ID card mega-database ditched
Lots of coverage of the Home Office’s “ID Cards Action Plan”. Steve Ranger writes in Silicon.com:
The government has trimmed back its controversial ID cards plans, ditching a single mega-database to hold all ID card information, and shelving the use of iris-scanning biometrics.
The National Identity Register (NIR) was to be the giant database at the heart of the project, holding personal identity information and biometric data for everyone enrolled in the scheme. But now three existing systems will share the NIR information instead.
The government’s action plan for the ID cards project revealed: “These sets of information – biometric, biographical and administrative – do not all need to be held in a single system. In fact, for security reasons, and to make best use of the strengths of existing systems, it makes sense to store them separately.”
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The plan for which biometrics will be used in the ID cards has changed too. Iris scans are now not going to be used following the review of the project in the summer – only fingerprints and facial biometrics.
Jean Eaglesham and Nicholas Timmins write in the Financial Times:
Intellect, the high-tech industry body, highlighted the continued lack of detailed specifications for the scheme and said the 300-plus companies interested in bidding for the work remained unconvinced the system would meet the government’s objectives.
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But industry insiders said the change of approach could also offer Gordon Brown an escape route, should he become prime minister and opt to scrap or scale back ID cards.
“It doesn’t close off an ID card scheme,” one senior industry figure said. “But it lets the government proceed with two things it really cares about – e-border controls and an identity management system that will let citizens do e-business more easily with government – while allowing a successor to Tony Blair to drop or significantly amend the ID cards project if that’s what they want to do.”
Ministers conceded that the reconfiguration of the system is likely to have little impact on its estimated £5.4bn 10-year cost.
Nigel Morris and Ben Russell writing in The Independent forsee a possible legal challenge:
Under the plans, non-European foreign nationals will be required to start supplying biometric identifiers such as fingerprints and iris scans from 2008. Britons would begin to receive their cards when they renew their passports the following year, with “significant volumes” being sent out in 2010. Civil liberties campaigners vowed to mount a legal challenge to the move to enrol foreign nationals ahead of Britons.
