IdCards
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Afghanistan moves ahead with plans for national electronic ID cards
It doesn't appear to involve the biometric IDs that were first proposed by NATO, but the Afghanistan government has just announced plans to issue electronic ID cards to everyone in the country -- an undertaking that it hopes will be complete in five years. That admittedly difficult effort got off to an official start today with the signing of a $101.5 million contract with Afghan company Grand Technology Resources, which will apparently be responsible for producing the wallet-sized cards themselves. In addition to the usual identification, those will each contain a chip that stores the individual's drivers license, vehicle registration, signature and voting registration records -- the latter of which is particularly key, as one of the main reasons for the cards existence is to ensure "fairer, more transparent and efficient" elections in the future.
Germany slapping RFID tags on its populace for the sake of brisker bureaucracy
ID cards and RFID tags are similar in one key respect: they get a lot of bad press -- one for constricting civil liberties, the other for being a lousy security risk -- and yet are widely used around the world. It's fitting, therefore, that Germany has decided to marry the two for the latest version of its own personalausweis. Dutch company NXP has begun production of the requisite RFID chips for these new slices of plastic, which will roll out from the beginning of November this year. The Deutsch state sees a vastly expanded role for the modernized cards, including validating your identity for online shopping and communicating with your local authority (e-government, they call it). And, of course, your biometric data is loaded onto the chip as well, just to make things nice and neat. You know, we remember the good old days when identity theft used to be hard.
