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Biometric ID Cards Ready For Trial In UK
0ctal writes "Looks like us lucky Brits are getting ID cards no matter what... A 10,000 user trial starts next week. There's been a fair amount of debate on this recently, and it's been coming for some time, but live trials are sooner than expected. The trial is set up to evaluate three competing biometric products. Qinetiq, quoted by the story, are a government backed company set up to use MoD tech in civilian apps."
Flame me, but I don't see the problem. Big Brother's now intruding on my privacy snooping around in my personal data like my height and my iris scan? Are you realistically worried that our (free world) goverments are gonna show their true face and prune out all those with less than blue eyes? I for one welcome better security on my credit card (and other) transactions.
This is another article on the BBC that discusses the last time Britain had a national ID card scheme, back during World War II. According to the article, it was not concerns about security shortcomings or civil liberties that ended the ID cards so much as that "the system was expensive and difficult to administer, and offered few benefits."
>ID Plans: 2008: 80% of economically active population will carry some form of biometric identity document. Estimated cost of 3.1bn pounds.
Administering a system where over 50,000,000 people each have to hold an identification card to carry on their daily business is going to have many direct and indirect costs and benefits. The people of the nation, and the government meant to represent those people, should think long and hard about those costs and benefits before implementing the system.
And to think that before the last reshuffle I was complaining about Jack Straw (who incidentally is a dead ringer for the Demon Headmaster, for those of you who remember) and *his* erosion of civil liberties with things like RIP. (It's down to you to prove you *don't* have the key to decode an encrypted message? Wouldn't that be, like, guilty until proven innocent?)
It's a walk in the park compared to Herr Blunkett of ze Gestapo.
Regards,
Tim.
More to the point, he's literally the only person in the UK who thinks ID cards are a good thing and yet still they're being pushed through.
This survey shows that your assertion is wrong.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
I wonder why they fail to mention the other part of the consultation? Of the 10000 replies, 6480 were against ID cards./ 6020/6020.pdf
Also, this makes it sound as if the replies from the organised opposition campaign were not counted as real replies:
"Of the 5,000 people and organisations who responded formally to the consultation, 4,200 expressed a view. Over 60% of these were in favour. We also received over 5,000 e-mails from an organised opposition campaign. Over 96% of these were opposed."
http://www.official-documents.co.uk/document/cm60
The new ID cards will hold biometric details - facial dimensions, an iris scan or fingerprints
I guess if you're an blind Islamic female double-amputee then they'll have a few problems here.
If your blindness is due to cataracts, you've lost both hands, and your religion requires you to wear a yashmak at all times then will they give you a blank card or what?
In the long term, Isaac Newton wins. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. I'll show you mine if you show me yours.
If we have to carry cards, we can also carry card readers. If we have to show id, then the person requesting id also has to show id. We swap cards and read them into our respective card-reading wireless terminals.
Technology is neutral. When we sense that we are being outnumbered by a more organized ecosystem, there will inevitably be an organized defense. Organized labor was a necessary response to organized management. Identity will be no different. While there are fascist motivations for strong identity, there are many more economic motivations. Hence, there will be economic incentives for social organization around identity.
Their people will talk to your people.
Everyone needs "people" -- and the government is not "your" people.
MacDonalds use Colchester in exactly this fashion (to test new products) because if you average out every town in the UK you get Colchester. Having lived there this doesn't surprise me.
This is basically a socialist/communist move. Just because your basic rate of tax hasn't gone up, doesn't mean that this isn't a socialist government. Look at how much regulation (increased power of state) and how many more government jobs there are. At the same time, their relationship with business is interesting. As a government, they don't want to really deliver anything, as then a minister is responsible. So, business in that respect is fine. They also understand that if you don't suck up to big business, they'll go elsewhere (nice big fat grants etc). At the same time, small businesses are getting hit with more and more regulations that are a big overhead to them. Then again, a small business going under doesn't make the news like a large electronics company moving abroad.
Both Bush and Blair strike me as shining examples of why Universal Suffrage doesn't work. Personally I think you should have to pass an exam before you can vote. Only simple stuff like: "Who are the leaders of the 3 main parties?", "Who is the Constituional head of state?". Let's face it, if you can't answer questions like that a) you're not well enough informed to vote and b) you don't fucking deserve to be able to vote.
Sadly, universal suffrage is the only way to really do it. In earlier times, property owners could vote (more a hangover from feudal times). At that time, it probably had the side effect that only those with education got to vote. Don't worry too much, though. Most people who don't give a shit about politics vote less.
Volunteers, as in people who think the ID cards are an OK thing in the first place? Who will more likely than not give positive feedback?
Neil Fisher, from QinetiQ - one of the companies developing the new technology, said the public would want to be able to prove their identity to show they were not a risk.
A risk of/for what?
> The plans are designed to tackle identity fraud, which costs Britain an estimated 1.3bn each year.
> The government has said it sees ID cards as a weapon against terrorism.
I keep seeing statements like these over and over again but I have yet to hear an adequate argument as to how it works as a weapon against terrorism, identity theft, etc.
He said the biometric system proposed would end multiple identities and give a boost to the fight against terrorism and organised crime.
I hope I'm not the only one who sees how naive this statement is...
And lastly, considering these cards will be obligatory but not free of charge, I see them as nothing more than a money making mechanism for the government than anything else.
People say I'm crazy, I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes...
Go ask the Spanish government about the 800,000 illegal immigrants from Morocco living in Spain *without* national ID cards. ID cards are compulsory in Spain.
They *also* don't make a blind bit of difference against terrorist organisations, as Spain also found out to their cost.
It's pure myth that ID cards are effective tools against illegal immigration and terrorism.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
The government launched a consultation exercise in autumn 2002, originally planned to end in December 2002. Sometime in November, Beverly Hughes, the then Immigration Minister, stated in Parliament that they had received about 2000 responses, overwhelmingly in favour of a card.
Stand.org.uk issued a wakeup call. They basically said "If you have an opinion on this, please tell the government." They put up a form with a free text area which would forward the response to the correct Home Office email address. It wasn't a 'click here to register a no vote' form, just a way for people to communicate their views to the Home Office.
The consultation was extended to February 2003 (can't remember why), and closed on the 28th of that month. On 28th April, Beverly Hughes stated in a parliamentary answer that the government had received about 2000 responses with a majority of 2:1 in favour. Stand had counted over 5000 responses (note they did not know what proportion were in favour as they weren't tabulating answers, but they did know that over 5000 messages had passed through their form).
I wrote to my MP to ask where the discrepancy came from, and to seek assurance that my vote had been counted. The Home Office response was that Stand had in effect coordinated 5000 no votes, and they would be counted as one vote coming from one organisation. That is untrue. I have no affiliation with stand other than sharing a concern about my rights, and since stand isn't a membership organisation the same is true of all the other respondees. Funnily enough, they also reassured me thay my particular opinion had been counted. So much for consistency.
There has been little public debate on ID cards. The draft bill was announced (leaked?) on a Friday . This is being steamrollered through, regardless of what the population think.
(It's far too nice to stay in this afternoon. I'll check back later for any response. Ithought you might be trolling as AC, that's why I wanted you to log in).
Cheers.
Secondly, *everyone* has something to hide. Everyone. It may not be something criminal, it may not be something wrong...
Yup. The introduction of mandatory ID cards is something I'm happy to go to prison about. I'm not a criminal, I've "nothing to hide". But that doesn't mean that I'm willing to have the government poking around in my life. The introduction of biometric ID cards is a possible foot in the door for much larger things.
Al.The Daily ACK - Eclectic posts by yet another hacker
I recently wrote about this in a similar thread involving faked I.D.
Looking at this measure which, in the Pilot program, is voluntary but if successful is expected to become compulsory around 2014, I can see how the potential for abuse that scares advocates of civil liberties.
The problem with biometric data in an Identity card is not that the system becomes suddenly perfect and invulnerable: it doesn't. The problem is one that I think it helps for to be an American for you to understand and hate: our constitution works with the assumption that some conflicts are inevitable: people will make mistakes, or have such bad fortune that will make them so desperate that they commit crimes. Our founding fathers recognized human nature and accounted for it in the legal system and they built acknowledgement of this into our constitution with the fifth amendment as the perfect example.
The fifth amendment to the American Constitution precludes an accused person of being forced to act as a witness against himself. This is a voluntary limiting of the government's power in the interest of society; it is an act of self-restraint in recognition of the tension between two values: government power over the individual versus the efficient administration of criminal justice.
In a perfect world, perfect I.D. cards with biometric features handed out by a government of saints who could be guaranteed in some way to never, ever misuse the power that the cards would give them would be wonderful things.
Secure I.D. cards could do wonderful things in the right hands and in the right circumstances, they might make fraud and identity theft harder while helping in legal defenses by providing authenticated proof that x was in y location at z time.
The real world provides the possibility for things that tends to make American civil libertarians sweat. In the real world in which we live today, technology works to enhance the government's weight in any prosecution while simultaneously opening the door to people you've never met and who haven't asked your permission knowing things about you and potentially using that information.
The ubiquitous cellular phone is already commonly known to provide information on its owner's approximate wearabouts in realtime. Add to this a secure and sure I.D. that, in ten year's time, you will be required to carry (with a penalty of ten years in prison for carrying a fake I.D.) and you have a situation which comes closer to one of the things that the founding fathers would have seen the soul of and hated: instead of being forced to speak against yourself in court (making the job of the prosecutor, the representative of the state, easy) you will be indicted by the government's access to technology that you either want to carry, or are that the law requires you to.
As a last thought, consider just how wise the founding fathers were: in a speculative historical scenario, the best case for forgery-resistant national I.D.s with associated databases is not to be found in England, but in the United States in the September 11th attack.
Plugging in the numbers, you're left with a very important question: would preventing the deaths of three thousand people have been worth what the I.D.s and their potential for abuse would mean to the other three-hundred million.
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
"Yeah. It smells, too..."
here's something interesting I read not too long ago:
Are fingerprints really infallible, unique ID?
How unique are your fingerprints? It's general held (and as er, The Register confidently stated just yesterday) that your fingerprints being found at the scene of the crime tied you up with it pretty conclusively, but a report published earlier this year by New Scientist claims that there is little scientific basis for the infallibility of fingerprints, and that the only research indicating that there is, is fatally flawed.
This could have major implications for the criminal justice system, and could undermine the basic premise of planned ID sytems in the UK, US and Europe. The report notes that the only known study, commissioned b y the US Department of Justice and only made public in summary form, was challenged in December. The study involved matching up 50,000 fingerprint images, and concluded from this that the probability of a false match was effectively zero. However, says New Scientist, "Although this produced an impressive-sounding 2.5 billion comparisons, critics point out that it is hardly surprising that a specific image should turn out to be more like itself than 49,999 other images."
The study wasn't designed to test matches between two or more different prints from the same finger, and it was even discovered that it originally included three instances of fingerprints being listed as similar but different, when they were actually different prints from the same finger. One pair was even found to be as dissimilar as prints from different people. And the sample size is seen by many critics as being too small to be seen as valid.
Despite the apparently shaky foundations of the little 'proof' that exists, there seems to be no government enthusiasm for further research. The DoJ has refused to sanction further research, and a Department of Defense and National Institute of Justice programme fell apart last year after arguments over dissemination and review of the material.
New Scientist points out that fingerprint evidence still has a value, but that it's such a long-standing technique that it has never been subjected to rigorous scientific scrutiny. This could well be its undoing, as ID systems' need to match up prints from millions of people takes fingerprinting into entirely uncharted territory. It would surely be just a little bit embarrassing if a few years down the line governments' deployment of fingerprints in the war on terror resulted in the near overthrow of the criminal justice system, wouldn't it?
People say I'm crazy, I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes...
I hope I'm wrong, but a 10,000 user trial doesn't actually sound that impressive
It isn't
Just don't preach to the converted and get down to www.faxyourmp.com instead.
Tell our MP's both the civil libities AND technical reasons why this is bad. Most MP's havent a clue about electronic security. Tell them why biometrics are not the solution, why its a bad idea to have all your eggs (data) in one basket (or card), why this wont prevent "terrorists and pediatricians"(!) and why this is just a BAD idea.
Dont sit on your arse. Get faxing!
Anyone quoted by a reporter knows how little they understand
Don't believe what you read is the truth.