Hacker News Reader

Comment by bananapub | Hacker News Reader

Let’s not normalise using your phone, containing all your secrets, as ID. And especially not interacting with it in front of unrestrained representatives of state authority.

Just carry a bit of inert - as inert as possible - plastic instead

View on HN

You don't have to share your phone, or its secrets, to use this. At the TSA checkpoint, there's a screen that says specifically what information they're asking for, you tap, and your phone shares that. You never lose physical control of your phone. No one even looks at the screen. It's basically tap-to-pay for authentication.

Personally, I fully expect this to gradually become the primary method by which all ID is issued and used. Cell phones are already effectively mandatory to function in our society, so whether you need to target a protest of potential dissidents or an audience of potential customers, it's the perfect one stop shop for our newly emerging highly integrated state+industry power structure.

I had to get my license renewed the other day and I watched an older person pull out a 2000s coolpix digital camera and bring up a picture of the barcode on the screen on the back to sign in.

Which, I oddly had respect for.

Sony sold a passport camera that I’ve seen in use these days, and apparently still in demand:

https://www.ebay.ca/b/Sony-DKC-200-299-9x-Digital-Zoom-Digit...

Does the TSA have any authority to even access your phone? Sure with suspicion they could refer you to the police or something where normal legal standards apply. But they aren't DHS/Customs staff who in the past could demand devices for unloading.

These days, you'll have to keep the plastic in some kind of metallic sleeve. The RFID chip in US Green Cards, and I imagine passport cards as well, is designed to be readable from across a room.

But not from the phone, if you put it the wrong way around.

An iPhone can read the RFID but you have to know that it is NOT where the icon is, but actually on the backside of the hard thick page (or something, I forget).

> I imagine passport cards as well

As someone who has a passport card, I can confirm it definitely has an RFID chip in it. Ironically they come in a protective sleeve.

Did you ever try scanning it with one of those passport checker apps? I tried this morning after reading this thread and couldn’t get it to work

Reply on news.ycombinator.com