deep breath... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:MS Navy (Score:3, Informative)
You're almost correct. Here's the story, at least how I remember it. I wasn't on the Yorktown itself, but I was on a similar ship and read some of the 'Lessons Learned' reports.
The USS Yorktown, CG-48, was to be the testbed for the 'Smart Ship' program. A major part of that program was converting the engineering plant (propulsion, electricity, water, etc) from manual to automatic control and monitoring. Most of the important sensors were wired into a central server, and control actuators were driven off of the same server. All other sensors would be read at periodic intervals into a portable computer and then downloaded into the server. The tools for doing this was a pen-based computer with a serial dongle. The idea was for the Engineering Officer of the watch to be able to control the entire plant from in fromt of a terminal, with minimal assistance.
Windows NT 3.5.1 was chosen as the computing platform because it was more mature and secure at the time than NT 4.0. A bunch of custom apps were written to control the various systems, and the back-end was a Microsoft database (I can't remember if it was SQL server or Access. Probably the latter, since most of the apps were written in Visual Basic). So not only was this system monitoring all of the engineering systems, it was also controlling them. Unfortunately, there wasn't much in the was of a 'manual bypass' on some of these system; they only took their input from the server.
Trouble came on a routine trip off of the coast when the guy who was collecting the period measurements accidentally entered an illegal value for one of the readings. When that value was uploaded to the server, no sanity checks were done, and as the server cruched through the data, a divide by zero occurred. Not only did this crash the software, it hopelessly corrupted the database. After several reboots, the technicians realized that the server was not coming back online on it's own, and started trying to do recovery efforts. All of this time, though, the ship was dead in the water because it's engineering control system was dead. There was emergency power, of course, and some systems were able to be brought up though manual means, but main propulsion was dead. After a while of fruitless effort to bring the server back up, the ship radioed to shore for tugboats to come out and haul it back in.
For everyone who is not in the Navy, having your ship towed into port is the biggest embarrassment that you can have. As a funny side note, one of the reports states directly that they should have been using Unix, not NT (Unix meaning Solaris or HP-UX, not Linux).