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U-Turn On UK ID Cards
An anonymous reader writes "The UK appears to be watering down its national ID card system, with the revelation by the government that it will now only check the cards against a central biometric database in a minority of cases. Critics are saying it not only renders the whole scheme pointless, but will pose a security risk by making it far easier to use copied or cloned cards. 'But an Identity and Passport Service spokesman denied the system would be vulnerable to fraud: 'The majority of instances where people use their identity cards will be day-to-day situations where the cards offer a convenient method of proving identity such as a young person proving their age to buy alcohol,' he said.'"
convenient method of proving identity such as a young person proving their age to buy alcohol
"A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers." Hayek
Personally I'd be more worried about some junior level government worker losing my data along with that of everyone else in the country when he goes digging through his pocket for enough change to buy lunch at the pub down the street.
So, this system will not be susceptible to fraud because young people will use it to buy alcohol, an activity known to create a black market in fraudulent identification. Brilliant!
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
They feel the resistance so now they roll the IDs out as an inferior version of the original proposal. As soon as they push them through, they will turn around and make them mandatory in every possible situation, blaming it on worsening terror and crime situation.
Not if they loose the database each week and screw up _both_ the biometric data signing and
UID, which given the history of UK government seems most likely.
While a Brit, thank God I live in Switzerland, where the populace is educated, public data secure and FOSS is ever more popular while the Bundesrat can't pass laws the people don't like.
What the USA and UK need is Universal Democracy, and the Internet would allow large populations to get there.
What the democracies also need to is to issue X509 certificates, free, to everyone at birth
keeping the key card till children come of age.
I'm jealous of you folks in the US, at least you've got a new government in 2 months time. We're stuck with the same leadership over here for likely another 18 months or so. Given the current recession and the billions plowed into bailing out the UK banking system, I'm pissed off that such big budget projects such as this - with dubious benefits - are still on the agenda.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
Our Spiffy, Shiny, Radically New(tm) system that is horribly vulnerable to fraud isn't vulnerable to fraud because we will only be using it to do what the old and busted system was perfectly capable of doing! (Is there some aspect of this that isn't completely insane that I've missed out on?)
"check the cards against a central biometric database in a minority of cases."
More like "check the cards against a central biometric database if your a minority"
"A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers." Hayek
If they're seriously proposing this as being used primarily for things like proof of age when buying alcohol with no means to confirm the validity of the card, how exactly are they going to protect against things like this?
There were so many different ways in which you were required to provide absolute proof of your identity these days that life could easily become extremely tiresome just from that factor alone, never mind the deeper existential problems of trying to function as a coherent consciousness in an epistemologically ambiguous physical universe. Just look at cash point machines, for instance. Queues of people standing around waiting to have their fingerprints read, their retinas scanned, bits of skin scraped from the nape of the neck and undergoing instant (or nearly instant -- a good six or seven seconds in tedious reality) genetic analysis, then having to answer trick questions about members of their family they didn't even remember they had, and about their recorded preferences for tablecloth colours. And that was just to get a bit of spare cash for the weekend. If you were trying to raise a loan for a jetcar, sign a missile treaty or pay an entire restaurant bill things could get really trying.
Hence the Ident-i-Eeze. This encoded every single piece of information about you, your body and your life into one all-purpose machine-readable card that you could then carry around in your wallet, and therefore represented technology's greatest triumph to date over both itself and plain common sense.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
But I thought "People 'can't wait for ID cards'":
The cards will be available for all from 2012 but she said: "I regularly have people coming up to me and saying they don't want to wait that long."
Someone should tell Jacqui that the people who stand to make lots of money from producing ID cards for the government wanting it to be done sooner don't count as a representative sample of the British public.
It seems to me that much of the problems with any form of national ID card could be mitigated if you had different cards for different purposes. If I need to be able to assert that I'm old enough to buy something, all I need is a difficult-to-forge card that asserts that fact, and ties that fact to me (with my photograph perhaps). Such a card has no need for my name, my address, or any other facts about my identity. If you wanted to get fancy, you could digitize all of this information and have nothing appearing on the card at all.
Similarly, a license to drive should be based on my ability to drive. My identity doesn't matter, at least beyond what's needed to prove that I'm the rightful holder of the license. I might need to present some identification to the government when I obtain the license, but that doesn't need to remain with it. So you could have a separate card (or set of digital credentials) for that.
It's the concentration of all of this into one card that makes that one card so valuable to thieves and a police state. But for most of the uses of the various identity/license/payment/shopper cards, they need to know very little about me. Usually just an account number of some kind, a way to ensure authenticity (digital signature, watermark) and a way for people I present the card to to verify that I'm the rightful holder, if that even matters (like a photograph, or a hash of any kind of biometric data). Why must everything be tied to a government identity?
Reprehensible woman. Put her in the stocks.
I like how these blanket statements of damnation are frequently made by, appropriately tagged, Anonymous Cowards.
While I will be among the first to admit that the US has its problems, blanket accusations such as this appear to say that everyone in the US (not America, that is a continent - two actually) is racist.
Inflammatory statements like that are likely only going to serve to get your comments in their entirety written off as just unfounded accusations and overblown bravado.
I bet she weighs the same as a duck.
"No, the purpose is selective enforcement"
...and selective enforcement, is a slower way to boil a frog. The point being, once they have a basic system implimented in law, they can then introduce new technology, controls and additional laws over time. So at first, introduce selective enforcement, then over time, widen the scope to much greater levels of enforcement. This way, they slip the full idea past opponents as opponents, *at this time* only have to agree on small parts of the overall idea. The control freaks who want this system, are starting to tread more carefully, now they are getting more (unwanted) attention on their plans. They still intend to have the full system, but they are now bring it in bit by bit. Don't want to heat the water too fast, or the frog will jump out the water.
But its wrong for the opponents of this system to say this is a U-Turn. "U-Turn" is political talk for implying a back down. This isn't a back down, the control freaks still want this system, no matter how many times they are told it will not work.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.