5 days ago, the Norwegian Parliament decided, unanimously, that all
-citizens of Norway, no matter if they are suspected of something
-criminal or not, are
-required to
-give fingerprints to the police (vote details from Holder de
-ord). The law make it sound like it will be optional, but in a few
-years there will be no option any more. The ID will be required to
-vote, to get a bank account, a bank card, to change address on the
-post office, to receive an electronic ID or to get a drivers license
-and many other tasks required to function in Norway. The banks plan
-to stop providing their own ID on the bank cards when this new
-national ID is introduced, and the national road authorities plan to
-change the drivers license to no longer be usable as identity cards.
-In effect, to function as a citizen in Norway a national ID card will
-be required, and to get it one need to provide the fingerprints to
-the police.
-
-
In addition to handing the fingerprint to the police (which
-promised to not make a copy of the fingerprint image at that point in
-time, but say nothing about doing it later), a picture of the
-fingerprint will be stored on the RFID chip, along with a picture of
-the face and other information about the person. Some of the
-information will be encrypted, but the encryption will be the same
-system as currently used in the passports. The codes to decrypt will
-be available to a lot of government offices and their suppliers around
-the globe, but for those that do not know anyone in those circles it
-is good to know that
-the
-encryption is already broken. And they
-can
-be read from 70 meters away. This can be mitigated a bit by
-keeping it in a Faraday cage (metal box or metal wire container), but
-one will be required to take it out of there often enough to expose
-ones private and personal information to a lot of people that have no
-business getting access to that information.
-
-
The new Norwegian national IDs are a vehicle for identity theft,
-and I feel sorry for us all having politicians accepting such invasion
-of privacy without any objections. So are the Norwegian passports,
-but it has been possible to function in Norway without those so far.
-That option is going away with the passing of the new law. In this, I
-envy the Germans, because for them it is optional how much biometric
-information is stored in their national ID.
-
-
And if forced collection of fingerprints was not bad enough, the
-information collected in the national ID card register can be handed
-over to foreign intelligence services and police authorities, "when
-extradition is not considered disproportionate".
-
-
Update 2015-05-12: For those unable to believe that the Parliament
-really could make such decision, I wrote
-a
-summary of the sources I have for concluding the way I do
-(Norwegian Only, as the sources are all in Norwegian).
-