California Sen. Joe Simitian (D) has revamped his bill (SB 682), which seeks to limit the use of radio frequency identification chips on drivers' licenses and other personal-identification documents, the Los Angeles Times reports. The bill last month passed the California Senate but next Tuesday faces a vote in the more "business-friendly Assembly," the Times reports.
The bill last month received bipartisan support and no opposition from the electronics industry. However, a coalition of industry representatives last week wrote to Simitian to oppose the legislation, saying it would "produce law that will necessarily prohibit current and future beneficial uses and innovations not yet known to the Legislature - innovations that will save time, save money, and most importantly save lives." The letter added that there are easy ways to encode personal data to prevent abuse.
The amended version of the bill would forbid state and local governments from mandating RFID technology on drivers' licenses, student IDs, and health insurance and public library cards. However, the bill would not limit how private industry uses the technology, and the government could still use the technology in other forms of identification, provided it includes the following three identify protections:
• Information must be disguised with a unique identifier. For example, a person's name or address would be denoted by a number;
• State and local governments would need to encrypt the unique identifier to ensure that only people with a code could access the information; and
• The cards must not convey information to a reader until a password verifies that the machine is authorized to receive the data.
The electronics industry opposes the amended bill, although it does support a provision that would make unauthorized scanning of personal-identification cards a crime, the Times reports.
Paul Boylan, an attorney and legislative director for InCom Corp., a company that manufactures student badges with RFIDs, said Simitian's privacy concerns are legitimate but misplaced. However, Nicole Ozer, policy director with the Northern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said, "The government shouldn't be forcing people to carry documents that are going to broadcast their identity" (Vogel, Los Angeles Times, 6/22).