Remember the national ID cards the UK spent billions on, then forgot to distribute readers for? Well, there’s another bump on that particular road, namely that the security around your private information is about on the level of “cookie jar.” A hacker with a phone and laptop, hired by a UK newspaper, cloned the card within a few minutes, then wrote new content onto it: “I am a terrorist — shoot on sight.” Imagine if that showed up on the checkpoint scanner while you were going through customs. Guess it’s lucky they don’t have the scanners yet!

This is only the latest misstep in the unpopular and poorly-managed national ID program over there. It’s really simple, guys. No critical information should be able to be skimmed from the ID. If you must put it digitally on the card, there’s enough space in a 128KB memory chip to fit a picture, all relevant information, and have it all encoded with 128-bit encryption only decodable by proprietary hardware with line of sight.

And, of course, those fragile chips are so vulnerable to damage. Who could blame someone if the memory component was rendered unreadable… accidentally, of course?

[via Reddit]