Identity Theft Check

The internet is practically in every home in Britten and online purchases becoming more and more common. Below I have compiled a short list of the different ways an id thief can steal your identity to help reduce the effects and increase knowledge of the various forms of online fraud.
Key logging – key logging is the process where a piece of hardware or software is installed on a user’s computer to capture all the key strokes made on the computer keyboard in the hope of gaining inputted usernames, pass words and banking information.
Website Pharming - Website Pharming is where a hacker will break into a legitimate site and redirect traffic to an identical looking fake site of their own making to try and get users to submit their personal details.
Viruses, Trojans, dialers and malicious software – these are generally programs that are designed to capture information or cause harm to a user’s computer and can contain smaller programs such as key loggers and browser hijacking scripts that redirect users to Pharming and Phishing sites.

There are many types of scams people will use to get your personal details, one such recent scam was a post on monster.com for the application of a sales manager which seemed very legitimate (and why wouldn’t it, after all it came from a well trusted source like monster.com) but after people had filled out the application form asking for names, addresses, national insurance numbers and mothers madden name, their bank accounts were cleaned out and identity’s stolen. As you may have guessed in this day and age where jobs are few and far between this elaborate scam is pretty low and as a result thousands of innocent people have to take very high fraud precautions, and gaining potential bad credit ratings against their names due to credit cards being applied for in their names.

There are many ways of storing a individuals identity such as the governmental ID cards ECT, but there is a recent innovation that actually implants this information under your skin. These ID chips use RF-ID technology, similar to pet tagging system that is currently used for cats and dogs, these ID chips are supposed to store all your medical records so doctors can just scan your arm and find all your recent medical history. Personally i am a bit sceptical of the new ID chips due to all kinds of information being implanted on these chips that you probably wouldn’t want everybody to know. Just imagine walking down the street and somebody who wants to steal your identity just walks past you with an RF-ID reader in their pocket and can capture all your details and you wouldn’t even know which makes it a very big security risk. The changes of everybody agreeing to have these chips implanted into them is slim at best, but even the thought of having these intrusive implants and your personal information so freely captured is just for anyone’s concern.

With terrorism on the increase, airports are steadily implementing new technologies to combat new terror threats. One of the new technologies recently implemented to combat terror is face recognition cameras and software. Even though this is a fairly new technology its pretty simple in the way it works. It works by taking a still photograph of a potential suspect and then comparing the image to a national database of terror suspects, however there probably more advanced version used in airports today, as i have heard of new scanning technology that uses a laser to map a person’s facial features, so there’s less chance of scanning errors. Although this good in terms of combating terrorism, it may prove cumbersome and time consuming to passengers at terminals if people have to be individually scanned.

Critics of the British identity card scheme suggest that they will compromise our civil liberties in the UK, that they will be too expensive and that they will do little to counter problems like terrorism (mentioned in a previous article).

There are also concerns that ID cards will cause tension within ‘ethnic minorities’, particularly groups that have been affected most by police stop and searches. Some people have even suggested that ID cards would force illegal immigrants to avoid contact with police and hospitals.

The government has tried to assure people that whereas the government does hold information about citizens, such as medical records and driving licence information, so do many private companies from supermarkets to insurance firms.

But the government emphasises that neither they nor the public at large have a system that proves who people really are without a wide margin for abuse and fraud.

Signatures and photo IDs are no longer considered enough in a world of hi-tech and often uncontrollable dispersion of personal information. The British ID cards, however, are intended to link biometric Person-Identifying Information, like iris patterns and fingerprints with the ID document itself.

It is hoped that this would make it nearly impossible for most criminals to impersonate other people for fraudulent ends, or to create entirely fake identities for similar purposes…

As detractors of the British ID card and National Identity Register have correctly identified, there is no proven correlation between the existence of ID cards and benefits in combating terrorism.

Terrorism, in this case, can be defined as the deliberate use of violence, or the deliberate threat of extreme violence, against civilians in order to achieve stated political goals. So by this measure terrorism becomes a definable and illegal tactic that private citizens, organised groups and even governments and state institutions can be held accountable for, instead of simply a subjective discourse about motivations where “one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter”.

How can ID cards combat terrorism then? Well that is the crux of the problem. In terms of stopping unexpected acts of violence (like a bombing of a petrol station), ID cards will have a limited utility and indeed the government hasn’t suggested that their introduction would be able to stop such ‘random’ acts of terror completely, simply because they ARE unexpected and apparently random.

What ID cards can help to do is to first weed out the varios radicals and militant demagogues who do not have legal residency within the UK. It is harder to hide within the faceless masses of British citizenry if all people are required to identify who they are, what their nationality-status is and where they live. Harder, but admittedly not impossible.

So there is an element of ‘keeping tabs’ on certain people, which could indeed lead to abuse if the insufficient check and balances are not put into place.

Turkey requires that all its citizens carry ID with them at all times and yet this had not stopped terrorist attacks within that country, as critics of the British ID scheme have pointed out. However, it is reasonable to suggest that as the system suggested by the British government is far more ambitious and technologically advanced than anything that exists outside of the UK and indeed as Britain as a country has a well established and very organised (some might say regimented) state infrastructure, it is possible that the British experience of ID cards and combating terrorism might be different from the Turkish one.

Besides anything else, Britain is much smaller than Turkey and has less places to hide – not that it is impossible for would-be terrorists to hide in the UK, rather that it would be hard for secret militias to train and mobilise within the UK than it is for them to do in such a large country as Turkey with so many areas of wilderness.

So the current absence of a definite correlation between ID cards and an increased utility in the fight against terrorism may yet prove to be circumstantial to the type of ID card and state in question rather than implicit to ID cards in themselves. Time will undoubtedly tell.