The government’s plans to institute passports with RFID chips were open for public comment since last February. The public feedback was overwhelmingly negative, noting concerns over both security and privacy. In an odd bit of irony, most of the public comment was posted in entirety on the State Department’s website — including name, email address, and phone number, and any other personal information included in the commentor’s e-mail or snail-mail submission.
It probably has been common practice for the government to make all public comments publically available. The difference here is that instead of having them sitting in some file room, where one would have to be very industrious and have a lot of time on her hands to go through them all, having them published on the web makes it much easier for someone to scrub the data in search any usable personal information. Another example of the failure of security through obscurity via the WWW.
[via Boing Boing]
MichaelZimmer.org 