ID Card Vendors Brace for PASS Act Changes

Vendors need to watch this legislation closely as it could possibly rewrite system requirements down the road. States have begun planning for new driver's license systems that are compliant with Real ID. Vendors should begin a dialogue with these agencies NOW in order to position themselves for any changes that may occur to their requirements. Vendors should also expect to see extended use of existing infrastructure should Pass ID become a reality. Costly and complex systems may not be needed as the timeline for the proposed Pass ID is narrow. - INPUT.com

PPJ : More on DNA Laminates

This in from the Proud Political Junkie

Forget about RFID. Oh, it will probably be used, also, but the Real ID cards the government is intent upon forcing us to have in order to drive a car, board a plane or enter a building paid for with our tax dollars may very well not even need RFID in order to positively identify each of  us.

A company called Applied DNA Sciences, located in Stony Brook, New York, announced on June 9, 2009 that it has, in collaboration with “a world leader in security laminated materials,” validated its proprietary SigNature DNA into “laminates typically used in travel documents, credit cards, drivers licenses and other government issued identification cards.”

So, the bottom line is that all they will need is a sample of your DNA and this can be laminated right into the Real ID card in such a way that your unique DNA sequence can be read by any card reader.

This raises the question, of course, of how they propose to get everyone’s DNA data, in the first place, but this may be easier than you think. Aside from the possibility of DNA being extracted from a blood or tissue sample when you visit your doctor, there are millions of people who have had DNA testing of various kinds done voluntarily, for seemingly innocuous purposes.

For example, there is a growing industry built up around the use of DNA by amateur and professional genealogists. I am among these genealogists, myself, in fact, which is how I know about it. In 2002, I founded the Rea Surname DNA Project, devoted to tracking the lineages of Reas (and all alternate spellings of the name) all over the world. The idea is to provide an extended means of finding one’s ancestry by matching with others who share the same common ancestors. Today, the project has some 100 or more members in the U.S., Canada, the UK and Australia. This is only one of literally hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of DNA surname projects that exist today, and is hardly one of the larger projects out there. The largest company that is used by these projects for DNA testing services is Family Tree DNA of Houston, Texas. The actual testing is done by the University of Arizona. FTDNA just handles the business end.

In genetic genealogy, as it called, there are various tests used, but the primary test, used in all surname projects to trace direct line descent from a common ancestor of the same surname, is the Y-DNA test. This isolates only the male Y chromosome and is expressed by a sequence of up to 67 “markers,” though the basic test uses only the first 12 of these markers. It is not, by any means, a complete genetic “picture” of the individual from whom the sample is taken. However, that’s assuming that only the extracted Y-DNA sequence necessary to genetic genealogists is extracted and the remaining DNA discarded or, at least, not used, which FTDNA assures its customers it is doing.

However, I have had some very disturbing doubts, not only about FTDNA’s true agenda, but that of all the other DNA testing services performing similar services. What if they are, contrary to the claims they’ve made to their customers, supplying the full DNA sequences of the people in their databases to the government or some agency of the government? What if, in fact, they are all actually fronts for the intelligence community? They will deny this charge, I am sure, but there are some additionally disturbing facts about Family Tree DNA that you should know about.

First off is the fact that FTDNA was founded by Bennett Greenspan and everyone on the FTDNA corporate staff is either an American Jew or an Israeli. Now, I’m not an anti-semite. That would involve being opposed to actual racial Jews. But the fact is that 99.9% of the people in the world whocall themselves “Jews” are actually descendants of the Khazars, not the Israelites. In other words, the Khazars adopted the Judaic faith, over a thousand years ago, and are “Jews” in name only. Their descendants make up the vast majority of those calling themselves “Jews” today. In fact, it would not be at all incorrect to say that the Khazarian Jews have completely co-opted the faith of Judaism, centuries ago.

Another aspect of the Khazarian Jews, also known as Ashkenazi Jews(literally translated as “German Jews”), is that they are the dominant force at work behind the New World Order. The Rothschilds were Ashkenazi Jewsand it was through the efforts of the Rothschilds that the state of Israel was founded after WWII.

Getting back to FTDNA and its Ashkenazi Jewish corporate staff, until very recently, one of the key staff members listed on the firm’s website was Max Rothschild, a geneticist by training and expertise. When I began to publicize this fact, just months ago, however, his photo and all mention of him quickly and mysteriously disappeared from the site without any mention or explanation. Infer what you will from that. Note that the page linked to Max Rothschild’s name above resides on a server that is owned by Ames Laboratory, which is run by the U.S. Department of Energy (the same folks who brought you such nice things as nuclear weapons).

Now, I don’t mean to single out FTDNA, though they are the largest, oldest and most popular provider of genetic testing services and, thus, the most influential, as well (they hold an annual conference for genetic genealogy in Houston, for example). There are others, as I have mentioned, and these companies are now quite numerous.

Among them is one that has been founded by, Anne Wojcicki, the wife ofGoogle co-founder Sergey Brin and is called 23andme.com. This enterprise is far more suspect, in my view, than FTDNA. It provides a range of services that extend well beyond FTDNA’s focus upon using DNA testing for genealogy purposes. Among 23andme’s services is the creation of a social networking scheme in which one can seek out others who match their DNA. The presumption is that seeking a genetically matched or genetically compatible mate is somehow superior to seeking one who possesses the character traits that one would find ideal in a spouse or partner. Note that the world’s elite have long been known for having an inordinate fixation upon genealogy, genetics, breeding and intermarriage between their elite family lines. In fact, this is precisely how Anne Wojcicki and Sergey Brin met. They deliberately selected each other as mates via a simliar genetic testing service, having never met each other before. Note, also, that both are Ashkenazi Jews and that Brin was born in the Soviet Union.

It is this social networking aspect of Wojcicki’s company that is most chilling, as it builds upon the existing trend toward social networking sites on the internet. Millions of people worldwide already belong to these sites (Facebook, MySpace and others being the largest and most visible) and there are now social networking sites for every imaginable interest group, as well as sites specific to various industries or professions or personal interests (even online gaming) that incorporate such social networking into their sites. This phenomenon is fast replacing the old internet message board paradigm. So, why not add genetic testing services to the mix? The trouble is, the genetic testing being done by 23andme doesn’t stop at the narrow band of markers used in genetic genealogy. In their efforts to find their members mates, 23andme uses the entire DNA sequence of its members. This is what is so chilling, because, that data, which is expressable by a simple string of numbers, can be encoded into anything – including Applied DNA Sciences’  SigNature identifcation coding, which, in turn can be laminated into any drivers license or the Real ID card.

These companies are now numerous and there seems to be no end to the growth of this “industry” that has sprung up around such genetic testing services. Each year, more and more people are having their DNA tested, for various reasons and purposes, and the common denominator in each case is that it requires a phyiscal sample of the individual’s genetic material, whether provided in the form of a blood or tissue sample.

In addition to these multiple voluntary means of gathering human DNA are those multiple compulsory means of doing so, such as requiring the DNA of newborn infants at all hospitals, or the requiring of DNA of convicted criminals, or the requiring of DNA samples from anyone stopped for a minor traffic violation. The number of ways your DNA can make it into some database somewhere has multiplied astronomically in the last decade and much of it, as I have shown, has been hidden and been made to look totally benign. But the fact is, if the government is to succeed in getting your DNA sequence laminated into the Real ID card, they will have to gather the DNA of everyone in the country. Period. They have to acheive this somehow, and these growing DNA databases, which have never been investigated or audited by anyone, may be the way.

SB 60 Passes Senate in CA

ACLU claims Governor Schwazenegger will Veto

BTC

Sacramento, CA -   SB 60, the California Real ID Act introduced for the 3rd consecutive time in January as identical legislation from previous sessions passed the Senate: 24 in favor, 15 opposed. The legislation has been vigorously opposed by ALIPAC, immigration and civil liberties groups in 2005, 2007 and now.     Legislations like SB 60 continue to move forward upon urges by DHS that security benchmarks must be met despite efforts towards a federal repeal of the Real ID Act of 2005.  

The repeal of the Real ID Act, supported by the Obama Administration, has made concessions for official federal purposes ascribed to State licenses by giving the nod to the PASS Act containing repeal language introduced Monday.

E-Mail Surveillance Renews Concerns in Congress

c/o NYTimes

WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency is facing renewed scrutiny over the extent of its domestic surveillance program, with critics in Congress saying its recent intercepts of the private telephone calls and e-mail messages of Americans are broader than previously acknowledged, current and former officials said.

TWIC Cards Come to Texas

c/o BiometricNews

A Newer Type Of Security Card

Texas And Security Revisited

Some time ago, I had written a Posting about the state of Texas implementing what is known as the "Transportation Worker Identification Credential" or also known as the "TWIC Card". I have also written about this type of Security Card in other Postings as well, and even talked about it in yesterday’s Posting.

The state of Texas has now implemented this TWIC Card, utilizing technology from Datastrip and the software component from a Biometrics/Security Vendor known as "Codebench, Inc.". With this Security Solution in place, the Port of Houston Authority (also known as the "PHA") has registered almost 7,000 people into this program.

Here are some details: "To comply with federal TWIC guidelines, all longshoremen, truckers, steamship line personnel, stevedores and vendors requiring access to PHA restricted areas must carry a TWIC card. To meet the April 15 compliance deadline, PHA initiated an aggressive outreach program through which authorities visited trucking companies to remotely enroll drivers using Datastrip’s mobile readers . . . Once back at the port, the data was transmitted from the handheld devices to the port’s existing AMAG Symmetry physical access control system (PACS). The PIVCheck Certificate Manager software checks cardholder data against the TSA hotlist twice daily and notifies PHA if a cardholder appears on the list." (SOURCE: http://www.findbiometrics.com/press-release/5978).

DPS Continues Obscuring Safety Features

BTC Comment:

It's little more than the length of a "tweet" but the safety features in the new licenses have much to do with a bar code and a conversion of your digital photo to face print biometric recognition. Those are the terms of the barter to include a digital photo on your licenses.

"But there will be a few security features not released to the general public," Lockhart said.

LUBBOCK ONLINE =Lubbock still sucks.

CATO on PASS ID

"They went to work. In meetings and telephone conversations with Senate staff, they spun the story that REAL ID was not going away. The “political reality,” they said, was that there was going to be a national ID program. The responsible thing to do, then, was to round down REAL ID’s sharpest edges - and free up those federal funds.

In exchange, the state lobby groups would wear down opposition from the nation’s governors and legislatures. If they could broker the sale of state authority over driver licensing to the federal government, they would lock in their role as lobbyists for the states on that issue." - Jim Harper for The CATO Institute

More on this damning report here: http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2009/06/18/the-politics-of-the-real-id-revival-bill/