ID cards will ‘help fraudsters’
An article in The Times quotes Dr James Backhouse, a director of the London School of Economics Information Systems Integrity Group, on identity theft:
Dr Backhouse said: “ID cards will exacerbate the situation. The stakes are raised that much higher if the master key is cracked; it opens the door to all sorts of frauds. The US has a very big identity fraud problem and this is partly because the system relies on social security numbers as a universal form of identity and this is exploited by fraudsters.” According to the US’s Federal Trade Commission, 27.3 million consumers there have been victims of identity theft in the past five years.
Despite government claims that the purpose of the ID card scheme is to reduce identity fraud, it actually seems to have been designed as a population tracking system, establishing a single National Identity Register Number for each citizen which government can use to collate all the data it holds on each person across multiple government departments. Unfortunately, as Dr Backhouse points out, NIRNs would make it equally easy for fraudsters to collate information on individuals, with unwelcome consequences.
