ChoicePoint Ant-Terrorist ID Card

From a newsgroup I monitor:


The New York Times published an article today about a new company, Verified
Identity Card Inc., which will: "offer customers an electronic card
containing data showing that they are not on terrorism watch lists and do
not have certain felony convictions on their records." Stephen Brill heads
up the new venture, with data aggregator ChoicePoint providing the data
supporting this effort.

The terrorist list that Brill talks about in the article is the SDN, a
publicly available list of people from the U.S. government. ( See the
"Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons" list at Dept of the
Treasury. http://www.treas.gov/offices/eotffc/ofac/sdn/) So, I need a card
to prove I'm not on the SDN? This is not the same as TSA's watchlist, and
folks shouldn't be fooled into thinking these "terrorist lists" are one and
the same thing.

I know the Privacy Act has its problems, but at least you can FOIA
documents under its mantle and see what's going on with the contracts, etc.

--Pam Dixon


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Venture to Offer ID Card for Use at Security Checks
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

Published: October 23, 2003

Americans hate to wait. But will they pay - and submit to security
screenings and even high-technology fingerprinting - to avoid the long
lines snaking behind checkpoints in airports, office buildings and sports
arenas?

Steven Brill is betting that the answer is yes. Mr. Brill, a journalist and
entrepreneur, will announce today a new company, Verified Identity Card
Inc., which will offer customers an electronic card containing data showing
that they are not on terrorism watch lists and do not have certain felony
convictions on their records.

If businesses, airports and government agencies sign on to the plan and put
Verified's card readers at security checkpoints, cardholders would be able
to zip through, avoiding the most thorough searches.

Mr. Brill, who created CourtTV and The American Lawyer and Brill's Content
magazines, joins a wave of companies hoping to fill a need and make a
profit as government agencies and businesses scramble to shore up defenses
against terrorism.

The card, he said, could serve as a more palatable alternative to a
government-mandated national ID card, which is opposed by privacy advocates
and the Bush administration.

Although the idea of a voluntary identity verification network is not new,
Mr. Brill's is the highest-profile effort to bring about such a system. He
has enlisted the Civitas Group as an investor. Civitas is a Washington
company headed by Michael J. Hershman, a security consultant. Its
co-chairmen are Samuel R. Berger, national security adviser in the Clinton
administration, and Charles Black, a former senior adviser to President
Ronald Reagan and the first President George Bush.

Other partners include Lehman Brothers; TransCore, the company that created
the E-ZPass electronic toll system; and ChoicePoint, a Georgia company that
will screen the customers.

Mr. Brill declined to discuss how much money he had raised or how much the
start-up of the company would cost.

He said that customer data would not be sold or shared with other
companies, and the system could not be used to track customer movements
from checkpoint to checkpoint. He did say, however, that the company would
probably alert law enforcement officials about an applicant whose name
appears on a terrorist watch list.

He also said he planned to seek an independent ombudsman appointed by a
privacy rights organization to monitor the company's privacy practices.

Those promises do not satisfy Marc Rotenberg, who heads the Electronic
Privacy Information Center in Washington. "I don't think it will
necessarily come as an assurance to most Americans that a Big Brother card
is being minted in the private sector and not in the government," he said.

He said that the system was probably unworkable. In any case, he said, it
would have to be developed and deployed in close cooperation with the
government, and would thus end up sharing many characteristics with the
unpopular national ID card. "If it walks like a national ID card and quacks
like a national ID card, it's a national ID card."

Matt Blaze, a cryptography and security expert at AT&T Labs-Research,
warned that a central database could become an attractive target for
subversion. "The card has to be almost perfect or it becomes worse than
useless, because it provides a single point of failure for multiple
security systems," he said.

Lawrence A. Ponemon, a privacy consultant based in Tucson, said that
managing privacy while providing accurate identification raises remarkably
complex issues. A flawed system could, for example, unfairly bar people who
should have been approved. Still, Mr. Ponemon said he was glad to see the
private sector tackle the problem.

Mr. Brill said that he got the inspiration for the company while working on
his book, "After: How America Confronted the September 12th Era." He said
that as he worked on the book and the security issues it dealt with, "it
just sort of hit me over the head that somebody ought to do this."

The cards will be linked to their owners through finger- and thumb-print
scans at security turnstiles. The network could be at demonstration sites
in the first half of next year, the company said. The enrollment cost would
be $30 to $50 a person, with a fee of a few dollars each month to maintain
the cardholder's information. Businesses, the company said, could buy the
cards to improve efficiency at their own checkpoints and to give their
employees the benefits of the broader network.

The biggest challenge, Mr. Brill said, was not the technology, which is
already fully developed for other purposes, but building the network of
companies that will recognize the card. They would have to install card
readers at building entrances or add the technology to existing turnstiles.

While some experts like Mr. Ponemon say that Americans are unlikely to pay
for the promise of added security and convenience, Mr. Hershman said he
takes a longer view. People might change their minds if another tragedy
occurs and tighter security measures create even longer lines, he said.

"The problem, likely, is going to get worse before it gets better."

 

Shameless bump for the night shift.