Government panel slams ID card plans [purplecthulhu]

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Now even a government appointed panel sees the ID card/database state scheme falling apart, especially with the privatizing of biometrics collection.

It must be time to put down this David Blunkett fantasy.

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There are 12 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

Would this be like the government sponsoered, independent panel of experts who said they should leave cannabis a Class C drug? Bet so.

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What I was going to say.

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Quite possible, but it adds to the pressure and makes them, once again, look stupid.

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What annoys me is that having an identity card would be really useful. In my last house, I could prove to be five different people by collecting mail for them - insurance policies, pension plans, bills... - and then take those to all kinds of places to prove my identity.

It has happened to me that a place would not accept my (German) ID card, and asked for utility bills. Now that *is* a stupid system, and not everybody has a passport or driving licence.

But in insisting on tons of superfluous (and not overly conclusive) data, the scheme has been pretty much killed from the outset.

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I can see a place for a voluntary method of ID verification, like a passport, that would be generally accepted. There are ways to do this in a secure fashion. I don't like the idea that much as it still smacks of the nationalization of identity and could too easily be made compulsory by law or practice., but I can see the arguments.

The massive networked intrusive database bureaucracy that the UK government wants is way way beyond that and, as far as I can tell, has no real justification. It certainly won't stop terrorism, fraud, health tourism etc. and is likely to be more expensive than any of those. The people behind the scheme are either stupid, misguided or have a different agenda altogether. Hopefully they are now seeing this particular set of vultures coming home to roost.

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I can see the point for a non-voluntary ID card. I don't think it's inherently evil for a state to know how many citizens it has or where they live, and as I said, the alternative of proving identity with electricity bills... that's just crazy.

Britain already has a database and a method of issueing people with ID. Only right now a passport is voluntary. Expanding that to ID cards is neither here nor there.

And I fully agree - the kind of 'security measures' the government was planning on won't stop really determined criminals. The costs and the data security implications are frightening. With this country's track record of lost laptops and mailed disks, I wonder they're confident about _any_ data they plan to keep, sorry, plan to lhand over to the lowest bidding private firm.

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leaving aside the fact that some of us think it *is* inherently evil for a state to want to "know how many citizens it has or where they live", there IS a huge difference between a voluntary passport and an involuntary ID card. the difference isn't that between a passport and an ID card, which as you point out, is neither here nor there; it's between voluntary and involuntary, which differences are huge. not least among these differences is that, should i not wish to show my passport, i can feasibly claim that i don't have one. i could not claim that with a national ID card.

one reason why i care about this distinction is that really, truly, proving identity is a non-trivial problem, and one which almost never really needs to be solved. the problem that is conflated with it, which often needs to be solved, and which can much more easily be solved if it's *not* so confused, is proving that the person who right now is telling Bob that she is Alice, is the same person who last told Bob that she was Alice.

all my bank needs to know is that the same person who's trying to get the money out is the same person who put it in. all my colo needs to know is that the person who's trying to get in to access teaparty.net is the same person who originally put it there and who pays the bills for hosting every month.

you might say that the easiest way to establish these things is to establish absolute identity at both ends of the transaction. i'd agree with that *if and only if* it were easy to establish absolute identity. but since that is not only not easy, but extremely difficult, the conflation of the problems only misleads people into solving the wrong one, which being more difficult, is frequently wrongly, and this *weakens* our general security.

make no mistake: ID cards in an inperfect world make for extremely imperfect security. on no other basis than that, they're a bad idea.

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"is frequently wrongly" should read "is frequently wrongly solved"

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So they are going to allow the processing of sensitive data to be done by the lowest bidder?

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Of course - that's what they always do. Why they're surprised when such things go horribly wrong is astounding.

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It must be time to put down this David Blunkett fantasy.
I'm not sure it's quite time yet. If they axe it now in response to yet another expert report saying it's a terrible idea, then they've not really wasted very much money (in the grand scheme of things) and after a while the general public will forget about it. They'll look stupid for a short while, and in about fifteen years' time whoever's in power then will have another go at doing something like this.

Ideally, I'd like it to fail a bit more visibly, memorably and publicly than that - so that for the next fifty years it becomes political suicide for anyone to even utter the phrases "national identity database" or "biometric identity card".

Which isn't to say that I wouldn't breathe a jubilant sigh of relief if Gordon did turn round tomorrow and say "Yeah, it turns out it's a terrible idea, so we're going to shelve it - it was all Tony Blair and David Blunkett's idea all along" of course.

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Ideally, I'd like it to fail a bit more visibly, memorably and publicly than that - so that for the next fifty years it becomes political suicide for anyone to even utter the phrases "national identity database" or "biometric identity card".

Yeah, but it'd be nice if that happened somewhere else than here...

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purplecthulhu

Government panel slams ID card plans

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December