lies, damn lies, Internet-statistics, and "sinister" EDI (fwd)

[a2@ah.com (Arthur Abraham)]

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> EVER FEEL LIKE YOU'RE BEING WATCHED? YOU WILL....
> Postal Service and IRS mull national identity cards,
> Clinton to sign orders
> 
> Digital Media has learned that the Clinton administration is debating
> not if, but how, to create a card that every American will need in order
> to interact with any federal government agency. Combined with two
> potential executive orders and the Postal Service's designs on putting
> its stamp on personal and business electronic transactions, the card
> could open a window on every nuance of American personal and
> business life.
> 
> The wrangling among the administration, the U.S. Postal Service, the
> Internal Revenue Service and Department of Defense, emerged into the
> public eye at this April's CardTech/SecureTech Conference. The
> gathering of security experts was convened to discuss applications for
> smart card and PCMCIA memory card technologies in business and
> government. The Postal Service, at the conference presented a proposal
> for a "general purpose U.S. services smartcard," which individuals and
> companies would use to authenticate their identities when sending
> and receiving electronic mail, transferring funds and interacting with
> government agencies, such as the I.R.S., Veterans Administration and
> the Department of Health and Human Services.
> 
> President Clinton is also considering signing two executive orders that
> would greatly expand the government's access to personal records,
> including an order that would allow the I.R.S. to monitor individual
> bank accounts and automatically collect taxes based on the results,
> said sources close to the White House. The collection service will be
> presented as a convenient way to avoid filling out a tax return. The
> White House did not respond to requests for comments about this
> report.
> 
> The Post Office: We deliver for you. The Postal Service's U.S. Card
> would be designed to use either smart cards (plastic cards with an
> embedded microprocessor carrying a unique number that can be read
> by a electromagnetic scanner and linked to computerized records
> stored on a network) or PCMCIA cards, which can contain megabytes
> of personal information. (You've probably seen this type card in
> AT&T's "You Will" ad campaign, which shows a doctor inserting a
> woman's card in a reader in order to access a recording of a sonogram).
> The Postal Service said it is considering AT&T and other companies'
> smart card technologies.
> 
> In a slide presentation at the conference, Postal representative Chuck
> Chamberlain outlined how an individual's U.S. Card would be
> automatically connected with the Department of Health and Human
> Services, the U.S. Treasury, the I.R.S., the banking system, and a central
> database of digital signatures for use in authenticating electronic mail
> and transactions. The U.S. Card is only a proposal, Chamberlain
> insists. Yet the Postal Service is prepared to put more than a hundred
> million of the cards in citizens' pockets within months of
> administration approval, he said.
> 
> "We've been trying to convince people [in the different agencies] to do
> just one card, otherwise, we're going to end up with two or three
> cards," said Chamberlain. He said in addition to the healthcare card
> proposed by President Clinton last year, various government agencies
> are forwarding plans for a personal records card and a transactions (or
> "e-purse") card. Chamberlain said the I.R.S  in particular is pursuing
> plans for an identity card for taxpayers.
> 
> Don't leave home without it. Though he did not name the U.S. Card at
> the time, Postmaster General Marvin Runyon suggested that the Postal
> Service offer electronic mail certification services during testimony
> before the Senate Governmental Affairs Subcommittee in March. The
> proposal is clearly intended as a way to sustain the Postal Service's
> national role in the information age, since it would give the agency a
> role in virtually every legally-binding electronic transaction made by
> U.S. citizens.  For instance:
> 
> * When sending or receiving electronic mail, U.S. Card users would be
> able to check the authenticity of a digital signature to screen out
> impostors.
> * Banking transactions (notably credit card purchases) that depend on
> authentication of the participants identities and an audit trail, would
> be registered in Postal Service systems.
> * Veterans, or for that matter college students and welfare recipients,
> could check their federal benefits using the identification data on their
> U.S. Cards.
> * Visitors to an emergency room would have instant access to medical
> records at other hospitals, as well as their health insurance
> information.
> 
> These examples may seem benign separately, but collectively they
> paint a picture of a citizen's or business's existence that could be
> meddlesome at best and downright totalitarian at worst. Will buying a
> book at a gay bookstore with a credit card that authenticates the
> transaction through the Postal Service open a Naval officer up to court
> marshal? If you have lunch with a business associate on a Saturday at a
> family restaurant, will the IRS rule the expense non-deductible before
> you can even claim it?
> 
> "There won't be anything you do in business that won't be collected
> and analyzed by the government," said William Murray, an
> information system security consultant to Deloitte and Touche who
> saw Chamberlain's presentation. "This [National Information
> Infrastructure] is a better surveillance mechanism than Orwell or the
> government could have imagined. This goddamned thing is so
> pervasive and the propensity to connect to it is so great that it's
> unstoppable."
> 
> Deep Roots; Deep Pockets; Long History. Chamberlain said the Postal
> Service has been working for "a couple years" on the information
> system to back up the U.S. Card. He said the project was initiated by
> the Department of Defense, which wanted a civilian agency to create a
> national electronic communications certification authority that could
> be connected to its Defense Messaging System. Chamberlain said the
> Postal Service has also consulted with the National Security Agency,
> proponents of the Clipper encryption chip which hides the contents of
> messages from all but government agencies, like law enforcement. The
> National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Ames Research
> Laboratories in Mountain View, Calif. carried out the research and
> development work for Clipper.
> 
> "We're designing a national framework for supporting business-quality
> authentication," said John Yin, the engineer heading up the U.S. Card-
> related research for NASA Ames' advanced networking applications
> group. "This is not specifically with just the Postal Service. We'll be
> offering services to other agencies and to third-party commercial
> companies that want to build other services on the card." For example,
> VISA or American Express could link their credit services to the U.S.
> Card.
> 
> Yin, who works on Defense Messaging Systems applications, said his
> group has collaborated with "elements of Department of Defense" for
> the past year, but would not confirm the participation of the National
> Security Agency, a Department of Defense agency. The NSA is
> specifically prohibited from creating public encryption systems by the
> Computer Security Act of 1987. Yin also would not comment on the
> budget for the project, which other sources said was quite large and
> has spanned more than two years.
> 
> A false sense of security? According to Yin, the cards would allow
> individuals or businesses to choose any encryption technology. "It's not
> our approach to say, 'Here's the standard, take it our leave it,'" he said.
> "We're not trying to create a monopoly, rather it's an infrastructure for
> interoperability on which a whole variety of services can be built." Yet,
> NASA, which is a participant in the CommerceNet electric marketplace
> consortium will "suggest" to its partners that they adopt the U.S. Card
> certification infrastructure, he said.
> 
> The reality is that government agencies' buying power usually drives
> the market to adopt a particular technology Q not unlike the way the
> Texas Board of Education, the largest single purchaser of textbooks in
> the U.S., sets the standard for the content of American classroom
> curricula. Since, the administration has already mandated use of
> Clipper and its data-oriented sibling, the Tesserae chip, in federal
> systems it's fairly certain that the law enforcement-endorsed chips will
> find their way into most, if not all, U.S. Cards. Even in the unlikely
> event that one government agency should weather the pressure and
> pass on the Clipper chip, it's still possible to trace the source,
> destination, duration and time of transactions conducted between
> Clippered and non-Clippered devices.
> 
> "Most of this shift [in privacy policy] is apparently being done by
> executive order at the initiative of bureaucracy, and without any
> Congressional oversight or Congressional concurrence, " Murray said.
> "They are not likely to fail. You know, Orwell said that bureaucrats,
> simply doing what bureaucrats do, without motivation or intent, will
> use technology to enslave the people."
> 
> EDITOR'S NOTE: Digital Media has filed a Freedom of Information
> Act request for Clinton and Bush Administration, Postal Service, NSA,
> Department of Defense, NASA, I.R.S. and other documents related to
> the creation of the U.S. Card proposal.
> 
>  -- Mitch Ratcliffe, Editor-in-Chief
> Digital Media: A Seybold Report
> 444 De Haro St., Suite 128
> San Francisco, CA 94107
> (415) 575-3775, 3780 fax
> Internet: dmedia@netcom.com
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> Copyright 1994 by Mitch Ratcliffe and Seybold Publications.
> 
> The full text of this story is available in the May 9 issue of Digital
> Media: A Seybold Report (published by Ziff-Davis Publishing).
> Contact Digital Media on the Internet at dmedia@netcom.com. This
> article may only be distributed with the above information.
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