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Originally Posted by Philip Johnston @ The Telegraph
Almost unnoticed last week, the Government announced it had shaved another £1 billion off the cost of its proposed identity card scheme.
It did so by deciding to let the "open market" capture citizens' biometrics, effectively outsourcing the cost of enrolling people on to the ID database. You could end up getting your fingerprints taken at a supermarket, rather than at a passport office as originally proposed.
Almost imperceptibly, the security architecture originally built around the ID card project has been dismantled.
When it was proposed in 2002, the intention was to establish a bespoke database. David Blunkett, then Home Secretary, said: "We've got to build a clean identity database from scratch. We can't use the National Insurance numbers, as there are 20 million more National Insurance numbers than there are people in the country."
But this idea was abandoned. Instead, biometrics will be stored on an existing system in the Home Office used for asylum seekers, biographical information will be held on a National Insurance database in the Department for Work and Pensions and a third database at the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) will hold administrative details related to the issue and use of the ID cards.
It was also envisaged that everyone would have to give an iris print, which is the most secure biometric with a far lower chance of false readings than fingerprints. Last year, however, the Identity and Passport Agency said it would proceed only with fingerprints, which are far cheaper to capture.
Still, at least these fingerprints would be taken in the secure and official environs of a government passport office, one of 70 being set up for this purpose. But when it became clear that far more than 70 offices would be needed to enrol 60 million people on to a database, and it would be costly, this changed as well. Hence the announcement that private contractors will be asked to bid for the work.
Does any of this sound secure to you? It seems to defeat the purpose of the whole exercise, which is to protect identities, capture terrorists, bear down on benefit fraud and stop illegal immigration. But of course none of these will be ameliorated by the possession of an ID card, which nobody will be required to carry with them.
As one perplexed campaigner said after the publication of the new costings: "The Government now appears to have junked the primary pretext for the scheme. So what is it for?"
(big big snip)
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