Iran's Latest Move To Stifle Dissent: Requiring ID Cards To Go Online

from the dangerous-ideas dept

For a while, Techdirt has been tracking Iran's continuing efforts to throttle its citizens' access to troublesome materials online. These have included blocking all audio and video files, and even shutting down Gmail, albeit temporarily. But stopping people accessing sites in this way is not the only approach. Here's another, from a report by Der Spiegel (original in German):

Iran's government is introducing a biometric ID card that will function at the same time as an access card to the Web. Without registration via "smart card" the Internet will be blocked for citizens -- an insidious strategy for monitoring the opposition on the Internet.

All Iranians over the age of 14 will be required to have one of these new ID cards, which will store a digitised fingerprint and other personal information in an encrypted form. Once these cards are ubiquitous in the offline world, it's only a short step to require them to be used everywhere in the online world too, which would effectively abolish all anonymity and privacy there.

Iran's latest move is a useful reminder that wherever they are used, ID cards or their equivalent can become powerful enabling tools for perfect online surveillance. Other oppressive regimes will doubtless be watching the Iran experience closely.

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Filed Under: free speech, id cards, internet license, iran

Biometric ID Cards Come To Britain... Biometric ID Card Readers, Not So Much

from the fingerprint-this dept

The British government's plans to introduce national ID cards that store biometric information about people have been causing controversy for some time. The first batch of the cards are now being issued to foreign nationals in the country, but Silicon.com has discovered that nobody has the equipment to read them. Neither police nor immigration officers, or any governmental body, has the proper readers to access the fingerprint information stored on the cards (which is perhaps why they've issued cops with portable fingerprint readers). Some people will probably argue that since the info on the cards can't be read, there's no privacy threat. Of course, all this says is that the government doesn't have any readers, but what about other folks? The recent story about the guy in San Francisco who was able to read RFID-enabled American passports and drivers' licenses with $250 worth of gear he bought on eBay highlights that just because the authorities that issued the cards can't read them, it's still possible that others can.

Filed Under: biometrics, id cards, uk