ID Card Ministers Won't Say RFID

When it comes to RFID, is MP Andy Burnham lying or drowning? If it's lying, then in principle the Home Office Minister is no more lying than other people are - the US Department of Homeland Security, the EU's Justice & Home Affairs Committee and impressive numbers of RFID, sorry, contactless, proximity chip vendors. But if he's not, the drowning act is pretty convincing.

For over six months now Burnham, pursued doggedly by MP and ID card opponent Lynne Jones, has been peddling the bizarre conceit that RFID and 'contactless' or 'proximity' chips are entirely different beasts. So, in July, he confirmed that for the UK ID card to be used as a travel document in Europe, "the card will need to meet standards established by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), which require the card to be contactless".* Presuming the information will not be moving across the air gap between the card and the reader using, say, smell, it's pretty obvious how that works, isn't it?

The contactless chips that will be used in ID cards and passports are amazingly like RFID tags. Place an RFID tag in the vicinity of a reader, and the reader can read data from it. Place an ID card or a passport in the vicinity of a reader and... you get the idea. Proponents and vendors of biometric ID however have noted that the general public seems to have some kind of privacy issue with the term "RFID", for some reason fearing that RFID ID documents involve them becoming tagged and monitored crates in the homeland security industry's supply chain. So, as Wired explained last year, the strangely RFID-like chips in biometric ID are instead to be called contactless or proximity chips.

And that's the brochure Burnham has been singing to Parliament from. He flew close to the wind in December, when he told Lynne Jones: "There are no plans to use radio frequency identification tags in ID cards... suppliers were asked for their views on the durability and costs of contact, contact-less, dual interface and hybrid cards. This survey concluded that a 10 year life for a contact-less card, incorporating a secure smartcard chip with a radio frequency contactless interface, was feasible." Got that? So the Home Office isn't using RFID tags, but is using a "chip with a radio frequency contactless interface".