ID cards and biometrics: UK govt publicity

[Owen Lewis]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ukcrypto-admin@chiark.greenend.org.uk
> [mailto:ukcrypto-admin@chiark.greenend.org.uk]On Behalf Of Adrian
> Midgley
> Sent: 19 May 2006 00:39
> To: ukcrypto@chiark.greenend.org.uk
> Subject: Re: ID cards and biometrics: UK govt publicity
>
>
> Peter Tomlinson wrote:
>
> > Katherine Courtney, the programme's director, and Ian Watmore, the
> > government's chief information officer, were updating journalists
> > about how the card will be introduced, parliament willing. They
> > presented the process as a near-seamless transmission from current
> > efforts to improve passport security and to tidy up government
> > systems. There will be no big bang, Watmore stressed."
>
> Charlie Stross, whom I suspect of having a clue, wrote about after it is
> introduced, and how
>
> http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2006/05/17#id-card-3
>
>

It now seems sure that a ID card system will be introduced. n what Govt has
made public, it is reasonable to expect what that plan to introduce to be an
awful mess. It is quite unclear why they have decided that the NIR and cards
should be concerned with anything other than simple verification of the ID
of the holder.

Other than in rare cases, a persons ID never changes from birth to death and
this makes it relatively simple to create a 'gold-standard' database of
personal identity for all citizens and to protect it as well as Fort Knox.
If that can be got right, mush else of benefit both the government and the
governed would follow from it. Insistence of jamming all manner of other
information onto the ID card can only assure that the card contents are
never fully up-to-date and therefore correct in every detail. The greater
and more varied the range of data that it is intended to collate within a
single system, the more inevitable will become the failure of that system to
be entirely reliable. Further, the more complex such a system becomes, the
les likely it is that it can be made fully compatible with schemes in other
countries. Since to attain the greatest utility, an EU and than a global
standard for ID checking should be aimed for, the current over-egged pudding
seems to run quite contrary to a fundamental long-term aim of an ID checking
system.

There seem to be two possible scenarios:

	1. We get a change of govt at the next election. The Tories have sad that
they will kill off the complete scheme. Frankly, I do not believe that they
would; ultimately and in today's world to many benefits flow from
well-assured personal ID that to deny the badly needed improvement to ID
assurance would be positively Luddite and could not stand in the long term.
However, it is very possible that they would put a moratorium on the current
scheme whilst that took a long and hard look as the mess they would inherit.

	2. That election outcome regardless, the scheme ploughs ahead along the
current over-ambitious and inward-looking lines. If we are right is saying
that this will lead to a thorough mess, it will be a mess of such a
fundamental nature that a moratorium on large parts of the scheme would have
to be declared at that point anyway whilst it is slowly, painfully and
expensively sorted out. Since the mess could directly affect a large part of
the population, God help the party in power at the time!

Owen