Ministers see latest scheme to push ID card in peril
Lots of Identity Card coverage today. The backlash against the Home Office identity fraud figures is widely reported, mostly based on a Conservative press release. Gerri Peev writes in The Scotsman:
Opposition was mounting to the government’s case for identity cards last night, despite the Home Office’s bid to highlight the supposedly rocketing rise in identity fraud.
Ministers estimated the cost of the crime was £1.7 billion a year – which they said was a rise of £400 million since the last study in 2002.
The Home Office study was published just days before the controversial Identity Cards Bill is due to come back to the Commons.
However, a backlash grew when it emerged that much of the rise was for fraud that had not been measured in the study three years ago, including £372 million for the new phenomenon of telecommunications crime.
The Guardian and The Telegraph have similar stories.
Also plenty of coverage of the Dutch Biometric passport skimming, based on NO2ID’s press release. Jenny Booth writes in The Times:
Security experts have found a weakness in the technology to be used for the Government’s biometric ID cards, it is claimed.
A Dutch security company has successfully cracked the encryption on a prototype biometric passport, according to NO2ID, an anti-ID card lobby group.
Experts from Riscure security lab in Delft, the Netherlands, claim to have been able to “skim” the data from a passport at a distance of 11 yards using a hi-tech gadget. They then decrypted it on a computer within two hours, accessing personal information including fingerprints, a digital photograph of the passport-holder’s face and date of birth.
The proposed British ID card will use similar technology to store biometric information about every adult in the country.
Meanwhile, The Financial Times reports that Simon Davies may sue Ministers over claims they’ve made about the LSE report:
Sir Howard Davies, director of the London School of Economics, has hit out at the government for dismissing an academic critique of the proposed ID card scheme as inaccurate and politically biased.
Sir Howard told the Financial Times he had been provoked into speaking out because of what he claimed was a continuing and concerted campaign by ministers to discredit a study by the LSE, which challenged the arguments in favour of the ID card scheme and questioned its cost estimates.
…
The LSE director was speaking after it emerged that Simon Davies, a visiting LSE academic and no relation, is threatening to sue the government over claims made against him over the ID card report. He is thought to have the support of several leading LSE academics.
