Slashdot Mirror
UK Gov't To Require ID Cards For Some Foreign Residents
craigavonite, writing "It's looking like the UK is in for biometric ID cards within the next few years, despite widespread protest from groups such as 'NO2ID,'" excerpts from an article at the BBC describing a UK identify card to be issued starting later this year: "The biometric card will be issued from November, initially to non-EU students and marriage visa holders. Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said the cards would allow people to 'easily and securely prove their identity.' Critics say the roll-out to some immigrants is a 'softening up' exercise for the introduction of identity cards for everyone."
It isn't a big thing. It's an ID card that holds a fingerprint record. How is it bad to tie a card to a person?
"It's looking like the UK is in for biometric ID cards within the next few years, despite widespread protest from groups such as 'NO2I"
Nice troll.
... card identify YOU
IT BE DOWN
so?
As in "say no to ID". Makes a lot more sense doesn't it?
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Didn't I see an hilarious piece on You Tube recently about redesigning the Stop Sign? Well these things look the same! What a waste of time and money. I don't even need one...I know who I am.
Smivs on the intertubes!
I live in a post-com country, and we've had identity cards forever. No fingerprins, just photograph, name, and other details. It also has some security features to make forging difficult (but not impossible; unfortunately there's no digital signature for the ID card so far). You can have a look at some examples at http://www.minv.sk/?vzory-dokladov-obcianske-preukazy I can't imagine to live without one. How do you prove your identity without it in a bank, or when you need something from some office (for example new driver's license), etc?
1. It wont stop illegal working.
Anyone who is supposed to have such a card but doesnt can just pretend to be on of the 99.9%
of the population that is not required to have the card.
2. Whats the point of the frigging fingerprint?
Who has got the both tha equipemnt and the right to check it?
3. The variously elected and appointed idiots are in thrall to various "consultants".
To paraphrase Warren Buffets immortal words "Never ask a consultant if you need an overpriced solution".
4. Lastly but most importantly -- there is no "problem".
Various candidates for the problem to which id cards are the solution have been proposed and they have
all been found wanting.
First it was terrorism -- but it was pointed out that all known serious terroist attacks in hte UK
were carried out by terrorists using thier real names, and, that at no point in the leadup to any attack
were they required to identify themselves.
Second it was illegal immigration -- but some 350 million EU citizens have the right to work in the UK
anyway, the much villified asylum seekers are attempting to immigrate legally, plus nobody is going
to check the documents of thier Russian nanny or Morrocan cleaner.
Thirdly it was "identity theft" -- but if the banks give money/credit to unverified strangers it is
thier problem. For this to be effective lenders would need to have; the equipment to read the card,
the right to ask for a fingerprint and access to the central database to verify the validity of the
card.
Currently Jaqi Smith cannot come up with any reasonable justification for this system at all but is
still pressing ahead with a system that will dump billions into the coffers of the "usual suspects"
Accenture, EDS (now HP), CAP and IBM.
Well at least the labour party will be more or less extinct in a years time, but the civil servants who
are pushing this idea will still be there, and the Conservatives look even more prone to SnakeOil salesman that the incumbent idiots.
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
How do they tell the difference between someone that is foreign and someone that just looks foreign? Any black person can just claim they are a British citizen, so don't need an ID card.
They already have biometric Garda National Immigration Bureau (GNIB) plastic cards with chip and other info on you here in Ireland (Republic of) for non nationals, and it must be on you at all times...
this is just the first part, sooner or later everone will have one, so your argument is null and void. As well as pretty stupid.
For now you can claim that you don't need a card. This will pass with time. That is the entire plan. Start small, then slowly get everyone to have to ID themselves.
Sometimes you wonder how the goverment can introduce such schemes without people protesting and then you see people like you and you know why. The voter is stupid.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Igor fetch me my slipperz
Is this really a big deal?
What's wrong with carrying an ID card? Don't the british carry their drivers license? (its what an ID card is in Canada) How do you ID at pubs?
Now that I'm in South Korea I had to get a foreign residents card. Actually I prefer it. You're supposed to carry your passport or the card on you at all time. I prefer to accidentally lose the card than accidentally lose my passport (which I can keep locked up somewhere secure). Yes I'd prefer not to accidentally lose either, but the card is far less of a hassle.
parts of you are in Jocks or cHaps unpleasant but it's not a rules are This
Identity cards introduced for those foreign Johnnies, not you. "The card will be compulsory for foreign nationals. All terrorists and illegal immigrants will be required to obtain one and show it to policemen, council officials or dog catchers on request. LOOK! TERRORISTS!"
This is largely from (a) civil servants who think it'd be convenient to their jobs to have everyone filed and numbered (b) private contractors like EDS and Capita who have been promised CASH CASH CASH for consulting on such schemes, and certainly don't have a track record of employing ex-goverment ministers and senior civil servants at vast consulting fees 12 months after they leave the government. Well, maybe a bit of a track record.
The ridiculous thing is that this is a creature of the Labour government, who are vastly unpopular, and will likely be kicked out on their corrupt arses in the 2010 election. This scheme is set only to be fully implemented by 2011/2012. EDS and Crapita will, of course, still be paid in full.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
The UK already requires anyone entering on a short-term visa (i.e. fiancee or proposed civil partnership) to get their biometric data taken (all 10 fingerprints and facial scan), it is just that this information is not carried on an easily lost or stolen card. As someone in the tech industry, it scares me enough that government has my biometric information, but to then put it on a card? There is no way this is secure and certainly not accomplishing any of the its goals (except to perhaps make more money for the companies involved, as someone else mentioned).
We already have a serious UK fraud problem originating in the Indian subcontinent - Mumbai was for many years the identity theft capital of the East, with fraud companies even keeping copies of real government forms going back many years, and annual ink samples, to facilitate document faking. Add these capabilities to those of our home grown criminals, and any identity card scheme actually becomes an identity theft facilitator, not an obstacle.
(And yes, I write from personal experience - I was involved in a UK case where an Indian physician from Mumbai produced forged documents. It was this experience that got me interested in identity theft and security, because he was using faked faxes, and the judge seemed unable to understand how easy this was to do.)
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Wow, what a class act. Let's inflict this evil on Johnny Foreigner, shall we? It's just as bad and risk prone for them to hand over their inside leg measurement to a government desperately seeking more contractors to blame their avalanche of data loss on, but hey, they're foreigners so that ought to be OK. Nobody will be campaigning for them, surely?
Every time I think the current UK government has reached the lowest of the low they amaze me by finding new ways to dig. I guess that's why they call it NEW Labour - it can pretend to be Labour but isn't, and it can pretend to be business friendly which it isn't either. It's hot air, spin and as huge a risk to the future to the UK and the current US government is to the US, no wonder they got on so well.
The current ID card schemes are unacceptable, and plenty of advise has been given how to correct it. All that is happening here is a last minute panic to try and land the new government with a huge mess to unpick, not that that pile needs any adding.
It's time to bring personal responsibility back to those clowns. It's needed.
because once your biometric details are stolen it's easy to replace/reset them.......
echo $SIGNATURE
Fingerprints are stored in the form of Minutiae Points rather than scanned imaged.
But that doesn't mean they can't be reconstructed.
U1NCaVpYUWdlVzkxSUhkcGMyZ2dlVzkx SUdoaFpHNG5kQ0JpYjNSb1pYSmxaQT09
What is the logic behind targetting foreigners first? The obvious answer is that the population is less likely to protest. I suspect some not-so-thinly veiled xenophobia.
Its a new stealth tax, just like how the fee to get permanent residency has gone up about 300% in just a few years. No doubt there will be a nice hefty fee to get this card and no one will care because its immigrants paying right?
In the country I live in (Malta), *everyone* has an ID card. How was it imposed? It wasn't but if you want to:
- Sit for an exam
- Require *any* government service (+ motoring +insurance etc)
- Vote
- Open a bank account
- Etc
you will need an ID. You don't "ask" for an ID card, you get one assigned to you upon birth registration.
Even local business ask for it sometimes because it makes locating your record easy. Seriously what's the problem with a having a document saying that you are number #123456 ? That's all it boils down to!
Maybe the data isn't stored on the RFID in the passport. But there's the headshot ; such an obvious biometric that people forget about it.
What many people noticed on applying for a UK passport recently was the leaflet that came with the form telling you exactly how to pose for your photograph... you were only allowed certain margins, certain backgrounds, you had to face forward, you had to take off your glasses. It was pretty clear to those with a technical bent that the photograph was intended for consumption by a computer, so I'd suggest that anyone with a recent UK passport is already in a large database of facial geometry metrics somewhere in the Home Office (and maybe on your passport chip too). This would mean that you are ripe for rapid recognition from any sufficiently detailed CCTV footage ; and as we know, the UK has more CCTV cameras than anywhere else in the world. Nice.
Now, people don't habitually carry their passport in the UK, partly because it's a valuable document, partly because you don't need it for everyday usage, and partly because of the form factor - a little red book that doesn't conveniently fit into your pocket without the risk of being bent. A credit card sized ID on the other hand, is VERY easy to slip into your wallet and forget about.
If I were the UK government wanting to promote the routine carrying of an RFID enabled ID, I'd make the UK passport modular - a red book for the visa stamps, with a pocket in the back to carry the wallet-sized photo / RFID card when you're travelling. A lot of people would take to carrying their "passport card" routinely because suddenly, it's convenient.
Many is the time I've turned up at a place and found I needed a photo-ID or my passport and not had one, buying foreign currency, for example. It would probably work on me (after I put the tinfoil weave in my wallet, of course).
To pull out my copy of 1984 so I can refresh myself on how I need to act in the future.
"I need to know who you are, where you're coming from, where you're going to and why. Now."
You'll all have committed demographic suicide. Don't worry, though. Your little brother the U.S. is deep into it's own process of a silent Mexican invasion. Eventually, poor and ignorant people from 3td world shitholes will have ruined what once were glorious and powerful nations.
They would not have come up with an uglier design if they had tried.
The issue as I see it is this.
At present I carry a passport, a driving licence, another chipped card for the tacho in the truck and various other cards for entitlement to drive various machinery.
The lame brained would say it is more convenient to have all the relevant data stored on one card. I disagree.
If I travel to a foreign country, I need a passport and maybe my driving licence (to hire a car). If I don't travel, I don't need the passport - why should I prove my entitlement to travel if I am in my native country ? Why should I open my complete life to inspection every time I "prove" my identity. The passport application process surely proves my right to be here. My driving licence proves my entitlement to drive on public roads in the UK, why should it identify me to the immigration dept. too ?
There will gradually be feature creep in the system leading to even your bank cards migrating onto this one evil card. Fine you say, less to carry around. Except that you will be required to use it more and more to gain access to anything. This means your entire life is recorded - which roads you used and when, what you bought and where, who was nearby when you drove and or bought anything etc etc.
The question you should be asking is not, can the cards be forged ? The question should be - can the system be hacked ?
Is there anybody here that thinks that any networked computer can be hack proof ? In that case, what happens when somebody breaks in and uses YOUR primary key to create a totally ficticious chain of events placing you in the vicinity of a robbery, murder, terrorist act, or even in the same building as other known criminals. As far as the police are concerned, the system doesn't lie and since your card contains your finger prints, it can't be anyone other than you that the records refer to. Not a problem ? Well not a problem until you are late for a train and they think you are about to set off a bomb and decide to shoot first and ask questions later. Quite a bit of incentive for terrorists there I think. Create a false trail for themselves, showing nothing but innocent activity, and a damning trail for some innocent who will be miles away from the action but conveniently will have the police trailing them, not the terrorists.
Bad idea.
The roll out to foreign nationals on spousal visa's, I understand that they can give you a card when you apply to extend your leave to remain, but my wife already has an indefinate leave to remain stamp in her passport, as far as we are concerned her deals with the Home Office are done. How are they to roll this out to the many many thousands who are already permanantly settled in the UK? We have moved a number of times since indefinate leave to remain was given, so sending a letter to the last known address isn't going to help them.
It's scary how V for Vendetta is slowly turning from a work of fiction into a documentary.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
wait until they put RFID in it, and RFID scanners in shops, subway, busses etc. then you can see where you where, and everyone an see everywhere you have been, all your life. probably stored foreever in some central system.
prepare for the complete end of privacy.
want to see you mistress? well.. be prepared for some blackmail from the overseers..
homo? don't want to tell. if you get famous, someone else will tell..
As a UK citizen I am more than willing to go to Prison for not having one of these cards once they inevitably become compulsory. It's one of the few issues I feel very strongly about.
Not to mention all the old ladies that simply won't be able to afford one. This government trying to introduce this scheme is beyond ridiculous if you consider that this government has never undertaken a single successful IT project in its' 11 years of government.
Nope, a great many of the CD incidents were unencrypted.
I've just recruited somebody who worked in Parliament IT, and I've worked in most areas of civil service IT, and from what he's told me and what I've experienced, I'm more against a centralized database of citizens (well subjects here in Blighty) details than ever.
Government departments over here tend to pay *huge* fees to the Accenture's and EDS's of this world who staff up the projects with their cheapest graduates and underdeliver a system that fulfills 15% (if lucky) of the business requirements, has no clear architecture, has expensive licensing implications and is a nightmare to support. They are then kicked out and the permanent staff are asked to take over. They pay their permanent staff very low wages on the whole, and offer fairly poor training - this combined with a rushed handover of undocumented rubbish from the big boys means we end up with a mish mash of systems with poor support, poor security and easily exploitable back doors.
The one military project I worked on was *not* like this which makes me think they should apply the same rigour to everything.
broad brush rant over...
-- For evil to triumph it is enough that good men do nothing.
The data that can be collected is listed in Scedule 1 of the Identity Cards Act 2006 http://www.opsi.gov.uk/ACTS/acts2006/ukpga_20060015_en_5#sch1 There are around 50 pieces of information, however you should look at paragraph 2(d) which gives the government the right to record any biometric information about us. My biggest problem with this scheme is that of function creep and the great amount of surveillance we have here in the UK. If you look down to paragraph 9 in the link I provided you can also see the scheme creates an automatic audit trail every time the information is used. Therefore the correct way to look at this system is in terms of surveillance and building indexes on our lives. I just don't think it is wise to allow the government this much potential for abuse with no reasonable justification.
Please, you must support this ID card, think of all those very poor multinational IT companies like IBM sorting through people's data, just like they did in Nazi Germany. Think of the politicians and their backhanders, and please, think of the taxpayer who is seemingly ever willing to put their hands in their pockets to find another £20bn (about $40bn US) the country cannot afford, whilst the government loses yet more personal data of the population.
The only people that are backing the ID cards are people with a vested interest in rolling out the police state, and cretins who's only idiotic childish reasoning is "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear."
Of course, the UK government have ways of forcing this "voluntary" ID card. It says that for students (university age) it will be voluntary, but to get a student loan to go to university will will HAVE to get an ID card, no ID card, no loan, no university. Not voluntary in other words unless you have lots of money.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
The really nasty thing here is not having a card with an identifying number on it, or even a card with lots of scary-sounding biometric data.
The really nasty thing is that the card implies a central government database which will contain everything they've got on you - criminal record, DNA fragment, address, car registration plate.
They have some or most of this stuff already but the crucial difference is that it's all sliced up into different databases and it's not practical to pull everything on someone.
The ramifications of this are as profound as the impact of large databases have already been in other areas. Imagine you didn't pay a parking fine and bang, the government garnishes your payroll, cancels your garbage collection and prevents you leaving the country for a month.
As for the politics of it, I'm convinced Labour are pushing this through for some sort of nasty, secretive reason. Why else would they keep coming up with one reason after another, none of which make any sense? Someone suggested they like funnelling cash to sh1tty consultancy agencies like Crapita and Accenture, (which sounds plausible since it's along similar lines to how the Iraq war happened).
Also, don't think we will be able to bring this down with passive resistance. People will get them and pay the fee for them when they realise they can't take an exam or get a passport without first getting an ID card. There won't be a massive public reaction to thsi like there was to the poll-tax. The best we can hope for here is that Labour simply give it up as too unpopular, before it is brough in.
You thought you could break the laws of physics without paying the PRICE?
But instead if a finger print, it's stored on a chip.
The US government has done this for decades and nobody has ever complained. In fact, I'm sure that if you asked the average American, they'd be all for it.
The reason the UK govt has problems is that the system admins aren't happy with their fringe duties dealing with the public and are burnt out. Just take a look:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwNwTjDLMP4
This should be reminded to them when the elections come.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
More like "Ihre Papiere! Ihre Papiere!!!"
I know when I lived in Japan I had to have a foreign resident card in order to get anything like a bank account or even get paid. This is really nothing new, and I don't see why it is such a huge deal. Sure, the biometrics may be new, but is it really something to make a big hubbub about?
I agree fully. I already have to carry around my drivers license everywhere. Now, I'll have to carry another id around, 2 id's seems excessive.
Well, the frog is now in the pot, and the water is lovely and warm - it thinks it's having a bath!
Get your own free personal location tracker
i dont think its got anything to do with border control - they are just trying to sneak it through the back door via the public support for the 'foreigner' idea, which so many english see as a danger to their country...
i'm personally not impervious to this erosion of privacy - as a working foreigner i expect to receive such a card in the coming months... to which i will probably either burn it, or pointedly refuse to carry it. ever.
What, you get NEWS in your local paper? Lucky you, all we get are ads for double glazing firms! If you need double glazing, come to Nottingham.
Smivs on the intertubes!
To express my detest for G. Brown
I jest I'm a threat to the Crown
Yet if I were Islamic
They'd not get this but panic
I'd spend forty two days underground
fe47c9f8cb83c885eedb0f7c1a36a864
Isn't it Subject's data?
Neither - it is foreigner's data.
Don't the british carry their drivers license? (its what an ID card is in Canada) How do you ID at pubs?
The British license is not like the Canadian one in that there is no photograph on it and it is valid until you turn 70 years old (as long as you are younger than 70 when you get it otherwise I think it is valid for something like 5 years?). I'm not sure if they have now added a photo to it (seem to remember something about that) but as an ID it is useless for a majority of people who have the old style. But that is fine, it is not meant to be an ID it is meant to show that you know how to drive.
Kind of expected, isnt it?
In addition to "softening" up joe public, when "most of" the immigrant population HAS an ID card, proving their entitlement to be in the UK etc, then, if you dont have one, then you're either innocent or a OMFG terrorist/health tourist/illegal immigrant etc. Hence, to "prove" you're a EU citizen, you'll need to get one yourself, since you'll automatically be suspected of being illegal by not having one, more so if you're not white. How else do you prove you're entitled to NHS services etc, if you dont have one? The government wont "force" you to get one, you'll do it all by yourself.
You might want to factor in the biased, outdated, unfair Japanese criminal justice system
remind anyone else of nazi germany?