The EDL Is Here and Privacy Concerns Remain.

Written by Christina Drummond

As I've written before, Washington state residents are the first in the country able to get an enhanced driver's license or identicard, which will double as an alternative to the U.S. Passport for land and sea crossings into Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean and Bermuda.

The ACLU-WA has listed out a number considerations for choosing between a passport and EDL. For those who care about their privacy, the key concern remains that the EDL contains an EPC Gen2 RFID tag that will hold a unique identification number assigned to you, and broadcast that number to anybody with a reader. The Department of Licensing acknowledges this and will send you a little sleeve to shield your license when not at the border.

By comparison, the U.S. Passport's RFID safeguards are much more robust. Tracking concerns diminish since a random number (instead of a unique one) is transmitted to folks reading the RFID tag.

And we're not the only ones talking about the lack of safeguards in the EPC Gen2 RFID tags.

• Recently, the Canadian information and privacy commissioners and ombudsmen issued a joint resolution of their concerns.
• Professor Magda Balazinska, a researcher with the UW's RFID Ecosystem research project and security expert Dan Kaminsky of I/O Active recently testified in support of HB 2729, a bill that would limit harvesting of data from driver's licenses. (TVW archive)(RFID Ecosystem blog post)
• The American Electronics Association (AeA) noted a number of privacy and security concerns about using this type of RFID in WHTI compliant documents, like the EDL, at the Radio-Frequency Identification Document Advisory Panel for the California Research Bureau.

Just remember, EDLs are not mandatory and you choose whether or not to get one. And if you want to do more to stop driver’s license scanning, take action.