Australia Scraps National ID Plan

IPU = Imaginary Property Unicorn writes "The proposed Australian 'Access Card', a universal ID that would be required for any Australian wishing to use Medicare, Centrelink, the Child Support Agency, or Veterans' Affairs, has been scrapped by the incoming Rudd Labor Government. The card would have contained an RFID tag with the person's name, date of birth, gender, address, signature, card number, card expiration date, and Medicare number, but there were also provisions to add more personal data later on. It seems that Rudd Labor is not eager to copy the American REAL ID Act."

Comments

Good riddance.

[Anonymous Coward]

I always did prefer anonymity.

Re:Good riddance.

[kestasjk]

For all non-Australians: At the moment here in Australia has a points system, where you need to provide a certain number of points of identification depending on importance. So you can get, say, 40 points from a passport, 40 points from a birth/citizenship certificate, 20 points from a drivers license, etc, and you need to provide 100 points to apply for a credit card, 50 points to get a Medicare refund, etc.

You need to identify yourself when you get Medicare refunds or pick up licenses, and this verification thing means that when you want to do this you need to carry around a bag of important documents to identify yourself. You don't even want to think about what would happen if you lost the bag with all your most important documents, you just better hold on fucking tight.

An ID card system would basically just clean this mess up. We live in the age of the digital database, we can centralize our data, it's more efficient for everyone, it's just common sense.

And I just don't see how this gives the government extra powers to spy on you. Even if you enter into the make believe world of Enemy of the State where the government will change your stuff around on a whim to destroy your life it's still hard to see how having a centralized ID system would help them. "They" can already track you with video cameras and credit card transaction lists. Why do people have a problem with this but no problem with having an IMEI number on their mobile phone?

This might make it easier for the government to stop you being able to identify yourself. So looking at a worst-case Enemy of the State scenario; they cancel your credit cards, steal your briefcase, post incriminating pictures of you and get you fired and kicked out of your home, frame you for murder, put bugs all over your body and wire tap your phone, hunt you down and force you into hiding, but now they can also stop you getting Medicare refunds if you didn't bring your passport with you!

I think this is just another of Rudd's cowardly policies of appeasing the loud minority of people who oppose this (the Tin-foil-hat lobby), rather than doing what's right.

Re:Good riddance.

[thegrassyknowl]

You don't even want to think about what would happen if you lost the bag with all your most important documents, you just better hold on fucking tight.

I agree that this mess of documents is messy, but once you have a Medicare card you don't need to carry around all that ID. Your driver's license and Medicare card should be enough for almost any medical care you need.

You generally carry enough ID around in your wallet/purse on a daily basis anyway. Usually you know when you're going to open a bank account or replace your Medicare card, etc.

And I just don't see how this gives the government extra powers to spy on you.

Centralising data the way the government wanted to gives them much more power to spy on you. Currently your medical records are contained with your GP. Medicare just gets the type of consult rather than a complete detailed record. As I understand it the new scheme was trying to store the full record on a centralised computer. That's great if you're ever in an accident and can't pass on details of your regular GP(s) but other than that people can simply pass on the details of their previous care providers and the new one can get access to the medical record.

The Child support thing always shits me. They use your Australian tax file number to identify you. They print it in letters to you and your ex and pass it around to anyone who asks for information from them like it's your fucking name. Your TFN is kind of like your passport for the tax office. It's not the holy grail, but if someone who wants to fuck you up has it they can use it to access the tax office and pretend to be you or falsify tax documents to really mess you up. I can't see how a national ID card will help there. What really shits me is that a lot of this national ID card crap is to further strengthen the (already far too extensive) powers that the CSA has (for example, they can already ignore a court order on the grounds "we don't feel that it's beneficial to...").

Going to a national ID card will allow the government to better and easier centralise their tracking and profiling of you. Currently it's a little harder because they have to go digging around different sources to find it. I'd prefer to keep them digging for it because then they need to have a reason rather than profiling everyone automatically.

Re:Good riddance.

[nomorecwrd]

Maybe it'a a matter of country size, but here in Chile we implemented a national ID number decades ago, ONE number and one ID card for almost everything, my ID number is the same as my passport, same as my driver's licence, same as my Medicare, same as my social security, etc. Even private companies, like banks, insurance, telephone, cable, etc. identify you with this number. Easy! and very convenient. The number is given to the new born when registred. Our IRS (SII) tracks your taxes with this number. Companies are assigned with an ID also (much higher number than individuals). Even foreigners can ask for an ID number. (needed if you want to work in here) Again, it's a very convenient system! I don't know how you guys can keep a whole big country running without this. Just my two cents.

Ah, the irony

[ta bu shi da yu]

I distinctly remember that John Howard actively campaigned against the National ID Card with Bob Hawke was in power. Then he was for it. Bloody hypocrite, I'm so glad he's gone.

Good.

[fotbr]

A request for the rest of the world:

DO NOT COPY US. It will take years to undo the damage this administration has done to the US, and most of the damage will likely never be completely undone. Point and mock if you must, but PLEASE learn from our mistakes.

Re:Good.

[MichaelSmith]

It wasn't really an ID card anyway. Most people who access Government services (usually some kind of welfare) need a card of some sort it identify themselves. For most Australians this means taking a Medicare card along to the doctor, and then to a Medicare office to get a rebate on the doctors fee.

For older people who access multiple services it would be better not to have to carry three of four cards around. There is nothing to stop the federal government from integrating their databases anyway. You don't need a common card for that.

Re:Good.

[Nomen Publicus]

There are plenty of ways to provide identity to a pretty high level of confidence that do not require a huge centralised government database (which from recent evidence, will quickly leak all the data because governments seem to be clueless about data security.)

Re:Good.

[Z00L00K]

It's actually about time for an internationally recognized ID standard, national ID:s are sooooo last century...

The reason behind this? - Yes, if you are trying to do something on an international basis some kind of nationally recognized ID is required for some transactions - and if you have an ID card for one country it won't work in another. It's a business issue more than a privacy issue.

The ID is also to prove that you actually are the person you claim that you are. If you want real privacy you can always hire someone else to do the job of registration or perform transactions in cash.

Some may say that passports are internationally recognized as ID:s but that's not really good for two reasons: 1. They are in a very inconvenient physical format. 2. They are easily forged.

As for identity theft - it's already a fact and no matter on which scale you do the identity data it is always a risk. It is even worse if it is on a state level than on a national or international level since the variations in the ID papers and registration data makes it harder to validate.

Re:Good.

[dbIII]

Australia actually copied the system that California used to determine power distribution and pricing despite everyone with a clue pointing out that it was a train wreck in progress. Show us your worst and we will copy it.

Re:Good.

[mjwx]

It's actually about time for an internationally recognized ID standard

We have one, its called a passport, its issued by your nation of origin or current citizenship and is recognised the world over as proof of identity.

You do have other forms of useful internationally recognised ID's such as International drivers licenses which are issued in your nation of residence and allow you to drive in nations which co-operate (Australian IDL's are recognised in most countries, I'm not sure about US IDL's as you chaps tend drive on the wrong side of the road).

personally I don't want one card to rule them all. There is security in having multiple forms of Identification for such purposes as a credit application taking out a small loan. I feel better about providing 100 points of Identification (at least three pieces of ID including one Photo ID) as I don't want someone who raided my mailbox (A bill is a form of Identification, at least in AU) racking up debt against my name.

Re:Good.

[arivanov]

Actually not quite so.

There are plenty of ways to provide identity that do not require online access to a database. X509 at your service. Tried, tested, works, scales to the size of a population (most continental EU ID cards are actually smartcards wich hold an x509 cert). The only thing the ID reader needs to do is verify that the cert on the card is correct and show the information. This can be done by a sub-10$ mass produced device nowdays. It can also be completely standalone for less important apps and for the more important it needs to check for revoked certs via OCSP. It does not really need access to a centralised database. In fact it is better for an ID like this to hold your photo and your biometric because the verification is done through cryptographic integrity. If it holds them it does not need central database access in 99.99% of the cases.

Issuing the ID is a completely different ball game. There you need a database if you want to avoid identity fraud. The bigger, the nastier, the more comprehensive - the better. As a matter of fact such the databases already exist in most countries, they are reasonably well maintained and they work. These are the taxation system databases and all countries with successful ID systems use these as a primary source of information. A good example of database nations like this is any Scandinavian country and Bulgaria out of the ex-Soviet block.

There is a crucial difference here - the database is accessed only on issuing IDs and on updating/checking tax records. It is not accessed by every wannabie wanker in a small quango office who has declared himself the supreme owner of your identity. This is also the crucial difference between RealID, The UK ID, the Australian ID and working ID projects. These all aim to sneak a provision for tens of thousands of wankers to access your data and they do not try to build on the tax system data (which the tax system office rightfully denies them access to). This is also doomed to be abject failures long before they have even been started because they have to build a database for the whole country from scratch.

Re:Good.

[rucs_hack]

but PLEASE learn from our mistakes.

The thing with the US is no matter how bad it gets, your culture has within it a tendancy to say 'screw you' to anyone that's in power, and throw them out. Either that or make things so tough that people quit.

I've been surprised at the no-cons apparent ability to just take over and start the conversion to a police state (facism?) though. Why there hasn't been soime sort of mass revolt is beyond me. You're apparently just sitting back and letting them re-institute a pro rich/powerful people nation.

I have a lot of respect for Americans, but as a country your starting to look a bit, well, stupid. Quite aside from the political situation, its what, 80% of your population beleive the earth is less than 10,000 years old? This does not fill me with confidence. I was considering paying for my son to spend his univeristy years in the state, now I have a doubt.

How long is this going to go on do you think?

Re:Good.

[fotbr]

If you visit a few of the better US universities -- especially those with good science & engineering programs -- you'll find little of the fundamentalist "science-is-bad-everything-we-need-to-know-is-in-this-book-right-here" mentality. Its not really as prevalent as the media makes it out to be. My experience has been that the West coast and the North East have less of that nonsense than other places, while the South and Midwest have more of it (the section referred to as the "Bible Belt" especially). Those are generalities, and there are exceptions, of course. Huntsville, AL has a decent engineering university, and is basically a city full of engineers. Rolla, MO is squarely in the middle of the bible belt, but because of the engineering university there is fairly sane (just don't go too far out of town). I'd suggest visiting a few schools with your son, deciding if you like the area, and explaining to your son that the Americans you'll find at engineering / science universities aren't *quite* as crazy as the media makes the typical American appear. Besides which, better than half of the students at most science & engineering universities are foreign students as well - predominantly from China, Japan, India, former soviet-bloc countries, and of course other countries as well, although not nearly as many.

There's been a mass revolt in public opinion of this administration, and many people voted for democrats for the first time in their lives last year to give us a democrat-controlled congress with the hopes that they'd move towards impeachment and would use congress' power to put the brakes on Bush's policies and power grabs. What they received in return was a democrat controlled congress that's happy to continue to act as a rubber-stamp while making a few speeches to give the appearance of resistance.

At this point, I think most people are a) too scared of the government* to do anything and b) holding out some hope that there's only a few months left and we'll have someone else in charge before too much more damage can be done.

*"Too scared of the government" doesn't mean an armed uprising, but merely people are beginning to watch what they say, lest they be deemed an "extremest" and marked as a "potential domestic terrorist", since there have been bills passed to study the "problem" of dissenting opinion (although its phrased "radical extremism" it is fairly clearly an attempt to find way to hang the "domestic terrorist" label on those that disagree with the government). To me, that is far more troubling than the guy with his hunting rifle being afraid the police or army would kick his ass in an armed revolt. I won't make any tinfoil-hat claims that the government is going to be sending random people to Guantanamo because of what they posted on the internet, but they can make things like air travel virtually impossible for people, based on no evidence that would hold up in our courts, and no chance of a day in court ever happening because they won't answer to anyone about why someone's on the no-fly list, all in the name of "national security". While I have no personal experience with, nor have I heard any first-hand accounts of, life in the former Soviet Union, the squelching of dissent and the fear of being seen as "out of line" sounds as if we're heading towards a situation very much like what I was told the former Soviet Union was like.

Re:Good.

[swillden]

It wasn't really an ID card anyway. Most people who access Government services (usually some kind of welfare) need a card of some sort it identify themselves.

This is true. I actually spent a couple weeks working on IBM's bid, mostly reviewing the security and privacy aspects of the design, so I got to understand the focus pretty well. The primary purposes of the card were to replace some 17 different government-issued ID cards with a single card, and to reduce benefit fraud. It was really about efficiency, not increasing government control. Not only that, the Howard government's RFP did take the privacy aspects pretty seriously -- they wanted strong guarantees that sensitive information on the card could only be read by authorized government personnel, that those personnel would only have access to the portions that they were suppose to read, and that the back-end databases had fine-grained access control and detailed and indestructible audit trails. One option that I recommended be added to IBM's proposal was to avoid, wherever possible, retaining any data in the back-end database. One of the ways a smart card can enhance privacy is by allowing the database to be effectively dispersed into millions of tiny, un-cross-referenceable pieces.

Arguably, it would have been *better* for privacy to put a comprehensive, well-designed system in place rather than letting government departments integrate their data in an ad hoc, uncontrolled way.

That said, I'm not particularly unhappy to see this die. Even supposing Australia did an excellent job of implementing this system, so that it improved privacy rather than harmed it, that's not to say that all of those back-end controls wouldn't be quietly removed through a series of "upgrades" (and the option to avoid storing the data in the back end was just that, an option, and it would have increased costs and created some inconvenience).

Most of all, I'd rather not have US politicians able to point to a well-implemented Australian system and say "see, we can do it too!". I have no confidence that a US system would be as well-implemented as what we proposed to Australia.

Oh, and proof of this.

[ta bu shi da yu]

http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2005/s1416572.htm is a transcript of what was said:

Bob Hawke: ... The Australia Card legislation, which my Government sees as essential to our continued campaign both to finally eliminate tax evasion and fraud in this country and also to the elimination of welfare cheating.
.
.
.
John Howard: When you realise that the assumption of the Australia Card legislation is that every Australian is a cheat, when you realise that it involves establishing a level of intrusion of a draconian kind into the day to day activities of many people and when people really read and understand the legislation, I believe that the support that some people feel, particularly in the ranks of the Government for this proposal, is going to disappear.

That was always the way with John Howard, slippery bastard. He said one thing and then did the other. Thoroughly untrustworthy. How he stayed in power so long, heavens only knows.

Re:Oh, and proof of this.

[syousef]

That was always the way with John Howard, slippery bastard. He said one thing and then did the other. Thoroughly untrustworthy. How he stayed in power so long, heavens only knows

Sadly the reason is that Australians were more interested in low interest rates on their home loans than in any kind of social justice. The real reason he's out is simply that interest rates started going up despite his assurances. Once people realized they weren't going to get their low interest rates (and that the new industrial relations laws were really going to hurt them) they threw him out.

He didn't just suddenly become a "slippery bastard". He always was one. He continually did backflips. He continually failed to support Australian interests in the international arena. He continually sided with big business and against unions which given the working class population is ridiculous.

I do hope Rudd's a better PM. He's a politician, so he's only going to go so far when his own neck is on the line, but it got so bad with Howard that almost any change is welcome.

Re:Oh, and proof of this.

[Nazlfrag]

Let us pay tribute to a great man.

Re:Oh, and proof of this.

[LordLucless]

The reason he stayed in so long is that labour fell apart, and stayed fallen for most of his term. Their leadership changed every few years - and really, even Howard was better than Latham.

Re:Oh, and proof of this.

[blind monkey 3]

You obviously don't read very well, I pointed out that ALTHOUGH HIGH SCHOOL MIGHT BE STATE RESPONSIBILITY, HIGHER EDUCATION IS FEDERAL. Every report has shown that spending is down on this as well as other areas, you want to go around turning a blind eye to things, looking at your obviously precious Liberal party through your rose coloured glasses. Spending has not increased in comparison to the rest of the developed countries, this is another story, there are plenty but you obviously are only interested in seeing things that agree with you. Health is the same, just google it and read a bit, it might be enlightening for you. Oh government debt was around for a lot longer than Labor was in power, we had debt in the sixties, it actually started taking off in Fraser's era (Howard was Treasurer). I still maintain both are only interested in one thing - their own little club. You think Howard was great, good luck to you, our infrastructure is falling apart, there is no plan for the future of our country (apart for THE FUTURE FUND!! YIPPEEE), water resource management (gets a good run every election - remember last election when they were going to fix the Murray?), rail always gets a mention as well, all forgotten within a few months. These things are obviously not important to you because like your reading, your vision is selfish and self serving, blind to anything else.

By the way, why don't you check your facts before making rash statements about the National debt? We owe more than when Labor was in power The Age, Howard has shifted the debt to the public (by not providing what was previously provided) and people as ignorant as you believe they have fixed the debt problem, so long as we keep running a balance of trade deficit, we are heading for troubled times. Neither party has an answer for this.

Solving real-world problems?

[Nomen Publicus]

It is interesting to see that not one western government that has claimed that ID cards are essential for the war against fraud, terrorism, crime and quite possibly global warming, has been able to present a viable case to the public.

As costs rise (the UK ID card scheme is now expected to cost between 10 and 20 BILLION pounds over 10 years) the government arguments become more and more vague and frantic rather than more solid and sensible.

ID cards seem to be more about giving huge IT contracts to the usual suspect systems companies than actually solving real-world problems.

Re:Solving real-world problems?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're forgetting the costs of updating all systems to recognize the card. The card would probably not be used only as a substitute for driver's id, but also as an electronic ID for lots of different systems

More personal?

[fahrbot-bot]

The card would have contained an RFID tag with the person's name, date of birth, gender, address, signature, card number, card expiration date, and Medicare number, but there were also provisions to add more personal data later on.

Hmmm..

• more personal-data: height, weight, hair & eye color
• more-personal data: penis size

Re:What exactly is your problem with ID cards?

[Zey]

What exactly is the problem with having some reliable method of identifying a particular person?

Too convenient, less intrusive and far less paperwork for the bureaucrats to shuffle when compared to the existing 100 points of ID check ;-). Seriously though, a card with RFID deserved to be killed dead: highly dodgy for anyone to be able to scan your ID from a distance (and potentially steal it).

ID cards and government database sharing are useful to governments for clubbing individuals who've messed up their paperwork. An ID card which works in our favour by reducing the red tape and paperwork we must deal with by auto-filling in the data they already have... now that would be a winner.

So what do you want?

[bruce_the_loon]

An RFID card that can be read can fill in all that data for you, but is also intrusive. Can't have the best of both worlds.

I prefer the manual filling in of forms. Makes sure I get it right. Can you see the unwashed hippy behind the counter saying that the CARD says I'm a female lion trainer because some tit miscaptured the data? And refusing to change it because "the computer can't be wrong"

Given the magnitude of errors South Africa already comes up with, changing gender, ethnic group, wrong photo to wrong ID number, wrong details etc, can you imagine the crap when they try to do more? I doubt this country is that unique either.

Re:So what do you want?

[Zey]

An RFID card that can be read can fill in all that data for you, but is also intrusive. Can't have the best of both worlds.

Of course you can. It's currently called the magnetic strip. Can't be read from a distance, just with a reader. Go high tech with the basic principle and you'll use NVRAM or a DVD-RW optical stripe. Go high tech/low tech and you can have the data written in highly miniaturized bar codes, too small for the naked eye but, again, visible to readers.

Government will know what it wants to know know about you. That fight was lost decades ago. The questions remaining are: (1) whether that right is annoying at the day to day level, (2) whether we can at least benefit in lower paperwork from it (rather than being punished for clerical errors), and, (3) whether we can stop everyone else stealing our details in the process, given most governments are managed at the bureaucratic level by incompetent baboons.

Go here for more information

[nighty5]

Check out the following for more in-depth information to this national ID system.

http://www.privacy.org.au/Campaigns/ID_cards/HSAC.html

I am pleased to see Rudd taking responsibility and listening to Australians, something Howard refused to do which ultimately lead to his demise.

Re:What?

[Admiral Ag]

The usual answer is that people protect their privacy by revealing select information to different entities. For example, you'll tell your bank some stuff, the health system some other stuff, the welfare agency some other stuff, the stores where you have an account some other stuff and so on. In no case is there one entity that has all your personal information. This means two things. First, it means that if one of them is compromised (as has happened in Britain), the information about you that will be compromised is far from complete. Second, it means that any agency or company that has your personal information only has fragments of it and so has less power over you. Knowledge is power, and the ability to selectively reveal information about yourself to differing persons is necessary for the preservation of privacy.

There's a really good SF novel called "Shield" by Poul Anderson that explores this idea. Unlike a lot of SF novels, it actually has something profound to say.

Re:What?

[The Master Control P]

In short, when it comes to the government having information about you the best policy is "deny unless explicitly allowed." Now, if they just wanted to put a (secure) rfid chip in your driver's license that says the same thing the license says, fine.

But whenever this comes up it involves all of your identifying information being on one chip that can be read by any government agency's scanner. It also tends to involve a similar centralized database that's just begging to be abused. Remember: If supporters of a law, when confronted about possible abuses that it would permit, angrily deny that such will occur then you have discovered exactly what the law will be used for as soon and often as possible.

Re:What exactly is your problem with ID cards?

[jimicus]

What exactly is the problem with having some reliable method of identifying a particular person?

I suspect you're trolling, since a similar question comes up every time the ID card debate is raised.

Nevertheless, I'll bite.

You're asking the wrong question. When a government wants something, the correct question is "what benefit does this offer to me as a citizen?" and measure it up against the costs. This is because government exists for the benefit of the citizens.

As soon as you start saying "I don't see why not", you're essentially accepting that you should do something for the benefit of the government. While this isn't in and of itself dangerous, it has a lot of potential to be. For instance, the UK government is currently making noises about ID cards - yet in the last month there have been no fewer than 3 major instances of personal data being lost by UK government departments. (Google for Revenue Child Benefit data loss, DVLA data loss and NHS data loss if you don't believe me).

Over 26 million records have gone missing and for most of those records there was more than enough data to carry out fraud. And we're supposed to trust this government with a single database which contains all of this and more?

Nice, but watch out for those tasers

[vandan]

I'm not really surprised that Labor has pulled back from this. It's not exactly a popular move. And they did just get in thanks to a massive working-class movement that rose to overthrow their 'workchoices' industrial relations bullshit, so they know they can't smack people with this kind of thing at the moment.

But only a couple of minutes ago, I watched an ABC ( the public broadcaster in Australia ) news report on the push for widespread use of tasers in policing. It will be interesting to see if they cave into the pressure from the police and conservatives ( as the report hinted ). For me personally, it's difficult to say which is worse out of the RFID devices from Satan, and tasers. As an activist, I'm a little worried about being shot ( and killed, as has happened to 297 others already ). I've already witnessed some absolute atrocities committed against peaceful activists around me.

Making me proud to be an australian again

[mahju]

I'm and Aussie, lived overseas now for more than 5 years, and have lived with people's attitude of Australia sliding down with stuff like this, us back peddling out of the Kyoto agreement that we helped set up, not simply saying sorry for things we have done wrong, and taking asylum seekers not to civilised facilities in Australia, or straight back to where they came from, but rather to dump them on a legally convenient little island made of bird crap in the pacific for more than a year.

Since then Rudd has come along, and I see Australia in the news here in the UK for things seen more positive in the international areana. What's Rudd done so far since elected in November? well he's;
* Ratifying the Kyoto Protocol (Rudd's first official act)
* Indigenous & Reconciliation (Former prime minister John Howard continually refused during his 11-and-a-half years in power to say "sorry" to Aboriginal Australians; Rudd has promised to make an apology to the "stolen generations" in his first term of government)
* Renewable Energy Target: 20% by 2020
* and now this on ID cards.

I'm getting prouder by the day to be an Australian =D

I don't get this

[Majin Bubu]

As an European, actually Italian, I don't really get this. I have been carrying my ID card (which is just a piece of stamped paper, by the way, and very cheap) since I was 15 or so, and it allows me to travel the whole EU (which is some 26 countries, by the way) without passport or visa. It certainly has no "police state" connotations in our culture.
I can understand why a RFID-card would be dangerous to privacy, but our cards have nothing like it. I, for one, would welcome a chipped card (not readable at a distance, of course) that would reduce the clutter in my wallet by integrating, for example, driver license, ID card, medical assistance etc.
Seriously, I don't understand what's the big deal about identifying yourself if necessary. It's not like you have police in the street stopping you at random while you walk around and asking for "papers". Yes, there are checks in sensitive places, like at the soccer stadium, etc. but so what?

Belgium has had it for ages

[Govannon]

In WWII the Germans introduced the mandatory ID card here in Belgium and in several other countries too. With the liberation of Belgium our government decided to keep the ID card as they thought is was a good idea.

A few years ago the "Eid" was introduced, which is an ID card with limited personal information (name, address & picture) digitally stored onto the chip. Till this day I am not aware of any mayor privacy rights being broken, or identities being stolen or whatnot. Mind you I am the typical paranoia person when it comes to privacy and anonymity.
You can check the official website here: http://eid.belgium.be/en/navigation/12000/index.html

Actually the software to read the cards is open-source and you can make a cheap entry check system with only a card-reader, an embedded system and a database server.

The problem is not ID card themselves

[loopkin]

Most of Europe has ID cards, and nobody ever heard it's police states.
The thing is to emit cards, you need a database. So the card becomes a key to your entry in the ID database. So far, so good.
Now, if you use it also to pay your taxes, the same card has become a key to your tax records and earnings. The same if you use it for your medical insurance, and so on.
Here's the privacy breach: the "one card does all" scheme is really very bad, because it allows easily to retrieve personal data from different databases.

Take France. There is one of the most advanced computer-related privacy law (IT and Freedom Act):
- there is a "national" ID card, that is connected to nothing, except maybe the passports database
- there is a medical state insurance ID card (Vitale card), that is connected to nothing, except other medical insurances, and your record at your doctor's
- for the rest (taxes, ...), where you don't need an ID card, there aren't ID cards.
All the systems have different unique identification numbers ("national" ID card number, medical state insurance number, tax payer number, ...) and it is disallowed by the law (for anyone, including the state), to make a database that references all those id numbers.
So where's the problem there ? (except that it's for sure more expensive that having a "one card does all", but privacy has its price).

Enough, actually

[WeirdJohn]

DISCLAIMER: I am an Access Card Taskforce member

It's been an interesting ride.

To begin with we had the standard 'moving target with secret agenda'.

Then we had a whole bunch of clueless vendors who were each trying to tie the country up into their own foreign-controlled solution ('the mechanism and algorithms for encryption are not detailed here for obvious reasons' Yeah right - like your particular crypto card ain't worth shit and you don't want anyone to know about the technical details of your patent-applied-for 31tor system. I kid you not gentle readers.)

Then we had all the 'Smart Card Smart Card Yeah Yeah Yeah!!' people who didn't understand that you still have to implement solutions, having a CPU card doesn't automagically make things happen just because you want them to be so.

The original concept for the card was a pretty good idea - replace 26 other cards with a single card to simplify the access to Government services. As planned it would not work as an ID card as there was to be no information printed on the card to identify you other than your name. This also made the card completely impractical. For example, tho card was going to simplify concession access to public transport. The catch was that the driver had no way of telling from the face of the card whether tho]e cardholder was eligible for concession fares. This meant that every bus, taxi, tram and ferry in Oz needed a WiFi enabled reader, and that every passenger using their card enter their PIN into a reader as they entered the bus (etc). This was clearly not going to save time, as most of the elderly that would use buses would do that slowly.

The finals hurdle we had was the previous Government trying to sneak RealID type facilities into the card. Fortunately several members crossed the floor, and those amendments never got up.

I got the impression that Prof Fels was not going to let the card get through unless he was happy with our work, and he very early in the process seemed to realise that we could easily come up with something very bad for Oz. I have the utmost respect for the man now that I've worked with him.

Do us a favour....

[mormop]

Can you get your man Rudd to phone Gordon Brown and talk some sense into him please. Either that or we'll do you a swap but I don't think you'd be that stupid.