[WSIS CS-Plenary] Friday 12th 11:30: PRESS CONFERENCE: WSIS: High privacy threat for the Civil Society

Wed Dec 10 14:46:17 GMT 2003

PRESS RELEASE,  Immediate distribution
URL: http://www.contra.info/wsis | wsis at contra.info

World Summit on Information Society: The personal data collection practises
in the summit is a threat for the privacy of the participants.
- -
Sommet Mondial de la Société de l´Information:Protection de la sphère
privée: Les participants de  la  société civile menacés par la collectes des
données personnelles.

La collecte d´information concernant les participants est en conflit avec
les  législations européene  et suisse ainsi que les principes fondamentaux
liés à la protection de la sphère privée
- -
Cumbre Mundial de la Sociedad de la Información: La seguridad de accesso a
la Cumbre pone en peligro la privacidad de todos los participantes.
- - - -

PRESS CONFERENCE, RUEDA DE PRENSA.

GENEVA PRESSE CLUB -  CLUB SUISSE DE LA PRESSE
Friday 12th December 2003 at 11.30 am
à « La Pastorale », Route de Ferney 106  à  Genève
http://www.pressclub.ch/menu/sub_menu/adresse_csp.html

GENEVA, 10th DEC 2003

An international group of independent researchers attending the Word Summit
on the Information Society (WSIS) has revealed important technical and legal
flaws, relating to data protection and privacy, in the security system used
to control access to the UN Summit. The system not only fails to guarantee
the promised high levels of security but also introduces the very real
possibility of constant surveillance of the representatives of the civil
society.

During the course of our investigation we were able to register for the
Summit and obtain an official pass by “just” showing a fake plastic identity
card and being photographed (via a webcam), with no other document or
registration number required to obtain the pass. The limited personal data
required to produce the fake ID and thus register was easily obtained - a
name from the WSIS website of attendees.

However this is only half of the story.

The official Summit badges, which are plastic and the size of a credit card,
hide a “RF smart card” [1] - a hidden chip that can communicate its
information via radio frequency. It carries both a unique identifier
associated with the participant, and a radio frequency tag (RFID) that can
be "read" when close to a sensor. These sensors can be located anywhere,
from vending machines to the entrance of a specific meeting room allowing
the remote identification and tracking of participants, or groups of
participants, attending the event.

The data relating to the card holder (personal details, access
authorization, account information, photograph etc.) is not stored on the
smart card itself, but instead managed by a centralized relational database.
This solution enables the centralized system to monitor closely every
movement of the participants at the entrance of the conference center, or
using data mining techniques, the human interaction of the participants and
their relationship. The system can potentially be extended to track
participants' movements within the summit and detect their presence at
particular session.

Because all of the personal data is stored in a centralized database, any
part of the database can be replicated locally, or transferred to future
events - for example the next WSIS Summit hosted by the Tunisian authorities
in 2005.

During the registration process we requested information about the future
use of the picture and other information that was taken, and the built-in
functionalities of the seemingly innocent plastic badge. No public
information or privacy policy was available upon our demands, that could
indicate the purpose, processing or retention periods for the data
collected. The registration personnel were obviously not properly informed
and trained.

Our main concern is not only that the Summit participants lack information
about the functionalities of this physical access system implemented, or
that no one was able to answer questions of how the personal data would be
treated after the Summit. The big problem is that system also fails to
guarantee the promised high levels of security while introducing the
possibility of constant surveillance of the representatives of civil
society, many of whom are critical of certain governments and regimes.
Sharing this data with any third party would be putting civil society
participants at risk, but this threat is made concrete in the context of
WSIS by considering the potential impact of sharing the data collected with
the Tunisian government in charge of organizing the event in 2005.

That a system like this gets implemented without a transparent and open
discussion amounts to a real threat for the participants themselves, and for
our Information Society as a whole.

More information is available at:
---------------------------------
http://www.contra.info/wsis
email: wsis at contra.info

================
Contact persons:
================
>>Ass. Prof. Dr. Alberto Escudero-Pascual, Researcher in Computer Security
and Privacy, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden (EN, SP) Tel:
+ 41786677843 , +46 702867989

>>George Danezis, Researcher in Privacy Enhancing Technologies and Computer
Security, Cambridge University, UK. (FR, EN, GR)

>>Stephane Koch, President Internet Society Geneva, Executive Master of
Economic Crime Investigations, Geneva, Switzerland. (FR, EN) Tel: +41 79 607
57 33

-----------------
NOTES TO EDITORS
-----------------
>>The World Summit of Information Society has contracted SportAccess, a
Company of Kudelski Group, as the main responsible of an integrated solution
for physical access control solution during the United Nations Summit of
Information Society. The MultiSAK system has already been deployed in other
meetings as the World Economic Forum in previous years and was globally
designed and developed by NagraCard and NagraID.

>>The procedures of how personal data is being handled during WSIS break the
principles of the Swiss Federal Law on Data Protection of June 1992 [2], the
European Union Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC [3] and the United Nation
guidelines concerning Computerized personal data files adopted by the
General Assembly on December 1990.

>>The Electronic Privacy Information Center [1] has an extensive news
archive and background material on the subject of privacy threats and
RFtags. Usage of RFtags in supermarkets, to tag products for purposes of
stock management and security, has already attracted oppositions on privacy
grounds by CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and
Numbering) [5] and has lead to campaigns for customer boycott of tagged
products [6].

REFERENCES

[1] Electronic Privacy Information Center Website about RFID Identification
http://www.epic.org/privacy/rfid/

[2] Swiss Federal Law on Data Protection,
http://www.edsb.ch/e/gesetz/schweiz/index.htm

[3] European Union Data Protection Directive,
http://europa.eu.int/comm/internal_market/privacy/index_en.htm

[4] Guidelines for the Regulation of Computerized Personal Data Files,
http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/71.htm

[5] - http://www.nocards.org/AutoID/overview.shtml

[6]The Boycott Gillette Campaign - http://www.boycottgillette.org/