Skip to content or view screen version

More ID card nonsense

j | 28.06.2005 14:27 | Analysis | Technology

Getting some fact together about ID cards.

This is not going to be cheap

This week, the London School of Economics published a report[1] stating that the ID card project will cost 3 times more than what the government says. Charles Clarke, member of a government that wasted £30bn in failed IT projects for the NHS, says the LSE is completely wrong[2]. By the way, the £30bn NHS project was supposed to cost £2.3bn in the first place.

Surely it will be completely different this time, if only because EDS, the IT company responsible for the tax credit fiasco, is bidding for this ID card project. "ID cards are a competency of EDS", says EDS[3]. Honest!

This is not going to be safe

This week too, we learnt that the government is outsourcing some of the handling of biometric visas to India[4]. The work that is to be done there is probably similar to what will need to be done for ID cards (biometrics too). Will ID card information end up being outsourced to India too?

Interestingly, there was some alarm regarding outsourcing last week when The Sun published an article[5] revealing how easy it was to buy data useable for identity theft in the UK from call centres in India.

The government gathers an awful lot of data about people, visa applicants and otherwise. It's beyond sanity that they are outsourcing and thus following the tracks of a number of industries that have been screwed that way, especially because simple techniques have been developed in the last years to specifically imitate the data the government is outsourcing, and plans to grab for this ID card project: they will fingerprint the whole population, will they export this data too? Fingerprints can be faked[6] simply with items one can find in grocery stores, how long before one can buy this data?

But hey, they'll implement watchdogs.

In any case, recent stories have shown how incompetent the police can be even though they have amounts of forensic data handy and all the biometric databases they need: last year, the Greater Manchester Police arrested a poor chap with Parkinson's disease for burglary. It didn't bother them that this guy couldn't walk or bathe or do anything unassisted, let alone be a burglar: they had matching DNA samples. The fact that DNA samples do not work all the time did not even cross their minds[7].

So what

The government will waste money on a project that will put the entire population at risk of being screwed by collecting information they are too stupid to use properly anyway. Talk about incompetent Big Brother wannabees - well done Labour.

j