Robin Wilton's esoterica

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23 Jan · Mon 2006

Going once... going twice...

Well, the House of Lords voted against the ID Cards Bill for a second time today. This time it was over the degree of compulsion which the Government intends. As I blogged earlier today, the Lord Chancellor reckons the the Bill's benefits will only start to click in if the card is compulsory. I suppose part of the intent here is to up the ante, so to speak, for anyone who tries to remain outside the scheme. The problem is that that extends responsibility for the security of the scheme extremely wide. For instance, when an applicant first 'approaches' the system to register, they will be expected to provide proofs of identity such as certificates of birth, marriage and the like. Fair enough, you might think --- who's got more than one of those? Well, that depends on a lot of things. Let's take a hypothetical case-study. Imagine a Register Office (the place where we are all supposed to go to get valid originals of these registration document) located in one of those Portakabin-style offices which were probably intended to be temporary a decade or so back. This Register Office happens to be between a Public Library, a petrol station and the delivery bay of a supermarket. All of these generate a certain amount of truck traffic, and one day a truck goes out of control and ends up parked half-way through the building. So the staff do the obvious thing. crate up all the files and documents and move them into the nearest council offices. Unfortunately, space is a bit limited, so they stack the crates in a corridor for the time being, until somewhere better can be found. A passing employee --- or visitor --- happens to see a crate with impressive-looking documents on the top, and lifts a couple of packets of them, only realising later that they are in fact blank birth certificates. As the Liberty white paper describes, this (opportunistic) 'preparation' phase is followed by distribution of the certificates (as the employee realises that they have a substantial value on the street) and subsequent exploitation, as benefit fraudsters start to feed the certificates gradually back into the system in the form of fraudulent registrations for Identity cards, most probably in a different area, through a different local authority. All this is hypothetical, of course, but it serves to illustrate the breadth of the problem which is generated by making an ID card scheme compulsory. That's not to say that a compulsory scheme can't be made to work --- but the cost of doing so spreads far wider than just the implementation of the scheme itself. So let me think; would the cost of preventing this kind of exposure be covered by the £584m forecast by the Home Office? Well, as these costs would be borne by every local authority in the country, it's clear that they would not. That level of implementation cost is, as they say, "left as an exercise for the reader".

Posted by racingsnake @ 10:08 PM GMT+00:00

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