Robin Wilton's esoterica

« The UK Identity Bill... | Main | Oh boy... it's as... »

25 May · Wed 2005

UK Identity Card Bill to be relaunched today

Link to BBC News article. The Home Secretary will today bring the Identity Card Bill back to the House of Commons. Apparently this is a version which has been revised to take into account the objections raised concerning the last Bill - although given the short time since the last attempt was withdrawn, and the fact that there was a general election campaign during most of that period, I find it hard to believe that the amendments will be either systemic or fundamental. And yet many of the objections could not be addressed without systemic or fundamental changes, not only to the Bill but to the Government's approach to the concept. Technically, it seems quite clear that the three major components of the ID Card architecture are extremely high-risk:

The system relies on smart card and biometric technology (the latter being still relatively unproven), implemented in the tens of millions of units and kept up to date with a corresponding re-issue process. Think of the investment Banks have had to make in systems and expertise to 'cycle' their smaller card-holder populations every 2-5 years;
It includes a centralised database of citizen data for all card-holders: controversial in principle; difficult to populate, maintain and secure;
The cards and database are of little use without client-side terminals to read and act on the ID data; but that population of readers doesn't exist, least of all in the citizen-facing public sector.

Further, if this were a commercial undertaking, one would be looking for a compelling risk/benefit case for going ahead, and trying to build a 'return on investment' model. As far as I can see, there is nothing to indicate that the benefits of the system can be measured, let alone shown to outweigh the cost. My previous posts on US high-tech security measures indicate there are plenty of ways to get this wrong. Let's see how different the revised Bill is - frankly, I am not optimistic.

Posted by racingsnake @ 08:10 AM GMT+00:00 [ Comments [1] ]

Comments:

It is still not to late to contact your MP. Labour is still shakey about this and the Tories are wavering towards objecting. With the current majority in parliment there is some hope that this can be stopped.

Posted by Chris Gerhard on May 25, 2005 at 10:19 AM GMT+00:00 #

Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat	Sun
« December 2009
	1	2	3	4	5	6
7	8	9	10	11	12	13
14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27
28	29	30	31

Today