HP Announces National Id System Built on .NET

Anonymous Coward writes "Yahoo is running a story about HP's national ID plan, 'The need to securely identify people moving across national and international borders has never been more important than it is today,' said Jim Ganthier, worldwide leader, Defense, Intelligence and Public Safety, HP. 'HP and Microsoft are working together to provide government agencies the ability to access the integrated data streams needed to securely identify people both in the physical and virtual worlds.'"

Comments

They clearly want a piece of the pie.

[Colin Smith]

The UK ID card system is now estimated at £18 billion (30 billion dollars or so). That's up from £3 billion and £6 billion previous estimates.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4590817.stm

Re:Security?

[Jugalator]

So if someone exploits a security hole in .NET they can take my identity?

Maybe, maybe not, it depends on how their platform works. But the same can of course be said with any other API an application may use. Not sure what you're trying to say -- that these important systems should always be built from scratch? But the downside of that is you'd rely on 100% homebrewn code that hasn't been tested in production ready systems since before.

Marketspeak Mumbo Jumbo

[maynard]

Wow, just what did that press release say beyond "we're going to help create a national ID using Microsoft .net"??? A whole lot of veribiage and redundant terminology. For example:

• 22 instances of "indentify" or "identification"
• 7 instances of "integrate"
• 7 instances of "system"
• 5 instances of "e-government"
• 4 instances of ".NET framework"
• 3 instances of "authenticate"

Feh. That's enough of reading through that tripe. Now I need to take a bath. --M

What's so bad about this?

[DigitlDud]

The article cites several countries where the .NET identity solution by HP is already in use. Obviously there has been no news about any security problems with these systems. You should be far more worried about simply losing your wallet than this system getting hacked.

Re:dumb question but...

[KarmaMB84]

I haven't heard a lot about .NET itself being insecure. Microsoft's non-.NET stuff has proven to be insecure, but I really haven't heard much of .NET.

Re:Who pays?

[MillionthMonkey]

Explain to me exactly how they got me to fund a system that is detrimental to my freedom?

The Real ID Act was cleverly attached by its author, Rep. Sensenbrenner (R-WI), as a rider to a completely unrelated appropriations measure for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since voting against appropriations for troops is unAmerican, the bill along with its Orwellian rider passed easily (House 368-58, Senate 100-0).

Note that the rider specifies no funding. The federal ID card is left as an unfunded mandate for states to implement on their own budgets, with the usual extraconstitutional trick of threatening to withhold federal highway funds from states that fail to enact supporting state legislation. In practical terms, aside from being a fascistic federal power grab, this is a really expensive measure for the states. Unfortunately Real ID enjoys some myopic political support because it will stick it to illegal aliens. (And anyone seeking asylum, political or otherwise.) People don't realize the larger implications of a national ID card that one is forced to carry, and we just got them with hardly any public debate at all:

House Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) originally introduced the bill as part of the House's intelligence community reform package in late 2004. When opposition to the provisions in the Senate threatened to kill that bill, the provisions were dropped, but the House leadership agreed to reattach them "to the first piece of legislation this session that both chambers were expected to pass" [Los Angeles Times, 1/27/05]. The Real ID Act was reintroduced in 2005 and passed the House, but apparently recognizing that the stand-alone bill lacked support in the Senate, the House leadership attached the legislation to the House version of the emergency funding bill. The Senate version did not include the measure. With bipartisan support, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) introduced an amendment expressing the sense of the Senate that the provisions should not be in the final bill, but the amendment was ruled "non-germane" and denied a vote. Most of the Real ID provisions in the House's version survived the House-Senate conference committee and were part of the conference report that passed the House and Senate.

During the Senate debate on the final version of the bill, several senators voiced opposition to the inclusion of the Real ID provisions in the conference report, but this opposition was not reflected in the final vote of 100-0. Here are some excerpts from the debate:

* Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN): "That does not stop me from objecting and expressing my disappointment to two provisions in the bill. One is the so-called Real ID Act. Actually, unlike a lot of legislation we pass here, this is well named. This really is a national identification card for the United States of America for the first time in our history. We have never done this before, and we should not be doing it without a full debate. This Real ID provision turns 190 million driver's licenses, which are now ineffective ID cards, into more effective national identification cards. To add insult to injury, we have also slapped state governments with the bill for them. I strongly object to this. When I was governor of Tennessee, I vetoed our state ID card twice because I thought it was an infringement on civil liberties. I thought that driver's licenses are for driving. If we need an ID card, we should have an ID card."
* Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R-RI): There are many concerns I have with Real ID in addition to the process used to bring it to the floor. First, the measure is an unfunded mandate to the states. Furthermore, unless every state complies, the federal government will have to mandate the creation of a national ID. Between the creation of a new database and approval system, training for DMV workers, and struggling state budgets, Real

Re:The minority rules OK!

[BasilBrush]

In the UK, the Labour party just got reelected with only 36% of the vote. Yup. That's a minority.

50% of the vote has no significance in country with more than 2 parties. No party has won a UK election with more that 50% of the vote since 1931. Criticising this particular government for not having a majority of the vote thus makes no sense.