ID cards criticised as “fairy tale”
Tom Young writes in Computing:
The national biometric identity card programme should be suspended until security fears have been eliminated, according to a group of academics.
The open letter to Andrew Dismore, Chair of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, refutes chancellor Alistair Darling’s statement that the scheme will increase protection against identity fraud.
“These assertions are based on a fairy-tale view of the capabilities of the technology, and in addition, only deal with one aspect of the problems that this type of data breach causes,” it says.
Signatories of the letter include Ross Anderson, professor in Security Engineering at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, Richard Clayton from the same department – who advised the House of Lords Inquiry into Personal Internet Security, and former Ministry of Defence and Nato employee Brian Gladman.
The letter itself is here.
November 28th, 2007 at 12:56
I used to believe in biometrics. I thought they conferred certainty.
Until May 2005, when the Atos Origin report on the UKPS biometrics trial was published. Then it became impossible to believe in biometrics. In the same month, I published an article on the European biometrics portal, Is the biometrics emperor wearing any clothes? No-one has bothered to answer.
No-one in the government and few people in the media will listen either and, as a result, the impression persists among the public that the biometrics chosen by the Identity and Passport Service on which the National Identity Scheme (NIS) relies are reliable. They aren’t. It’s as simple as that. And, without reliable biometrics, there isn’t the slightest point our spending billions of pounds on the NIS.
The message hasn’t got through yet. It will. Let us hope that it does before we have spent the billions and not after.
With six such eminent academics delivering the message, it is to be hoped that it will now get through. And when it does, there will be fireworks.