« These Telegraph Proof Readers. | Main | Polly Misses the Point. »
October 18, 2005
Yet More ID Card Idiocy.
So Charlie the Safety Elephant announces another change to the ID Card system:
The home secretary,
Charles Clarke, will today guarantee that the personal details
contained on the national identity card will not go beyond those
currently held on passports.
He is to announce that he will write the guarantee into the legislation which passes through its final stages in the Commons today.
The bill specifies that only name, date and place of birth, gender, address, nationality and immigration status can be recorded on the ID database. To guard against "function creep" the home secretary has promised that fresh primary legislation will have to be introduced if extra personal details such as health records, criminal records or other background information were to be added.
The guarantee will even
extend to a ban on the inclusion of any numbers that could lead to
sensitive personal details being disclosed.
So it isn’t actually going to do any of the things once asked for. Apart from the nationality/immigration status this is the same information that’s on the credit card sized driving licence. So why not simply add that information to the licence and issue "non-drivers" licences or ID cards as so many other places do? Why have the ID card system at all?
The Home Office minister,
Andy Burnham, said that the infrastructure of scanners and readers
needed for the national identity card scheme would have to be
introduced anyway to upgrade to the next generation of "biometric"
passports.
That is simply a lie. As Chris Lightfoot has repeatedly pointed out the international agreement is only that there will be a machine readable version of the current photograph on the passport. (He’s also good on this subject yesterday.)
I think we’ve actually reached the point where even the Government would like to dump the whole thing. They’re not going to get any of their all singing all dancing stuiff onto the card or into the database but they can’t drop it as they’ve got so much political capital invested in it. So we’ll all waste 18 billion for the sake of their political vanity. Wonderful.
October 18, 2005 in Current Affairs | Permalink
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
https://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8341c2d3e53ef00d8345c3a8653ef
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Yet More ID Card Idiocy.:
Comments
It has to contain more data than the current passport, since it has to contain the data on the three (or 13 according to the Safety Elephant) biometrics. Or perhaps they have given up on them as well, not that that would change the card's uselessness.
Posted by: chris | Oct 18, 2005 9:01:45 AM
The bill specifies that only name, date and place of birth, gender, address, nationality and immigration status can be recorded on the ID database.
My passport does not have my address on, nor does the passport authority have my current address.
Posted by: Tim Newman | Oct 18, 2005 9:17:00 AM
For me, one of the main reasons for introducing ID cards is to cut benefit fraud. Denying access to public "services" such as dole money and incapacity benefit without a card could reduce the level of fraud, especially if the information is cross-checked with the inland revenue and banks.
The only problem is the issue of civil liberties, which can be addressed by limiting the amount of information on the card and who has access to it. Unfortunately, as you rightly point out, this will reduce the card's effectiveness to almost nothing.
So why are they bothering? Am I being cynical when thinking it's easier to get draconian legislation through the houses if it's done over a period of time rather than in one go? It might cost more in the long run (new infrastructure to deal with more information, re-issuing of cards etc..), but that has never been a problem for NuLabour before.
Posted by: lascivious | Oct 18, 2005 9:19:08 AM
@ lascivious
The Department for Work and Pensions own estimates for impersonation of identity fraud is about £35 million a year.
With a perfect UK ID Card system they think that they might be able to reduce this by about £5 million a year
This is out of a total fraud benefit fraud estimate of more than £3 billion a year, out of a total annual payout of over £100 billion.
i.e. the effect of ID Cards on benefit fraud would be too small for the DWP to be able to estimate accurately.
Most benefit fraud has nothing to do with false or multiple identities, but with people claiming false circumstances e.g. working whilst claiming benefit, inflating their housing benefit claims etc.
Cross checking with banks and tax authorities already happens now, without the need for an intrusive centralised biometric database ID Card scheme. Do not forget that not everyone has a bank account or pays income tax.
The Government's own underestimates for the cost of the ID Card scheme are over £450 million a year, so the economics simply do not add up.
See
Evening Standard: Andrew Gilligan demolishes the £1.3 billion identity fraud hype
Posted by: Watching Them, Watching Us | Oct 18, 2005 10:02:16 AM
Well it seems you have completely thwarted my attempts to find something positive in ID cards. That'll teach me to not do my research :)
Posted by: lascivious | Oct 18, 2005 10:26:12 AM
What I think you are overlooking is the human rights perspective.
Did anyone see the episode of Spooks last week, where (spoiler) the ex-eastenders guy was locked up on a case of mistaken identity?
With proper biometric id system, abuses of human rights like that would be much less likely. It's all very well for white middle class morgage holders to take some kind of 'principled' stand on an issue they know will never affect them, but what about those people without such secure, easily provable identities?
People who are owed benifit, but denied it because of slow manual anti-fraud procedures. People in jail for crimes someone with a similar name comitted. People the bank refuses a loan to because they have no credit record, who can't buy cheap goods online because they have no bank account
In a post-modern society, the ability to prove your identity is a fundamental human right, and concerns of practicality and expense need to be considered in that light.
soru
Tim adds: Read through some of the Chris Lightfoot stuff. The false positives rates on these biometric identifiers will mean more people mistakenly identified, not less.
Posted by: soru | Oct 18, 2005 12:10:53 PM
