Entries Tagged "identification"

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Impersonation

Impersonation isn’t new. In 1556, a Frenchman was executed for impersonating Martin Guerre and this week hackers impersonated Barack Obama on Twitter. It’s not even unique to humans: mockingbirds, Viceroy butterflies, and the mimic octopus all use impersonation as a survival strategy. For people, detecting impersonation is a hard problem for three reasons: we need to verify the identity of people we don’t know, we interact with people through “narrow” communications channels like the telephone and Internet, and we want computerized systems to do the verification for us.

Traditional impersonation involves people fooling people. It’s still done today: impersonating garbage men to collect tips, impersonating parking lot attendants to collect fees, or impersonating the French president to fool Sarah Palin. Impersonating people like policemen, security guards, and meter readers is a common criminal tactic.

These tricks work because we all regularly interact with people we don’t know. No one could successfully impersonate your brother, your best friend, or your boss, because you know them intimately. But a policeman or a parking lot attendant? That’s just someone with a badge or a uniform. But badges and ID cards only help if you know how to verify one. Do you know what a valid police ID looks like? Or how to tell a real telephone repairman’s badge from a forged one?

Still, it’s human nature to trust these credentials. We naturally trust uniforms, even though we know that anyone can wear one. When we visit a Web site, we use the professionalism of the page to judge whether or not it’s really legitimate—never mind that anyone can cut and paste graphics. Watch the next time someone other than law enforcement verifies your ID; most people barely look at it.

Impersonation is even easier over limited communications channels. On the telephone, how can you distinguish someone working at your credit card company from someone trying to steal your account details and login information? On e-mail, how can you distinguish someone from your company’s tech support from a hacker trying to break into your network—or the mayor of Paris from an impersonator? Once in a while someone frees himself from jail by faxing a forged release order to his warden. This is social engineering: impersonating someone convincingly enough to fool the victim.

These days, a lot of identity verification happens with computers. Computers are fast at computation but not very good at judgment, and can be tricked. So people can fool speed cameras by taping a fake license plate over the real one, fingerprint readers with a piece of tape, or automatic face scanners with—and I’m not making this up—a photograph of a face held in front of their own. Even the most bored policeman wouldn’t fall for any of those tricks.

This is why identity theft is such a big problem today. So much authentication happens online, with only a small amount of information: user ID, password, birth date, Social Security number, and so on. Anyone who gets that information can impersonate you to a computer, which doesn’t know any better.

Despite all of these problems, most authentication systems work most of the time. Even something as ridiculous as faxed signatures work, and can be legally binding. But no authentication system is perfect, and impersonation is always possible.

This lack of perfection is okay, though. Security is a trade-off, and any well-designed authentication system balances security with ease of use, customer acceptance, cost, and so on. More authentication isn’t always better. Banks make this trade-off when they don’t bother authenticating signatures on checks under amounts like $25,000; it’s cheaper to deal with fraud after the fact. Web sites make this trade-off when they use simple passwords instead of something more secure, and merchants make this trade-off when they don’t bother verifying your signature against your credit card. We make this trade-off when we accept police badges, Best Buy uniforms, and faxed signatures with only a cursory amount of verification.

Good authentication systems also balance false positives against false negatives. Impersonation is just one way these systems can fail; they can also fail to authenticate the real person. An ATM is better off allowing occasional fraud than preventing legitimate account holders access to their money. On the other hand, a false positive in a nuclear launch system is much more dangerous; better to not launch the missiles.

Decentralized authentication systems work better than centralized ones. Open your wallet, and you’ll see a variety of physical tokens used to identify you to different people and organizations: your bank, your credit card company, the library, your health club, and your employer, as well as a catch-all driver’s license used to identify you in a variety of circumstances. That assortment is actually more secure than a single centralized identity card: each system must be broken individually, and breaking one doesn’t give the attacker access to everything. This is one of the reasons that centralized systems like REAL-ID make us less secure.

Finally, any good authentication system uses defense in depth. Since no authentication system is perfect, there need to be other security measures in place if authentication fails. That’s why all of a corporation’s assets and information isn’t available to anyone who can bluff his way into the corporate offices. That is why credit card companies have expert systems analyzing suspicious spending patterns. And it’s why identity theft won’t be solved by making personal information harder to steal.

We can reduce the risk of impersonation, but it will always be with us; technology cannot “solve” it in any absolute sense. Like any security, the trick is to balance the trade-offs. Too little security, and criminals withdraw money from all our bank accounts. Too much security and when Barack Obama calls to congratulate you on your reelection, you won’t believe it’s him.

This essay originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal.

Posted on January 9, 2009 at 2:04 PM • View Comments

Biometrics

Biometrics may seem new, but they’re the oldest form of identification. Tigers recognize each other’s scent; penguins recognize calls. Humans recognize each other by sight from across the room, voices on the phone, signatures on contracts and photographs on driver’s licenses. Fingerprints have been used to identify people at crime scenes for more than 100 years.

What is new about biometrics is that computers are now doing the recognizing: thumbprints, retinal scans, voiceprints, and typing patterns. There’s a lot of technology involved here, in trying to both limit the number of false positives (someone else being mistakenly recognized as you) and false negatives (you being mistakenly not recognized). Generally, a system can choose to have less of one or the other; less of both is very hard.

Biometrics can vastly improve security, especially when paired with another form of authentication such as passwords. But it’s important to understand their limitations as well as their strengths. On the strength side, biometrics are hard to forge. It’s hard to affix a fake fingerprint to your finger or make your retina look like someone else’s. Some people can mimic voices, and make-up artists can change people’s faces, but these are specialized skills.

On the other hand, biometrics are easy to steal. You leave your fingerprints everywhere you touch, your iris scan everywhere you look. Regularly, hackers have copied the prints of officials from objects they’ve touched, and posted them on the Internet. We haven’t yet had an example of a large biometric database being hacked into, but the possibility is there. Biometrics are unique identifiers, but they’re not secrets.

And a stolen biometric can fool some systems. It can be as easy as cutting out a signature, pasting it onto a contract, and then faxing the page to someone. The person on the other end doesn’t know that the signature isn’t valid because he didn’t see it fixed onto the page. Remote logins by fingerprint fail in the same way. If there’s no way to verify the print came from an actual reader, not from a stored computer file, the system is much less secure.

A more secure system is to use a fingerprint to unlock your mobile phone or computer. Because there is a trusted path from the fingerprint reader to the stored fingerprint the system uses to compare, an attacker can’t inject a previously stored print as easily as he can cut and paste a signature. A photo on an ID card works the same way: the verifier can compare the face in front of him with the face on the card.

Fingerprints on ID cards are more problematic, because the attacker can try to fool the fingerprint reader. Researchers have made false fingers out of rubber or glycerin. Manufacturers have responded by building readers that also detect pores or a pulse.

The lesson is that biometrics work best if the system can verify that the biometric came from the person at the time of verification. The biometric identification system at the gates of the CIA headquarters works because there’s a guard with a large gun making sure no one is trying to fool the system.

Of course, not all systems need that level of security. At Counterpane, the security company I founded, we installed hand geometry readers at the access doors to the operations center. Hand geometry is a hard biometric to copy, and the system was closed and didn’t allow electronic forgeries. It worked very well.

One more problem with biometrics: they don’t fail well. Passwords can be changed, but if someone copies your thumbprint, you’re out of luck: you can’t update your thumb. Passwords can be backed up, but if you alter your thumbprint in an accident, you’re stuck. The failures don’t have to be this spectacular: a voiceprint reader might not recognize someone with a sore throat, or a fingerprint reader might fail outside in freezing weather. Biometric systems need to be analyzed in light of these possibilities.

Biometrics are easy, convenient, and when used properly, very secure; they’re just not a panacea. Understanding how they work and fail is critical to understanding when they improve security and when they don’t.

This essay originally appeared in the Guardian, and is an update of an essay I wrote in 1998.

Posted on January 8, 2009 at 12:53 PM • View Comments

Jim Harper Responds to My Comments on Fingerprinting Foreigners at the Border

Good comments:

Anyway, turning someone away from the border is a trivial security against terrorism because terrorists are fungible. Turning away a known terrorist merely inconveniences a terrorist group, which just has to recruit someone different. The 9/11 attacks were conducted for the most part by people who had no known record of terrorism and who arrived on visas granted to them by the State Department. Biometric border security would have prevented none of them entering.

(Another option is physical avoidance of the border—crossing into the United States from Canada or Mexico at an uncontrolled part of the border. I know of no instance of this occurring (successfully), but it could. And, most importantly, there’s no cost-effective way to prevent it.)

In summary, border biometrics have some benefit! They are at best a mild inconvenience to terrorists—an inconvenience that the 9/11 attacks mostly anticipated. But that’s not zero benefit! It’s just negligible benefit.

Posted on December 12, 2008 at 6:21 AM • View Comments

Kip Hawley Responds to My Airport Security Antics

Kip Hawley, head of the TSA, has responded to my airport security penetration testing, published in The Atlantic.

Unfortunately, there’s not really anything to his response. It’s obvious he doesn’t want to admit that they’ve been checking ID’s all this time to no purpose whatsoever, so he just emits vague generalities like a frightened squid filling the water with ink. Yes, some of the stunts in article are silly (who cares if people fly with Hezbollah T-shirts?) so that gives him an opportunity to minimize the real issues.

Watch-lists and identity checks are important and effective security measures. We identify dozens of terrorist-related individuals a week and stop No-Flys regularly with our watch-list process.

It is simply impossible that the TSA catches dozens of terrorists every week. If it were true, the administration would be trumpeting this all over the press—it would be an amazing success story in their war on terrorism. But note that Hawley doesn’t exactly say that; he calls them “terrorist-related individuals.” Which means exactly what? People so dangerous they can’t be allowed to fly for any reason, yet so innocent they can’t be arrested—even under the provisions of the Patriot Act.

And if Secretary Chertoff is telling the truth when he says that there are only 2,500 people on the no-fly list and fewer than 16,000 people on the selectee list—they’re the ones that get extra screening—and that most of them live outside the U.S., then it is just plain impossible that the TSA identifies “dozens” of these people every week. The math just doesn’t make sense.

And I also don’t believe this:

Behavior detection works and we have 2,000 trained officers at airports today. They alert us to people who may pose a threat but who may also have items that could elude other layers of physical security.

It does work, but I don’t see the TSA doing it properly. (Fly El Al if you want to see it done properly.) But what I think Hawley is doing is engaging in a little bit of psychological manipulation. Like sky marshals, the real benefit of behavior detection isn’t whether or not you do it but whether or not the bad guys believe you’re doing it. If they think you are doing behavior detection at security checkpoints, or have sky marshals on every airplane, then you don’t actually have to do it. It’s the threat that’s the deterrent, not the actual security system.

This doesn’t impress me, either:

Items carried on the person, be they a ‘beer belly’ or concealed objects in very private areas, are why we are buying over 100 whole body imagers in upcoming months and will deploy more over time. In the meantime, we use hand-held devices that detect hydrogen peroxide and other explosives compounds as well as targeted pat-downs that require private screening.

Optional security measures don’t work, because the bad guys will opt not to use them. It’s like those air-puff machines at some airports now. They’re probably great at detecting explosive residue off clothing, but every time I have seen the machines in operation, the passengers have the option whether to go through the lane with them or another lane. What possible good is that?

The closest thing to a real response from Hawley is that the terrorists might get caught stealing credit cards.

Using stolen credit cards and false documents as a way to get around watch-lists makes the point that forcing terrorists to use increasingly risky tactics has its own security value.

He’s right about that. And, truth be told, that was my sloppiest answer during the original interview. Thinking about it afterwards, it’s far more likely is that someone with a clean record and a legal credit card will buy the various plane tickets.

This is new:

Boarding pass scanners and encryption are being tested in eight airports now and more will be coming.

Ignoring for a moment that “eight airports” nonsense—unless you do it at every airport, the bad guys will choose the airport where you don’t do it to launch their attack—this is an excellent idea. The reason my attack works, the reason I can get through TSA checkpoints with a fake boarding pass, is that the TSA never confirms that the information on the boarding pass matches a legitimate reservation. If all TSA checkpoints had boarding pass scanners that connected to the airlines’ computers, this attack would not work. (Interestingly enough, I noticed exactly this system at the Dublin airport earlier this month.)

Stopping the “James Bond” terrorist is truly a team effort and I whole-heartedly agree that the best way to stop those attacks is with intelligence and law enforcement working together.

This isn’t about “Stopping the ‘James Bond’ terrorist,” it’s about stopping terrorism. And if all this focus on airports, even assuming it starts working, shifts the terrorists to other targets, we haven’t gotten a whole lot of security for our money.

FYI: I did a long interview with Kip Hawley last year. If you haven’t read it, I strongly recommend you do. I pressed him on these and many other points, and didn’t get very good answers then, either.

EDITED TO ADD (10/28): Kip Hawley responds in comments. Yes, it’s him.

EDITED TO ADD (11/17): Another article on those boarding pass verifiers.

Posted on October 23, 2008 at 6:24 AM • View Comments

ID Cards for Port Workers

While I am strongly opposed to a national ID, I have consistently said that giving strongly secured ID cards to groups like port workers is a good idea. It’s happening in New England:

The scannable card serves as proof that a background check has been performed and it contains features aimed at preventing misuse. In addition to a photograph, the card contains a smart chip that carries a copy of the holder’s fingerprint. Port and delivery workers, cargo handlers, and other employees who must venture into sensitive or secure areas will be required to submit to a fingerprint scan before entering those locations. The scanning machine will automatically perform a match analysis with the fingerprint embedded in the smart chip.

This is a great application for these cards.

Posted on October 21, 2008 at 1:28 PM • View Comments

Me Helping Evade Airport Security

Great article from The Atlantic:

As we stood at an airport Starbucks, Schneier spread before me a batch of fabricated boarding passes for Northwest Airlines flight 1714, scheduled to depart at 2:20 p.m. and arrive at Reagan National at 5:47 p.m. He had taken the liberty of upgrading us to first class, and had even granted me “Platinum/Elite Plus” status, which was gracious of him. This status would allow us to skip the ranks of hoi-polloi flyers and join the expedited line, which is my preference, because those knotty, teeming security lines are the most dangerous places in airports: terrorists could paralyze U.S. aviation merely by detonating a bomb at any security checkpoint, all of which are, of course, entirely unsecured. (I once asked Michael Chertoff, the secretary of Homeland Security, about this. “We actually ultimately do have a vision of trying to move the security checkpoint away from the gate, deeper into the airport itself, but there’s always going to be some place that people congregate. So if you’re asking me, is there any way to protect against a person taking a bomb into a crowded location and blowing it up, the answer is no.”)

Schneier and I walked to the security checkpoint. “Counterterrorism in the airport is a show designed to make people feel better,” he said. “Only two things have made flying safer: the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers.” This assumes, of course, that al-Qaeda will target airplanes for hijacking, or target aviation at all. “We defend against what the terrorists did last week,” Schneier said. He believes that the country would be just as safe as it is today if airport security were rolled back to pre-9/11 levels. “Spend the rest of your money on intelligence, investigations, and emergency response.”

Schneier and I joined the line with our ersatz boarding passes. “Technically we could get arrested for this,” he said, but we judged the risk to be acceptable. We handed our boarding passes and IDs to the security officer, who inspected our driver’s licenses through a loupe, one of those magnifying-glass devices jewelers use for minute examinations of fine detail. This was the moment of maximum peril, not because the boarding passes were flawed, but because the TSA now trains its officers in the science of behavior detection. The SPOT program—Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques—was based in part on the work of a psychologist who believes that involuntary facial-muscle movements, including the most fleeting “micro-expressions,” can betray lying or criminality. The training program for behavior-detection officers is one week long. Our facial muscles did not cooperate with the SPOT program, apparently, because the officer chicken-scratched onto our boarding passes what might have been his signature, or the number 4, or the letter y. We took our shoes off and placed our laptops in bins. Schneier took from his bag a 12-ounce container labeled “saline solution.”

“It’s allowed,” he said. Medical supplies, such as saline solution for contact-lens cleaning, don’t fall under the TSA’s three-ounce rule.

“What’s allowed?” I asked. “Saline solution, or bottles labeled saline solution?”

“Bottles labeled saline solution. They won’t check what’s in it, trust me.”

They did not check. As we gathered our belongings, Schneier held up the bottle and said to the nearest security officer, “This is okay, right?” “Yep,” the officer said. “Just have to put it in the tray.”

“Maybe if you lit it on fire, he’d pay attention,” I said, risking arrest for making a joke at airport security. (Later, Schneier would carry two bottles labeled saline solution—24 ounces in total—through security. An officer asked him why he needed two bottles. “Two eyes,” he said. He was allowed to keep the bottles.)

Posted on October 16, 2008 at 4:32 PM • View Comments

Gait Analysis from Satellite

Ignoring the sensationalist headline, this is interesting:

By analysing the movements of human shadows in aerial and satellite footage, JPL engineer Adrian Stoica says it should be possible to identify people from the way they walk—a technique called gait analysis, whose power lies in the fact that a person’s walking style is very hard to disguise.

Video taken from above shows only people’s heads and shoulders, which makes measuring the characteristic length and rhythm of a person’s stride impossible. That’s not true of shadows, though, Stoica told a security conference in Edinburgh, UK, last month. Shadows, he says, provide enough gait data to deduce a positive ID. To prove it, he has written software that recognises human movement in aerial and satellite video footage. It isolates moving shadows and uses data on the time of day and the camera angle to correct shadows if they are elongated or foreshortened. Regular gait analysis is then applied to identify people. In tests on footage shot from the sixth floor of a building, Stoica says his software was indeed able to extract useful gait data.

The article goes on to say that using satellite images would be harder, but that the basic idea is the same.

Of course, this is less useful for finding individuals and more useful for tracking a population as it moves about its day. But some individuals will have more distinctive gaits than others, and will be easier to track. Soon we may all need to walk with rocks in our shoes.

Posted on September 9, 2008 at 12:22 PM • View Comments

Identity Farming

Let me start off by saying that I’m making this whole thing up.

Imagine you’re in charge of infiltrating sleeper agents into the United States. The year is 1983, and the proliferation of identity databases is making it increasingly difficult to create fake credentials. Ten years ago, someone could have just shown up in the country and gotten a driver’s license, Social Security card and bank account—possibly using the identity of someone roughly the same age who died as a young child—but it’s getting harder. And you know that trend will only continue. So you decide to grow your own identities.

Call it “identity farming.” You invent a handful of infants. You apply for Social Security numbers for them. Eventually, you open bank accounts for them, file tax returns for them, register them to vote, and apply for credit cards in their name. And now, 25 years later, you have a handful of identities ready and waiting for some real people to step into them.

There are some complications, of course. Maybe you need people to sign their name as parents—or, at least, mothers. Maybe you need to doctors to fill out birth certificates. Maybe you need to fill out paperwork certifying that you’re home-schooling these children. You’ll certainly want to exercise their financial identity: depositing money into their bank accounts and withdrawing it from ATMs, using their credit cards and paying the bills, and so on. And you’ll need to establish some sort of addresses for them, even if it is just a mail drop.

You won’t be able to get driver’s licenses or photo IDs in their name. That isn’t critical, though; in the U.S., more than 20 million adult citizens don’t have photo IDs. But other than that, I can’t think of any reason why identity farming wouldn’t work.

Here’s the real question: Do you actually have to show up for any part of your life?

Again, I made this all up. I have no evidence that anyone is actually doing this. It’s not something a criminal organization is likely to do; twenty-five years is too distant a payoff horizon. The same logic holds true for terrorist organizations; it’s not worth it. It might have been worth it to the KGB—although perhaps harder to justify after the Soviet Union broke up in 1991—and might be an attractive option for existing intelligence adversaries like China.

Immortals could also use this trick to self-perpetuate themselves, inventing their own children and gradually assuming their identity, then killing their parents off. They could even show up for their own driver’s license photos, wearing a beard as the father and blue spiked hair as the son. I’m told this is a common idea in Highlander fan fiction.

The point isn’t to create another movie plot threat, but to point out the central role that data has taken on in our lives. Previously, I’ve said that we all have a data shadow that follows us around, and that more and more institutions interact with our data shadows instead of with us. We only intersect with our data shadows once in a while—when we apply for a driver’s license or passport, for example—and those interactions are authenticated by older, less-secure interactions. The rest of the world assumes that our photo IDs glue us to our data shadows, ignoring the rather flimsy connection between us and our plastic cards. (And, no, REAL-ID won’t help.)

It seems to me that our data shadows are becoming increasingly distinct from us, almost with a life of their own. What’s important now is our shadows; we’re secondary. And as our society relies more and more on these shadows, we might even become unnecessary.

Our data shadows can live a perfectly normal life without us.

This essay previously appeared on Wired.com.

EDITED TO ADD (9/9): Interesting commentary.

Posted on September 9, 2008 at 5:42 AM • View Comments

My LA Times Op Ed on Photo ID Checks at Airport

Opinion

The TSA’s useless photo ID rules

No-fly lists and photo IDs are supposed to help protect the flying public from terrorists. Except that they don’t work.

By Bruce Schneier

August 28, 2008

The TSA is tightening its photo ID rules at airport security. Previously, people with expired IDs or who claimed to have lost their IDs were subjected to secondary screening. Then the Transportation Security Administration realized that meant someone on the government’s no-fly list—the list that is supposed to keep our planes safe from terrorists—could just fly with no ID.

Now, people without ID must also answer personal questions from their credit history to ascertain their identity. The TSA will keep records of who those ID-less people are, too, in case they’re trying to probe the system.

This may seem like an improvement, except that the photo ID requirement is a joke. Anyone on the no-fly list can easily fly whenever he wants. Even worse, the whole concept of matching passenger names against a list of bad guys has negligible security value.

How to fly, even if you are on the no-fly list: Buy a ticket in some innocent person’s name. At home, before your flight, check in online and print out your boarding pass. Then, save that web page as a PDF and use Adobe Acrobat to change the name on the boarding pass to your own. Print it again. At the airport, use the fake boarding pass and your valid ID to get through security. At the gate, use the real boarding pass in the fake name to board your flight.

The problem is that it is unverified passenger names that get checked against the no-fly list. At security checkpoints, the TSA just matches IDs to whatever is printed on the boarding passes. The airline checks boarding passes against tickets when people board the plane. But because no one checks ticketed names against IDs, the security breaks down.

This vulnerability isn’t new. It isn’t even subtle. I wrote about it in 2003, and again in 2006. I asked Kip Hawley, who runs the TSA, about it in 2007. Today, any terrorist smart enough to Google “print your own boarding pass” can bypass the no-fly list.

This gaping security hole would bother me more if the very idea of a no-fly list weren’t so ineffective. The system is based on the faulty notion that the feds have this master list of terrorists, and all we have to do is keep the people on the list off the planes.

That’s just not true. The no-fly list—a list of people so dangerous they are not allowed to fly yet so innocent we can’t arrest them—and the less dangerous “watch list” contain a combined 1 million names representing the identities and aliases of an estimated 400,000 people. There aren’t that many terrorists out there; if there were, we would be feeling their effects.

Almost all of the people stopped by the no-fly list are false positives. It catches innocents such as Ted Kennedy, whose name is similar to someone’s on the list, and Yusuf Islam (formerly Cat Stevens), who was on the list but no one knew why.

The no-fly list is a Kafkaesque nightmare for the thousands of innocent Americans who are harassed and detained every time they fly. Put on the list by unidentified government officials, they can’t get off. They can’t challenge the TSA about their status or prove their innocence. (The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decided this month that no-fly passengers can sue the FBI, but that strategy hasn’t been tried yet.)

But even if these lists were complete and accurate, they wouldn’t work. Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber, the D.C. snipers, the London subway bombers and most of the 9/11 terrorists weren’t on any list before they committed their terrorist acts. And if a terrorist wants to know if he’s on a list, the TSA has approved a convenient, $100 service that allows him to figure it out: the Clear program, which issues IDs to “trusted travelers” to speed them through security lines. Just apply for a Clear card; if you get one, you’re not on the list.

In the end, the photo ID requirement is based on the myth that we can somehow correlate identity with intent. We can’t. And instead of wasting money trying, we would be far safer as a nation if we invested in intelligence, investigation and emergency response—security measures that aren’t based on a guess about a terrorist target or tactic.

That’s the TSA: Not doing the right things. Not even doing right the things it does.

Posted on September 1, 2008 at 5:15 AM • View Comments

Flying Without ID

Seems like the procedure has changed:

Mr. Peters nodded, and then looked down at the sheet which I had filled out and signed. “I’m going to have to make some calls to verify your identity.”

I nodded.

He pulled out a cell phone. I had assumed that we would be going to some separate screening room, but that wasn’t the case. He stood facing the silver table, and I leaned back against it. So this was the dreaded interview. People walked past us with bags and luggage.

“Hello,” he said. “Security.” Long pause. It sounded like he was transferred. He said a number that I think had the same number of digits as a phone number. Then he said a shorter number. “No, she doesn’t.” He wrote something in small letters on the form. Then he spelled my name over the phone. “D-A-V-I-D-O-F-F. That’s Indigo Delta… yes.”

He looked at me. “What’s the name of a street that you lived on prior to your current address?”

“Inman.”

“Inman,” he repeated. There was a pause. “Where did you live in 2004?”

“Hmm…” I said. “New Mexico? I think? Maybe Massachusetts.”

He conferred with the person on the phone. “That’s fine.” He hung up.

“All right,” he said. “You’re going to go through full security screening.” He wrote “SSSS” in red marker on my printed boarding pass. He handed my form to one of the officers at the podium, and then gestured to the first screening line. “Right here.”

This only works if you’ve lost your ID, not if you refuse to show it.

Posted on August 12, 2008 at 12:33 PM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.