What's next -- Passports? RFID's? Concealed Weapon Permits?

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Bob Rosenberg <bob () bobrosenberg phoenix az us>
Date: Sun, 06 Mar 2005 09:28:46 -0700
To: <dave () farber net>
Subject: What's next -- Passports? RFID's? Concealed Weapon Permits?

Dave

What's next -- Passports?  RFID's?  Concealed Weapon Permits?

Cordially,

Bob Rosenberg
P.O. Box 33023
Phoenix, AZ  85067-3023
LandLine:  (602)274-3012
Mobile:  (602)206-2856
bob () bobrosenberg phoenix az us

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In the ID Wars, the Fakes Gain
By WARREN ST. JOHN
Using Internet resources and sophisticated computer graphics software,
under-age
drinkers are forging drivers' licenses of startlingly good quality.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/06/fashion/06fake.html?th

..................

The New York Times
March 6, 2005
In the ID Wars, the Fakes Gain
By WARREN ST. JOHN

EARLY last month, after being shut down by the police for two days for
serving
underage drinkers, the owners of the West End, a Manhattan bar and
restaurant
near Columbia University, deployed a new weapon in their continuing battle
against fake ID's: an E-Seek scanner, a high-tech age-verification device
designed to tell a real driver's license from a fake in a simple swipe.

But if the arrival of this fake-ID devourer - its manufacturer makes a
similar
hand-held model called the Buster - was supposed to strike fear in the
hearts
of aspiring beer guzzlers in the freshman and sophomore classes at Columbia,
it
hasn't had quite that effect.

"Within a week I could be beating the West End no problem," said a Columbia
student who claims to have forged over 400 driver's licenses but said he
stopped for fear of being arrested (and wanted his name withheld for the
same
reason). "If you know how to use Photoshop and a simple Epson printer, you
can
print ID's in your dorm room."

The age-old battle of wits pitting police officers and bar owners on the one
hand against under-age drinkers on the other is as lively as ever, though it
has entered a new technologically advanced phase. Gone are the days of the
art
major down the hall who was a wizard with an X-Acto knife, a stencil and
some
super glue. Using Internet resources and sophisticated computer graphics
software, college students are forging drivers' licenses of startlingly good
quality, complete with shimmering holograms, special inks and data encoding
that can fool the police and even occasionally the latest generation of
scanners. To hear law enforcement officers tell it, in the fake-ID arms race
the kids are winning.

"They're definitely a step ahead of us," said Steven Ernst, the district
administrator in San Diego for the California Alcoholic Beverage Control
Department. "In terms of the color, the typeset and the hologram they're
real,
real good. Most can't be picked out by the naked eye."

While getting a fake ID is a right of passage for many young people who want
no
more than access to the occasional six-pack or campus pub, the potential
security threat posed by forged drivers' licenses - most prominently, the
threat of access to commercial airliners - has cast the old barroom conflict
in
a new light.

"People think of fake ID's for buying beer or cigarettes when you're 19,"
said
Sgt. William Planeta, who runs the New York Police Department's document
fraud
squad. "But it has a lot of different implications in a post-9/11 world. You
can use that fake ID to do all sorts of things."

In an effort to catch up with counterfeiters, therefore, the government and
a
growing document verification industry are turning to both legislation and
technological innovations. "We're going to give the fake ID a run for its
money," said James E. Copple, the director of the nonprofit International
Institute for Alcohol Awareness at the Pacific Institute for Research and
Evaluation, with headquarters in Maryland, which studies public health.

They are having some success, at least with clumsily forged ID's. With help
from
his Intelli-Check scanner, Paul Barclay, 48, the owner of a Boston club
called
the Rack, confiscated 600 fake ID's last year, including 13 in a single
weekend
night. Mr. Barclay said he pays his bouncers $20 for each fake they bring
in.

"It's a full-blown war at this point," he said. "We've come across amazing
ones,
where they've impregnated the back with legitimate data from someone else.
The
kids have gotten a lot more clever."

Scanners, though, are rare, and word quickly circulates when a bar gets one.
Web
sites like www.hotspotboston.com rate bars and clubs by the strictness of
their
ID policies, so under-age drinkers know which ones to avoid.

When it comes to getting a fake ID, students can be as discriminating as
they
are about the music on their iPods. Students shy away from fake licenses
from
nearby states because bouncers and bartenders are so familiar with the
authentic versions. They also avoid certain licenses, like one older type
from
New Jersey, that are so easy to tamper with that no bouncer worth his black
light would let one pass without a thorough going-over.

"ID's made by students tend to be much better than ID's you buy in the
Village
or Times Square," said a 19-year-old Columbia sophomore who has a fake
driver's
license and asked not to be identified for fear of the police. As for the
importance of having a fake ID, she said: "All of my friends have fake ID's,
everyone I know from high school and all my friends at school. It's
definitely
a necessity."

THE nation's fixation with security cards and ID systems has also been a
boon
for manufacturers of fake ID's. The widespread use of corporate ID's has
created a large pool of people who know the inner workings of the security
features in the cards. In online chat rooms dedicated exclusively to the
manufacture of fake ID's, unscrupulous members of this pool - including some
drivers' license bureau workers, the police say - share or sell information
about security features and even run a black market in the more
sophisticated
components of ID's.

"There are guys online who manufacture the bar codes and holograms," said
the
Columbia student who made fake ID's. "The hologram like on a Texas will
glow. I
can order that."

Some ID mills are offshore and sell online. Many sites purporting to sell
fake
ID's are scams set up to take advantage of gullible under-age drinkers, but
Michael Cawthon, the special agent in charge of the Nashville district of
the
Tennessee Alcoholic Beverage Commission, said that others offer forgeries of
drivers' licenses. Mr. Cawthon said some offshore counterfeiting outfits
solicit students to market for them on campuses and even conduct background
checks on their American liaisons to make sure they are not the law.

"The Internet stuff is beginning to kill us," he said.

For students who prefer to make their own ID's, the Web offers all the raw
materials. High-quality graphics templates for most state drivers' licenses
-
with accurate renderings of intricate background patterns and color schemes
-
can be found online. High-tech driver's license plastics and laminates that
were once available only to drivers' license bureaus are now easily
available
online as well at legitimate office supply sites and specialty sites.

Once counterfeiters have compiled the necessary raw materials for a
convincing
fake, they get photographs from their customers, which are easily taken in a
dorm room with a Web cam. Then they fill in the personal information on the
template with a computer, assemble the pieces and laminate them.
High-quality
fake ID's can cost $50 to $200. Once college students have gone through all
this trouble for a fake ID, they seldom make just one.

"It's not unusual to bust a counterfeiter who has made over 10,000 falsified
documents," said Maj. David Myers of the Florida Alcoholic Beverages and
Tobacco Division.

> From the under-age drinker's point of view - and, the police would add, the
terrorist's - the holy grail of fake ID's is an authentic driver's license
issued to someone presenting a bogus or borrowed birth certificate or Social
Security card. Short of that, discriminating buyers of fake ID's want forged
licenses that are properly encoded and can pass muster with a scanner.

Licenses store information in two formats: magnetic stripes like those on
credit
cards, and two-dimensional bar codes, strips of small dots arranged to
convey
information in a kind of graphic Morse code. Magnetic stripes can be erased
with a magnet and reprogrammed with, say, a new birth date, using basic
ID-making equipment, and bar codes can be photocopied or transferred from a
legitimate ID to a fake one.

While a careful bouncer or police officer might figure out such ruses by
comparing the information from the data strip to that on the front of the
ID,
most don't bother. Instead, scanners search the encoded strips for a birth
date
and issue a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down on whether the cardholder is the
legal
drinking age.

"All it tells you is if the age is older than 21 or not," said the former ID
maker at Columbia. "You just have them all programmed over 21."

PENALTIES for possessing and making fake ID's vary from state to state. In
New
York possession of a fake driver's license is a felony punishable by up to
seven years. Often when the police encounter a fake ID these days, they are
more interested in getting information on who made it than in prosecuting
the
under-age user.

That was the case in Louisiana in late 2003, when a 19-year-old L.S.U.
student
named Corey James Domingue died of acute alcohol poisoning after using a
fake
Texas driver's license to buy four fifths of liquor from a local Winn-Dixie
supermarket. By questioning Mr. Domingue's roommate and friends with similar
forged ID's, Louisiana authorities were able to unravel a high-tech ring
that
had issued thousands of counterfeit licenses.

"These kids built their own computers from scratch," said Steven E.
Spalitta,
the enforcement director of the Louisiana Office of Alcohol and Tobacco
Control, who handled the case. "We learned the ID's were not just perfect
but
they were encoded. There's almost no way you can tell it's a fake with the
naked eye."

In all, five people pleaded guilty to forgery and a sixth is facing trial.
Using
computer records Mr. Spalitta's agency also tracked down and issued hundreds
of
criminal citations to students who bought fake ID's from the ring.

Mr. Spalitta said that finding the violators was easier than he had
anticipated.
"The students used their personal information" on the fakes, he said. "The
only
thing they changed were their addresses and their dates of birth."

Mr. Copple, of the Pacific Institute, said that in the coming year a variety
of
changes could make getting away with a fake ID tougher.

Some states will begin using new watermark technology akin to that used on
currency for drivers' licenses next year. This spring the United States
Senate
is expected to vote on a bill already passed by the House that would require
states to standardize the format of the data encoded on the backs of
drivers'
licenses, making it easier to scan them. Software companies are rushing to
develop verification programs for scanners that can be updated in real time,
not unlike antivirus software, in response to evolving forgery techniques.

While the backers of these efforts say they herald the demise of the fake
ID,
officers on the beat have doubts.

"They find a loophole and exploit it," said Sergeant Planeta of the New York
document fraud squad, which has arrested 90 people for faking documents
since
its formation last year. "We plug it, and they find their way around it. And
it
goes back and forth."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company



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