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Links: Database Privacy and Stolen Passports
Posted by James Grimmelmann on Monday, August 23 @ 16:08:49 EDT Privacy
The New York Times is running a story today about problems checking for stolen passports at border crossings (my apologies for the link format; the link generator doesn't like this story; there's always bugmenot). Interpol has been trying to get its member countries to check that passports they check aren't on lists of passports that have been stolen, but has been having institutional problems getting adoption. In some cases, privacy laws create trouble:
Interpol would like to be the repository for such information, Mr. Noble said, but privacy protection laws bar many countries from disclosing data from travel documents, even if the documents have been stolen. For such data, Interpol is developing a system that will send searches to databases in its member countries: if there were hits, the requesting party would receive a notice reporting which country had the corresponding record and the two countries could then exchange information.
Now that's just dumb. I consider myself a privacy advocate, but this is a case in which a centralized database -- here, of passport numbers that aren't valid -- would be more privacy-preserving than the current system, which is basically an active inducement to identity theft. Another choice quote from the article, though, makes me think that Interpol may have even deeper problems:
The stolen documents on file are a small fraction of those circulating around the world, but still, Interpol says member countries should check all issued visas against the database to see which ones were obtained with a false document. The list of 1.7 million stolen documents fits on one floppy disk.
Interpol is shipping data around on floppy disks?
 
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Re: Database Privacy and Stolen Passports (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Monday, August 23 @ 17:23:57 EDT
Interpol's problems are worse than that; if the list of 1.7 million stolen documents fits on a floppy disk, there's only room on the disk for the first 7 bits of each stolen document. Maybe as much as three full bytes, if they're using some wicked compression.


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Technical solution (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Monday, August 23 @ 22:25:31 EDT
Store a hashed version of the data which allows searching the data for a matching record, but not retrieving the data from any of the records.


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