The Real ID program is proving to be a veritable sumo match of epic proportions. The calls are going out to kill it before it grows.

From the Baltimore Sun:

“No. Nope. No way.”

So exclaimed Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer of Montana when asked whether his state would participate in the federal Real ID program.

Frustration with this misguided, expensive and unworkable federal mandate also compelled another governor, Republican Mark Sanford of South Carolina, to call Real ID “the worst piece of legislation I have seen during the 15 years I have been engaged in the political process.” If Real ID has any friends in the states, they’re not speaking up.

This sentiment is now percolating through the halls of Congress. In recent hearings before the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, senators from both sides of the aisle were blistering in their criticism of Real ID.

Read on.

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Aurora, Ill., joins MetroFi cities turning down gear deal: Aurora, the city of light, the first electrified streetlit city in the U.S., opts to not buy the MetroFi gear. Along with all of MetroFi's other networks (excluding Riverside, Calif., operated with AT&T), June 20 will likely be the last day of service. About 160 of 600 to 900 nodes were installed in Aurora.

San Francisco paper wraps up MetroFi's shutdowns in their area: Ryan Kim writes in the SF Chronicle about the many networks being shut down by MetroFi around the bay. Santa Clara and San Jose are still looking at MetroFi's equipment offer. Neither city has complete coverage; Santa Clara is focused on some residential portions, and San Jose has some downtown service. Kim brings up the spectre of twice or three times dead Ricochet.

Santa Fe bypasses Wi-Fi health concerns: The city council voted unanimously to approve Wi-Fi service in libraries and city-owned buildings. This odd paragraph appears in the AP story: "Julie Tambourine, an advocate for the disabled and homeless, said after Wednesday's meeting that the legal analysis was flawed, because it didn't take into account those with diabetes, seizure disorders, respiratory ailments and other conditions that can be adversely affected by microwave radiation." It's unfortunate the writer didn't get a medical research in any of those areas to discuss that. I have never heard the strongest advocates of the view that EMF causes health issues mention any of those conditions.

Ostensibly this purchase allows JetBlue a faster and simpler path into operations. Whether it's worth it to JetBlue is hard to tell, except that they will likely be marketing this service to other airlines as a differentiator. It will be lower bandwidth than AirCell, but could be likewise cheaper and used for shorter-haul flights.

Verizon notes some of the technical details of their service's business status on a FAQ for their corporate customers, which has an oddly large amount of business detail. Verizon was obligated within two years of the end of the auction for the spectrum they occupied with their very inefficient narrowband analog service to cease operations on those frequencies. That date is about now (the certification of the auction results was close to two years ago), and Verizon clearly worked out the details to allow current customers to maintain continuity through the spectrum vacation and into JetBlue's hands on January 1.

As I noted a few days ago, a few sources had already tipped me that JetBlue's test aircraft with Wi-Fi onboard and email was using the ancient Airfone network, which is capable of slow dial-up modem speeds, rather than using the 1 MHz which could conceivably carry over 500 Kbps of data in each direction per plane.

This might not be everybody's idea of utopia -- and it certainly doesn't address the inherent value of privacy -- but this theory has a glossy appeal, and could easily be mistaken for a way out of the problem of technology's continuing erosion of privacy. Except it doesn't work, because it ignores the crucial dissimilarity of power.

You cannot evaluate the value of privacy and disclosure unless you account for the relative power levels of the discloser and the disclosee.

If I disclose information to you, your power with respect to me increases. One way to address this power imbalance is for you to similarly disclose information to me. We both have less privacy, but the balance of power is maintained. But this mechanism fails utterly if you and I have different power levels to begin with.

An example will make this clearer. You're stopped by a police officer, who demands to see identification. Divulging your identity will give the officer enormous power over you: He or she can search police databases using the information on your ID; he or she can create a police record attached to your name; he or she can put you on this or that secret terrorist watch list. Asking to see the officer's ID in return gives you no comparable power over him or her. The power imbalance is too great, and mutual disclosure does not make it OK.

You can think of your existing power as the exponent in an equation that determines the value, to you, of more information. The more power you have, the more additional power you derive from the new data.

Another example: When your doctor says "take off your clothes," it makes no sense for you to say, "You first, doc." The two of you are not engaging in an interaction of equals.

This is the principle that should guide decision-makers when they consider installing surveillance cameras or launching data-mining programs. It's not enough to open the efforts to public scrutiny. All aspects of government work best when the relative power between the governors and the governed remains as small as possible -- when liberty is high and control is low. Forced openness in government reduces the relative power differential between the two, and is generally good. Forced openness in laypeople increases the relative power, and is generally bad.

Seventeen-year-old Erik Crespo was arrested in 2005 in connection with a shooting in a New York City elevator. There's no question that he committed the shooting; it was captured on surveillance-camera videotape. But he claimed that while being interrogated, Detective Christopher Perino tried to talk him out of getting a lawyer, and told him that he had to sign a confession before he could see a judge.

Perino denied, under oath, that he ever questioned Crespo. But Crespo had received an MP3 player as a Christmas gift, and surreptitiously recorded the questioning. The defense brought a transcript and CD into evidence. Shortly thereafter, the prosecution offered Crespo a better deal than originally proffered (seven years rather than 15). Crespo took the deal, and Perino was separately indicted on charges of perjury.

Without that recording, it was the detective's word against Crespo's. And who would believe a murder suspect over a New York City detective? That power imbalance was reduced only because Crespo was smart enough to press the "record" button on his MP3 player. Why aren't all interrogations recorded? Why don't defendants have the right to those recordings, just as they have the right to an attorney? Police routinely record traffic stops from their squad cars for their own protection; that video record shouldn't stop once the suspect is no longer a threat.

Cameras make sense when trained on police, and in offices where lawmakers meet with lobbyists, and wherever government officials wield power over the people. Open-government laws, giving the public access to government records and meetings of governmental bodies, also make sense. These all foster liberty.

Ubiquitous surveillance programs that affect everyone without probable cause or warrant, like the National Security Agency's warrantless eavesdropping programs or various proposals to monitor everything on the internet, foster control. And no one is safer in a political system of control.

This essay originally appeared on Wired.com.

We were able to demonstrate that two of the most popular PEDs in the UK — the Ingenico i3300 and Dione Xtreme — are vulnerable to a “tapping attack” using a paper clip, a needle and a small recording device. This allows us to record the data exchanged between the card and the PED’s processor without triggering tamper proofing mechanisms, and in clear violation of their supposed security properties. This attack can capture the card’s PIN because UK banks have opted to issue cheaper cards that do not use asymmetric cryptography to encrypt data between the card and PED.

In addition to the PIN, as part of the transaction, the PED reads an exact replica of the magnetic strip (for backwards compatibility). Thus, if an attacker can tap the data line between the card and the PED’s processor, he gets all the information needed to create a magnetic strip card and withdraw money out of an ATM that does not read the chip.

We also found that the certification process of these PEDs is flawed. APACS has been effectively approving PEDs for the UK market as Common Criteria (CC) Evaluated, which does not equal Common Criteria Certified (no PEDs are CC Certified). What APACS means by “Evaluated” is that an approved lab has performed the “evaluation”, but unlike CC Certified products, the reports are kept secret, and governmental Certification Bodies do not do quality control.

This process causes a race to the bottom, with PED developers able to choose labs that will approve rather than improve PEDs, at the lowest price. Clearly, the certification process needs to be more open to the cardholders, who suffer from the fraud. It also needs to be fixed such that defective devices are refused certification.

We notified APACS, Visa, and the PED manufactures of our results in mid-November 2007 and responses arrived only in the last week or so (Visa chose to respond only a few minutes ago!) The responses are the usual claims that our demonstrations can only be done in lab conditions, that criminals are not that sophisticated, the threat to cardholder data is minimal, and that their “layers of security” will detect fraud. There is no evidence to support these claims. APACS state that the PEDs we examined will not be de-certified or removed, and the same for the labs who certified them and would not even tell us who they are.

The threat is very real: tampered PEDs have already been used for fraud. See our press release and FAQ for basic points and the technical report where we discuss the work in detail.