Biometric ID Cards Trialled in Glasgow

StuWho writes "The Register is reporting a trial of Biometric ID Cards in Glasgow, Scotland. The trial is one of several tests prior to the implimentation of a universal UK ID card. It also carries reports of how you can evade the sensors by doing something as simple as crying. 'It costs the UK 1.3 billion a year, and facilitates organised crime, illegal immigration, benefit fraud, illegal working and terrorism,' Home Office Minister Des Browne said. He then said that the ID card would fix all this, but did not say how. It's not only in the US where governments are using the excuse of terrorism to infringe on civil liberties."

Comments

And now for the usual sarcasm about Revelations.

[The I Shing]

And the ID card will be grafted onto the right hand or forehead of the bearer, and will contain a 666-character identification number. Persons without ID cards will be disallowed from engaging in commerce of any kind, and those actively refusing to wear the ID card will be summarily put to death.

When questioned about the potential reactions from devout Christians, government officials replied, "Revelations of what, now?"

News Opinion

[Bon bons]

"It's not only in the US where governments are using the excuse of terrorism to infringe on civil liberties."

It's only news until you stick your opinion in it. Honestly, I think things like this are best said in comments, not in the front-page reports

the american flavor

[Anonymous Coward]

cryptogram article talks about an american ID card in the works (and why its a bad thing )

Disgrace

[fiannaFailMan]

People in the UK should refuse to carry these things. They are an abomination.

Re:Disgrace

[GothChip]

I am one of the 1 Million people who would rather go to jail then carry a card.

I can understand why you would want to license drivers and I can understand the need for a passport. But I refuse to accept I need a license to walk down the street in the country where I was born.

Re:Disgrace

[s20451]

But I refuse to accept I need a license to walk down the street in the country where I was born.

You already do need a license. It's called "citizenship" and you get it when you are born. You can surrender this license if, for example, you become a citizen of a different country that doesn't recognize dual citizenship. In this case your country of birth is well within its rights to refuse you entry and prevent you from walk down the street in your native country.

The only difference is, before you only had to prove your citizenship when you crossed a border. And given the many forms of ID that the average person carries, and the multitude of ways in which the government (or any private agency) can track your movements, I don't see why this is such a massive attack on privacy, other than its symbolic value.

Much better that we should insist on privacy rights associated with the ID card, rather than resisting it altogether, for reasons which are mostly speculative or implausably apocalyptic.

Re:Disgrace

[Attaturk]

I am one of the 1 Million people who would rather go to jail then carry a card.
I can understand why you would want to license drivers and I can understand the need for a passport. But I refuse to accept I need a license to walk down the street in the country where I was born.

Took the words right out of my mouth. See you in there mate. Shall I bring the scrabble?

Re:Disgrace

[iminplaya]

...I can understand the need for a passport.

I don't. The only purpose for national boundries is to restrict an individual's travel rights, and to create economic stratification for profiteering corporations. Without poverty, how can we motivate people to work?

Re:Disgrace

[PennyUK]

Like Anonyomous Coward says, you can live your entire life without making any allegiance to the country. So far, I've never had to swear alleigance to the UK in any form.

When and to who?

[magarity]

So you've got this national ID card with biometric data. Who gets to see it and how often? I haven't been pulled over and asked for a driver's license for over 15 years now. I have had to show a DL at the airport last year but what if I just drove everywhere? If this biometric card has a similar use pattern then it doesn't seem worthwhile. On the other hand, if they're going to set up roadblocks every few miles where you have to swipe the thing then I guess it will catch some baddies but how much aggrevation will that cause?

The entertainment biz

[Freston Youseff]

and French people don't like George Bush. Film at 11.

Defy-ID protest in Glasgow

[Master Of Ninja]

If you are in the area and want to help protest against the ID cards, Defy ID is organising meetings against it. Go to the main website to get more information, as well as pointing your friends to it. Everyone needs to know!!

Build a better moustrap....

[Shivantrill]

And someone will build a better mouse.

How soon before we hear stories of people having their eye extracted so that someone could get by these scanners? This has been portrayed many times in the movies. Cue the next Urban legend, "I woke up in a hotel room with one eye a different color, someone had swapped them on me!"

A 4% failure rate? What happens if it fails? Are you detained, denied whatever you were being identified for? This seems unacceptable as a form of identification. Until they perfect the thing, why not use thumbprints?

Less Secure

[cquark]

The likely result of universal biometric identification schemes will be to make us less secure. All of them suffer from the problem of creating the initial cards for the whole population. How do you determine people's identities to give them their initial cards? By using their current identification materials, so the system won't start in a state that's any more secure than our current identification system. In order to be secure, you not only have to avoid transitioning from a secure state to an insecure one, you also have to start in a secure one, and all of these systems fail that requirement.

Two of the 9/11 terrorists had valid driver's licenses in false names. Biometrics won't prevent existing false IDs from being used to generate new false biometric IDs. Biometrics also won't prevent the personnel who issue biometric IDs from being bribed or coerced into issuing IDs in false names. Remember that the initialization problem isn't a one time issue either--people lose IDs frequently, so the procedure for issuing new biometric IDs to people who don't have one has to exist throughout the lifetime of the system.

Identification is not an effective solution to preventing terrorism. What good would it have done to have known Timothy McVeigh's name before the Oklahoma City? In order to prevent terrorism, you need to know someone's intentions, not their identity, or you need preventative mechanisms in place to stop terrorism that are idependent of who a person is, such as secure doors to the cockpits of airplanes.

Re:Less Secure

[turgid]

The real reasons for the UK ID card scheme are to make money issuing the cards (they'll be compulsory soon, but you'll have to pay a lot of money to get one) and to cut benefit fraud. The UK social security (and health) system loses hundreds of millions of pounds a year through false claims for unemployment benefit, income support and foreigners coming on "holliday" to Britain to get free operations on the NHS. The terrorism story is just an excuse. We already have National Insurance numbers (social security numbers) and cards, but they just contain a signature. You never need to show them to anyone - just recite your number. Biometric ID on your National Insurance card might be a slightly better idea, but the whole "terrorism" thing is just hogwash.

Re:Less Secure

[Blue Stone]

"The UK social security (and health) system loses hundreds of millions of pounds a year through false claims for unemployment benefit [&] income support [...]" But very very little of that is related to people claiming money under a false identity. The majority of cash that's taken from the system in breach of the rules is due to things like people claiming benefits whilst working, people caliming benefits as if they are single people when they are infact couples (housing benefit etc.) and such like.

Identity is only a small factor in benefit fraud in the UK (just the same as it is in crime, which will also be largely unaffected by ID cards.)

social engineering

[magarity]

The biggest problem of this kind of idea is the one where line level law enforcement persons contract 'the computer is always right' syndrome.

"Well, yeah, he kept twitching nervously but the database said that according to his ID card he was allowed to have all those guns and explosives."
"Well, I know she *looked* like someone's great grandmother but the database said she was really an international terrorist so we shot her on sight."

With good looking fake identification you can bluff your way past the most secure system as long as there's a person you can appeal to. And if your information gets entered incorrectly by the minimum wage data entry clerks hired to populate the database with its first data, you're SOL.

Guess what

[Anonymous Coward]

Guess what, it's pretty much impossible to live as a citizen of any modern nation without having to carry some sort of identification. Social security numbers, driver's licenses, even credit and debit cards can be used to identify you and infringe on your privacy. I guess you could go live as a hermit in Montana, paying for everything with wads of dirty bills that you keep stuffed in your matress, but for the other 99% of the population, ID cards are already a reality.

Instead of crying about them, or coming up with some kind of implausible 1984-esque depressive scenarios, how about insisting that the government enact legislation to prevent them from being misused. That seems like a much better option.

Re:Guess what

[Jane_Dozey]

Like you said, it already seems that we're already required to carry around ID. So why do we need more?
And why will they make it mandatory to carry these new ID cards around with us?
Is there actually a valid reason to spend all this money (and make us pay for the "privalidge")?

Re:Guess what

[Cranx]

How can you be free when your anonymity is completely erased? The government isn't the watchdog of all of its citizens, and shouldn't be. It's perfectly acceptable for a human being to live quietly, unbeknownst to his/her neighbors and remain that way for their entire lives. The government has no right to cast an eye on every living human being, effectively "tagging" them like animals so their every move, their every purchase, their every word spoken can all be cataloged and analyzed for any purpose.

If implemented, this sort of system WILL leave to the kinds of abuses envisioned in 1984. It's just a matter of time, but this is definitely the foundation on which it is all based. After this, it's just a matter of tying input into the system. Cameras that can ID faces can instantly match your presence in any given location to a database of everything you've done, said, eaten, shitted, dropped, picked up, waved at, got into, got out of, you name it. When they can tie your IP packets to the database, the cameras, microphones, etc. all into the one place where everything can be stored and associated with your one big biometric ID, it's just a matter of time.

I know this is paranoid. But this is the direction governments move in. Democracies moves away from it, but bureaucracies move towards it. It makes the jobs of police and investigators a lot easier, and the pressure to implement 1984-style system is constant and internal. It's hard to fight against. So when technology starts to make it easy, and other valid uses for it are found, they can sneak in and once they're there, they're there.

We don't need to track everyone and everything. Forgery-resistant certificates are all we need to establish citizenship, eligibilities, ownerships and so on. We don't need one big database maintaining all that information. Every once in awhile forgeries will occur. That's a small price to pay for liberty.

It has also worked just fine for centuries.

False Positives

[cquark]

A 4% failure rate? What happens if it fails? Are you detained, denied whatever you were being identified for? This seems unacceptable as a form of identification.

If the purpose is discovering terrorists, a 4% false positive rate means the system is completely ineffective. Assuming than one person in a million is a terrorist (ridiculously high, I know), then you'd have 40,000 false positives in addition to your one likely correct guess. That's not only a tremendous cost to civil liberties, but it's also likely that the security personnel are going to ignore the terrorist because they've dealt with 40,000 mistakes in the process, and are justifiably unlikely to believe the system any longer.

Re:False Positives

[turgid]

The other problem is that with the UK ID card, like the driving license, you don't actually have to carry it, but if asked to see it, you have 7 days to produce it at a police station of your choice.

Now, will someone kindly explain to me how this cures terrorism (or any other crime for that matter)?

Contact lenses can defeat iris scanners, and thin transparent plastic can defeat fingerprint scanners.

There will be nore more "innocent until proven guilty" (not that there really is in England nowadays). Everyone will be under suspicion, and everyone will have to "prove" their innocence. With such a system where infallability is assumed by the powers that be (just listen to or read some of the nonsense David Blunkett comes out with), it will be very difficult indeed to regain your freedom once the system gets its grubby little fingers around your throat.

Trial in FRA (Frankfurt am Main) in Germany

[aepervius]

There is a similar trial with Biometrical data by lufthansa in Frankfurt. I dunno the detail... But you can read them here :
LH and biometric
German Airport and Biometric

Face it, whether you like it or not (I personally dislike it being traced and identified by my "biological property" for various reason, one being you cannot escape being recognized once they are in governement database...), biometric will come...

there's only one good biometric

[InternationalCow]

.. and that's DNA extracted from blood cells (the white ones). Run it through a lab-on-a-chip which will take all of, oh , 5 minutes these days and run a minimum of six microsatellite repeats on it. Guaranteed ID, although you might consider running eight satellites for added safety. One problem: the identification procedure is invasive (it has to be, to be sure that the DNA really comes from the person that is being ID'ed) and takes too long. But those are mere technical problems. All other forms of biometry can be circumvented (crying, enucleation of eyes, cutting of hands). You can even check the blood for freshness (eg by measuring calcium in platelets, takes a couple microseconds) to prevent people from carrying little bags of blood to have tested.

thank you!

[sbma44]

Aren't we nerds supposed to feel a sense of antipathy toward horrible marketingspeak like this? You can't "trial" something. You can't "task" someone. Stop verbing nouns.

Re:thank you!

[kraut]

Allegedly you can "burglarize" someone's house, though, at leat in the colonies ;)

Re:Young people will hate ID cards

[Jane_Dozey]

How so? If they arn't asked for ID now, why would they be when a new ID system is in place? And who's to say they won't just borrow their older sister or brothers card, and make themselves look a little more like said older sibling before going off to try and buy the stuff? It happens now, so kids will find a way around it.
In order to tackle underage drinking, you need to tackle the people selling it (I was very rarly asked for ID and when I was I usually managed to convince the person selling it that I'd left my ID at home).

Re:And now for the usual sarcasm about Revelations

[gnu-generation-one]

Information minister Blunkett has said that there'll be a GBP 2500 penalty on anyone refusing to register for the ID card. That sounds like it would stop a lot of people from engaging in commerce. (Specifically, those who won't have any money left)

Do you have 2,500 pounds ($4470) to spare, or would you choose to be marked?

And in other news,

[Anonymous Coward]

Nouns verbed in Slashdot article header.

Come on, "trialled"?

Re:And now for the usual sarcasm about Revelations

[The I Shing]

its "Revelation" (not plural)

Damn, I should've looked it up.

One time, years ago, I was collecting money at the door of a bar for a friend's band, and this kind of dirty hippie dude came up and wanted to come in. The doorman of the bar demanded to see ID before letting him in, since it was a 21-and-over venue. The hippie dude got really peeved, since he didn't have any ID at all, and was denied admittance, and as he walked away, he angrily exclaimed, "Sorry, I don't carry the Mark of the Beast."

If I wasn't busy working, I'd have run after the guy and demanded to know how he could possibly equate a driver's license, which one carries in one's pocket and uses to simply prove identity, age, and automobile driving privileges, with the Mark of the Beast from the Bible. I wanted to ask him, "Hey, if you went into that little grocery store across the street and tried to buy a pack of gum, would you have to show ID? No? Then how is an ID card the Mark of the Beast when you can buy most things without showing it?" Then he probably would've stabbed me or something. Good thing I had to stay in the bar and collect money.

Still, people like that hippie dude ought to at least read the Bible before declaring that its prophesies are being fulfilled.

Correction

[StuWho]

Part of the section attributed to me is a quote from The Register.

'It costs the UK 1.3 billion a year, and facilitates organised crime, illegal immigration, benefit fraud, illegal working and terrorism,'[Quote from Des Brown] Home Office Minister Des Browne said. He then said that the ID card would fix all this, but did not say how.[Quote from The Register].It's not only in the US where governments are using the excuse of terrorism to infringe on civil liberties.[Quote from StuWho].

Re:And now for the usual sarcasm about Revelations

[Tandoori Haggis]

Parent was marked funny but the potential is there. There may be enough people scared enough of being
a minority to beg to be given their new WiFi implant with its unique xxxxxx.xxxxxx.xxxxxx IP address.

Besides, think how many people you see everyday with a phone welded to their ear. Time to get in to cyborg business perhaps.

Caveat: I don't own any tin foil hats - they tend concentrate the RF energy into the body rather than away from it, especially near mobile phones...

The problem is the single index.

[Colin Smith]

An ID card gives all information about you a single index. All you need is an indidividual's ID number and there's absolutely no technological reason you couldn't monitor their activities in real time.

"Speculative or implausably apocalyptic"? WTF? Don't you know *any* history?

Germany, 1938 6 million jews were executed by their government. The jewish people had "J" stamped on their identity documents. It's how they knew who to kill.

Rwanda, *TEN* years ago. 800,000 men, women and children with "Tutsi" marked on their ID cards were *butchered* by their government... With machetes.

Governments change in the blink of an eye:

Pakistan, 1999 a military coup took 17 hours.
Iraq, the fall of Saddam took a week and that was an outside country.
Greece, 1967.
Portugal, 1974.
Fuck, there was a coup attempt in Spain in 1981.

What planet do you live on? One where the CIA didn't help overthrow the democratically elected government of Chile and install a military dictator?

All these things *actually* happened. If you give the government the tools they'll bloody well use them.

Ancient rights

[the_twisted_pair]

I am also one of that million - in fact I dearly hope the number is higher than that.

The problem I do have is that, on one hand, we are told that ID cards are essential to our 'security' when more-enlightened people are moving the other way - travel throughout continental Europe as an EU citizen and you just don't not need a passport to travel; I've *never* been challenged to produce one, and it's a joy to travel light, far and wide. You come home to find Tony B.liar (aided and abetted by David Blunkett, our control-freak Home Secretary) cannot act fast enough on enabling legislation which has the potential to lock-down UK citizens.

[sarcasm] The day I plan some great abomination against a group of people I'm sure my biggest worry will be that I can't prove who I say I am. Mmmm: handguns in the UK, check; explosives, check; evil plans, check. Fake ID - oh bugger, I'll never carry that off. [/sarcasm] You see where I'm going with this? Benjamin Franklin's most famous quotation was never more true.

Guess what? I will protest, all I can, for my liberties which have their roots in law delineated in the Magna Carta. Posters in the U.K - read it, it is the legal acceptance of pre-existing common law, now an 800 year-old precedent. And it was expressly draughted to prevent interference in the lives of citizens by the Government:

IT IS ACCORDINGLY OUR WISH AND COMMAND that [...] men in our kingdom shall have and keep all these liberties, rights, and concessions, well and peaceably in their fulness and entirety for them and their heirs, of us and our heirs, in all things and all places for ever.
Both we and the barons have sworn that all this shall be observed in good faith and without deceit. Witness the abovementioned people and many others.

That we now have an elected dictator, rather than a hereditary one, does not change the rights of the people.

Re:Ancient rights

[H09N0X10U5]

travel throughout continental Europe as an EU citizen and you just don't not need a passport to travel; I've *never* been challenged to produce one, and it's a joy to travel light, far and wide.

Rubbish. You still need an ID card, different name same function. And even when you aren't crossing an international border, it is (certainly in Belgium & France and I think in Germany and Italy) an offence to step out of your door without carrying one.

Bad for privacy? I don't think so

[jsebrech]

Why do people assume ID cards would be a privacy invasion? Every modern country needs to keep track of its citizens for various things, from banking to medical insurance. The US uses the combination of social security number and driver's license as a facsimile for an ID card. The problem with these facsimiles is that they weren't originally designed to uniquely identify a person, so identity theft is a lot easier.

Here in Belgium we have had ID cards for as long as I can remember, and it has never to my knowledge been a privacy problem. Yes, the ID card lets people gather up all your data in one tight bundle, but that can be done with or without an ID card. It is not some disastrous measure that suddenly opens up your data to all the world. There is no privacy in modern society. Not in Western Europe (which mostly has ID cards) and not in the US. Deal with it.

I don't get the hysteria people have around things like ID cards. The government doesn't need them to find out what they want about you. And they are a protection against identity theft.

Now, as for why the British government thinks ID cards will solve illegal immigration, let me explain why this would be the case. Currently since there are no ID cards, once someone gets inside the British borders, they can pretend to be a citizen, and even if the police stops them they aren't easily identified as illegal immigrants. Therefore all someone needs to do to live as an illegal immigrant in Britain is sneak past customs (not a hard thing to do). When there is a national ID card not carrying your ID sets you apart for scrutiny, and life as an illegal immigrant becomes a lot harder. And since most modern ID card systems are tied into a database which cops can easily access they are very hard to fake, so the black market won't be the answer.

Re:Bad for privacy? I don't think so

[JimBobJoe]

Every modern country needs to keep track of its citizens for various things, from banking to medical insurance.

Well then have the banks issue me whatever they want to identify me (prior to ID cards they have perfectly good internal cusotmer identification systems.)

Medical insurance is an odd one. But, if everyone in a social health care country has automatic insurance, then why do they need a card anyway?

Here in Belgium we have had ID cards for as long as I can remember, and it has never to my knowledge been a privacy problem.

One of the main lessons about ID card issues is that each country's experience with it is different. Of what I know of Beligium's ID card experiences I would characterize them (as I would a lot of the Western European ID card experience) as being bureaucratic. A lot of the bureaucracy that a Beligian would use an ID card for would be done differently in the US or UK. Honestly, several european nations really don't need them (I would put Beligum into that category.)

It's an odd paradox, but if you don't have rampant ID card fraud, you really dont' need the card in the first place.

Now, as for why the British government thinks ID cards will solve illegal immigration, let me explain why this would be the case.

Other posters answered this question pretty well. Once again, the Western European model of ID cards is fairly uninteresting and benign, as well as entirely unnecessary.

Take a look at Latin America though for some great experiences. You got everything good, hard to forge ID cards, biometrics, national database, blah blah blah.

And you have the most amazing ID fraud ever. I would say it's a sport in Costa Rica, but that would be singling out just Costa Rica. I think a lot of the problems are bribery (which is the case in the US as well, but DMVs go out of their way to make sure that internal bribery is covered up. Here in Ohio, I happen to know that criminal charges are often not carried out so that the scale of internal bribery is not fully realized.)

Check out Israel for a really odd ID card experience. It's a completely worthless card--not even used for bureaucratic purposes for the most part. It's not even used in security contexts.

It is however used as a way of hassling Palestinians. Stories abound of Israeli guards taking away Palestinian ID cards so that they can be fucked over (something which the UN intervened on several years ago)...or throwing them onto the as a show of force. Honestly, you could write several books about ID cards in Jewish history.

Hmmm.

[H09N0X10U5]

'It costs the UK 1.3 billion a year, and facilitates organised crime, illegal immigration, benefit fraud, illegal working and terrorism,' Home Office Minister Des Browne said.

But that's enough about the EU...

Ive in Glasgow

[neon-fx]

I live in glasgow and to be honest, im not agaisnt the plan. Im just against having to pay for this sort of thing (im a student you see). The main reason Im not against them is because of the amount of fraud here, I work in a major department store in town and every day Im in the police get called in for people trying to get money out the store via openning instore acount under false ID. An ID card would be perfect way to let us know a little bit about the client, it would save alot of time as well. The other reason is becuase of the amount of scum who live here who take advantage of our benfits system (social security equivalent) and other means of claiming things they dont deserve. I currently carry about my drivers licience as my main form of ID and a matricluation card to get about university, neither of these have ever caused me an inconvienience and Ive never been worried about my privacy. One more card for a lot less hasslte, not a problem with me as long as its free.

Waste of money, no benefit

[kraut]

So the government plans to spend 3 billion of our tax money on this, which, given their record of delivering IT systems, will almost certainly mean 8 billion for a system that does half what was promised.

Then it wants to charge you 35 for getting an ID card, which you have to renew regularly. How do you identify yourself to get this card? Doh, using your existing unsafe identification.

It will do nothing to stop illegal immigration; it will do NOTHING to stop terrorism. It might cut down on benefit fraud a bit - but that's hardly a reason to make everyone carry one. It might cut down on "health tourism" a little, but the estimated cost of that is trivial by government standards anyway (200million). Also, of course, anyone willing to travel to the UK to use our public health system must a) be pretty desperate anyway and b) we can't actually, in this country, turn dying people away at the hospital door for not having insurance.