ID cards marked for fast rollout
Rumours are starting to circulate about the contents of the much-delayed Crosby review. Sarah Arnott writes in Computing:
Identity cards should be rolled out to citizens as quickly as possible, an influential Treasury-backed report will recommend to ministers this month.
Sir James Crosby’s review of private sector uses of the proposed biometric ID scheme was due to be published with the Budget in March. According to insiders, the former HBOS chief executive’s report will be circulated internally in the coming weeks and is to be published when Parliament reconvenes in early October.
It seems that Crosby will argue against the universal online ID card verification and pervasive biometric checks envisaged by the Home Office:
The Crosby report is expected to curb the scheme’s high-tech ambitions even further.
‘It will recognise that there are many ways for checking services to be used and a lot will be offline, without the need for a huge IT network infrastructure,’ said the source.
The review may make an even more radical proposal – the abolition of any ID card checks involving the proposed National Identity Register:
[Use of private-sector ID brokers] would reduce the government’s role to mandating and managing the biometric enrolment of citizens only. All subsequent use of the identity established would be run by one or more trusted third parties – such as a bank – as chosen by the individual.
‘A broker system could achieve the same outcome but is potentially more civil-liberties friendly and has a much lower cost than the traditional monolithic, centralised approach,’ said EPG director Toby Stevens.
August 9th, 2007 at 07:47
If these rumoured Crosby recommendations are implemented, they would be the second major re-design of the system since the legislation was passed. Doing this while the procurement is in progress is a recipe for a total IT fiasco – the database infrastructure needed for millions of online biometric verifications per day is entirely different to the one needed for mere biometric enrolment.
It looks as if we are watching government continuously scaling back the scope of the ID card plans to try to keep the costs from ballooning into the tens of billions.
However, even the proposed scaled-down “ID broker” scheme would probably still involve everyone in the country getting a single, unique, government-wide identification number. This is a recipe for rampant identity fraud – see the US Social Security Number system for details.