A Swedish rail line now scans microchip implants in addition to tickets | Hacker News Reader

A Swedish rail line now scans microchip implants in addition to tickets

nordic.businessinsider.com

24 pointsErwin22 comments

> For those brave enough to get an implant inserted into their hand, however, the time they save not standing in ticketing lines may be worth it.

There aren't really any ticketing line problems in Sweden. Anyone can buy their tickets online and have them delivered to their phones.

> SJ, a state-owned rail line launched in 2000

According to SJ's website the company was founded in 1856.

It would have been strange if Sweden only had railways since 2000.

· https://www.sj.se/en/about/about-sj.html

Sort of. It was founded in 1856 as a government agency. In 2001 it was turned into a company with 100% of the shares owned by the government.

Additionally, it's not a "rail line". It's the largest train operator in Sweden.

Rail line is like airline but for trains, perhaps?

Microchip implants are one of those things that invokes a visceral and immediate rejection and fear from the conservative, apocalypse-believing American Christians I’ve known in my life. It’s considered to be the fabled mark of the beast that biblical literalists will avoid at all costs. Some I know also staunchly avoid RFID chips in cards and other objects they carry on themselves (though, notably, not smartphones).

As a non-believer, I’ve always felt torn between wanting to poke fun at such a funny (to me) belief, and encouraging the drive to resist such implants because they offer far too much ability to be creatively abused by entities with—or seeking—power. When our political leaders cannot avoid helping themselves to all sorts of data and dubious practices to gerrymander districts, subvert democratic participation, target misleading messaging for power gains, and actively perpetuate starving the republic of a well-informed and reasonable polity, the ability to more efficiently and specifically target individuals for any purpose seems worth resisting, whatever the underlying reasoning may be.

I can always put down my phone or stop using credit cards. It's a lot more difficult to take out a microchip. But as long as it's not de facto required I guess it's fine.

It my belief that you should be allowed to walk around within America (or your country) without any form of identification.

Implanted rfid chips must be the most stupid idea so far.

It does not really solve any actual important problems, unless you are a cat, and introduce health risks and security risks instead.

In the past I would lose my keys on a painfully frequent basis, lock them in my vehicle, etc.

Similarly master offline backups of mine have been lost, stolen, or simply not available to me when I needed them most.

A few years ago I had two NFC tags implanted. I use them to open/start all my vehicles, unlock my front door and office doors, as well as store encrypted backup seeds for my cryptocurrency wallets and other private keys. They even allow me to use a vending machine at my favorite hackerspace.

I can lose my keyring and my wallet and have my home burn down and I still maintain access to all of my remaining physical and digital property.

Over the past few years I have not had to keep up with metal keys, and it has been a pretty great life upgrade.

I still use HSMs day to day for transaction signing, binary signing, password management, ssh, etc. to keep from exposing secret keys. I will be replacing these cases soon with a Vivokey which offers an implantable NFC powered secure element.

Implantable RFID tech is solving a lot of problems for me.

passwords are bad, but I like that someone needs to beat a password out of me and can't just scan or rip out my implant.

neither scenario is part of my threat model, so I get that my objection isn't practical/rational. but I'd prefer my important passwords stay in my head, and not my body.

I'd also be concerned about what I could be compelled to do with such a chip at a border crossing.

privacy as a moral imperative doesn't make my life any easier (I still lose my keys all the time), but I'm not quite ready to get chipped, either.

According various articles about methods Soviet and Russian special forces has been using to extract information from the heads of their victims only people with no feeling of pain can withstand it. The claim is that using a metal file against teeth works in 99% of cases.

I don't doubt this (though I'm interested in your sources!), but as I said I'm not making an argument of practicality.

passwords are based on consent, regardless of whether or not that consent is coerced handily by special forces. the difference between an FSB agent filing your teeth and a border agent waving their chip reader at you isn't one strictly of outcome.

If you value your unharmed body more than the password you still have the option to reveal it. With an implant your body will always be harmed against your will.

Why would the body need to be harmed? Any NFC scanner can read the encrypted content, and trying to remove it forcefully is likely to damage it.

Need to get through door. Rfid tag gets cut out. The owner is likely to notice that.

Picking a wallet will probably not harm anyone.

At that point why would an attacker not use a crowbar?

I think we have very differnt threat profiles...

Assuming someone scanned my implants, they will only get encrypted data. They would also need the high entropy passphrase in my brain to make any use of it.

Assuming my HSM devices are damaged, (Or assuming I manage to forget my pin 3 times be it accidentally or intentionally), It would require more than my implant to reconstruct keys to my password manager data is encryptded to should I forget this high entropy passphrase.

It would also require finding multiple individuals that all live in different countries to obtain the needed Shamir's Secret Sharing peices.

I know a lot of people in a lot of countries and I highly doubt anyone is going to be able to identify the correct ones much less have the legal jurisdiction to compel them all to reveal their SSSS parts.

It allows me to honestly say it is not possible for me to decrypt the needed data.

In a more probable scenario than government actors coming after me... if I were to suffer a head injury these individuals could help me recover my access. If I were to die, they can ensure my assets are made available to others of my choosing.

Having an escape hatch made of distributed trust solves a lot of problems.

late to reply, but thanks for the explanation. from the way you described it initially (car keys specifically) it sounded like no pin was needed.

Sounds creepy at first blush, but actually pretty neat. They aren't offering implants themselves, but just adding support for the implants that a couple thousand people in Sweden already have.

And this after having determined that out of the 2000 people only 200 will actually use the thingy.

I see it as just a way (intelligent) to get talked about on newspapers.

I know that everything must start somewhere/somehow, but to implement a (I hope) complex and secure system over a national (though of course Sweden is a relatively small country by population) railline with an expected number of customers of 200 sounds hardly as something making any economical sense, the current "electronic tickets" on smartphone as similar work AFAIK just fine, besides traditional paper ones.

This is what will usher in the age of transhumanism and the singularity - not the quest for knowledge or the relentless march of technological progress but the convenience of not waiting in line.

While this might provide short term convenience, we lack the human ethics and the engineering discipline for this not to be abused. And even if we addressed these challenges, a regressive authoritarian government or an emergent superintelligence would instantly have a fast and efficient mechanism to dominate society.

Hell no.

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