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?"

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.

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?

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!!

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

[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.

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.