28,000 people signed the petition calling for the Government to abandon plans for a National ID Scheme, one of the largest responses since the e-petition service was set up. The petition is now closed but the Prime Minister has decided to e-mail the people who signed up to tell them why he is going to ahead with the scheme anyway. The e-mail is too long to post here in full so I've just put in a few excerpts. I've saved the whole message as a pdf file which you can download from here. Needless to say the Prime Minister fails to acknowledge the abuse of civil liberties and privacy his scheme entails and the numerous experts and officials who have said that the scheme is impractical and too costly.
The petition disputes the idea that ID cards will help reduce crime or terrorism. While I certainly accept that ID cards will not prevent all terrorist outrages or crime, I believe they will make an important contribution to making our borders more secure, countering fraud, and tackling international crime and terrorism. More importantly, this is also what our security services - who have the task of protecting this country - believe.
It will increase fraud. Hackers have already found a way to crack the security codes and clone biometric passports. Doing the same to ID cards shouldn't present a problem to them.
So I would like to explain why I think it would be foolish to ignore the opportunity to use biometrics such as fingerprints to secure our identities. I would also like to discuss some of the claims about costs - particularly the way the cost of an ID card is often inflated by including in estimates the cost of a biometric passport which, it seems certain, all those who want to travel abroad will soon need.
I thought fingerprinting was something that happened to suspected criminals when they are arrested, not everyone. My new Italian passport will last ten years and I can go anywhere with it. It has no biometric data or computer chips in it, and what's more it only cost 30 quid. Even without the new biometric data, my British passport cost more than double that some years ago.
In contrast to these exaggerated figures, the real benefits for our country and its citizens from ID cards and the National Identity Register, which will contain less information on individuals than the data collected by the average store card, should be delivered for a cost of around £3 a year over its ten-year life.
The difference is, of course, that store cards are voluntary, no shop has forced one on me. Also with the ID card and National Identity Register scheme more information can be added later, like medical details, despite an earlier promise not to include such information.
But first, it's important to set out why we need to do more to secure our identities and how I believe ID cards will help. We live in a world in which people, money and information are more mobile than ever before. Terrorists and international criminal gangs increasingly exploit this to move undetected across borders and to disappear within countries. Terrorists routinely use multiple identities - up to 50 at a time. Indeed this is an essential part of the way they operate and is specifically taught at Al-Qaeda training camps. One in four criminals also uses a false identity. ID cards which contain biometric recognition details and which are linked to a National Identity Register will make this much more difficult.
Er... no, not really. Terrorists and criminal gangs will carry on regardless, possibly with cloned ID cards.
Secure identities will also help us counter the fast-growing problem of identity fraud. This already costs £1.7 billion annually. There is no doubt that building yourself a new and false identity is all too easy at the moment. Forging an ID card and matching biometric record will be much harder.
The EU-funded FIDIS (Future of Identity in the Information Society) has warned that implementation of the current generation of biometric travel ID will dramatically decrease security and privacy, and increase the risk of identity theft. Sounds like a gift to terrorists to me. This little exchange between David Davies and Joan Ryan last year is revealing; David Davies pointed out that Microsoft’s National Technology Office says that ID cards could “trigger massive identity fraud”, and one of the FBI’s leading identity fraud consultants said that the ID card could be replicated perfectly by criminals within six months. Joan Ryan's response is priceless.
Nor is Britain alone in believing that biometrics offer a massive opportunity to secure our identities. Firms across the world are already using fingerprint or iris recognition for their staff. France, Italy and Spain are among other European countries already planning to add biometrics to their ID cards. Over 50 countries across the world are developing biometric passports, and all EU countries are proposing to include fingerprint biometrics on their passports. The introduction in 2006 of British e-passports incorporating facial image biometrics has meant that British passport holders can continue to visit the United States without a visa. What the National Identity Scheme does is take this opportunity to ensure we maximise the benefits to the UK.
Iris recognition has been dropped from British biometric plans because it has been found to be useless. Other countries will probably follow suit.
These then are the ways I believe ID cards can help cut crime and terrorism. I recognise that these arguments will not convince those who oppose a National Identity Scheme on civil liberty grounds. They will, I hope, be reassured by the strict safeguards now in place on the data held on the register and the right for each individual to check it. But I hope it might make those who believe ID cards will be ineffective reconsider their opposition.
I'm not even slightly reassured. What exactly are these "strict safeguards"?
If national ID cards do help us counter crime and terrorism, it is, of course, the law-abiding majority who will benefit and whose own liberties will be protected. This helps explain why, according to the recent authoritative Social Attitudes survey, the majority of people favour compulsory ID cards.
It is also the law-abiding majority who are losing valuable civil liberties. How much support there is for compulsory ID cards rather depends on how you ask the question doesn't it? I haven't even gone into the costs of this scheme, but needless to say I don't believe Blair's claim that it will cost less than £30. Sending an e-mail to the tens of thousands of people who signed a petition because they wanted this scheme scrapped, and telling them why their demands will be ignored isn't really a successful exercise in democracy. A referendum on the issue would give a far more revealing picture of national sentiment on the issue but we all know why Blair won't want to do that.
Blair's e-mail did also mention that James Hall, the official in charge of delivering the ID card scheme, will be answering questions on the Downing Street website on 5th March. So in another exercise in futility, we can put some questions to him. I wouldn't know where to start.
I've sent the following
I've sent the following question for Mr Hall. I hope everyone likes it and I hope we see an answer to it.
Mr Hall, how are you going to keep the technology involved in protecting people's data from being exploited or hacked?
I've listed below a sample of past "unbreakable protection schemes" that have been found wanting. How are you going to ensure any ID scheme is different and what safeguards will be in place to protect us when it is being actively exploited by criminals and terrorists?
Background:
History has shown many unbreakable protection schemes have been ultimately cracked. Some examples:
DVDROM movies would be protected through various protection schemes making them uncopyable e.g. region locking, Macrovision, ARccOS, and many more - defeated.
BlueRay & HD DVD are not even out of the early adoptor phase and both have had their protection schemes defeated and people are able to copy content. All this has been done by a couple of amateur hackers who were up against protection schemes designed by teams of experts.
WEP encryption for securing wireless network - defeated. It is now possible to break into WEP networks in minutes.
WPA encryption for securing wireless networking - can be defeated under certain circumstances.
The US military regularly upgrade their minimum standard of encryption used to protect sensitive data, DES was once strong enough, then triple DES but now they want AES. One day AES will be broken and they will want something stronger.
I could go on and on and on.
The technology will always have a vulnerability from day 1. At some point someone will discover it and then the identity card scheme isn't worth the plastic and silicon chips that hold it together.
Criminals will have this cracked in no time IMHO thereby compromising millions of people's identities. This is going to be one of the greatest risks aiding identity theft and terrorism since people will have a false sense of security in the flawed technology.
Okay, so if he's going to
Okay, so if he's going to ignore us then we can very easily do the same. Ignore, and disobey. The eminent moral philosopher Ted Honderich has just such a proposal for dealing with the anti-democratic forces that purport to lead us.
What struck me most about
What struck me most about the email was not the fatuous content but the fact that the state had recorded a list of malcontents and directly targeted them with propaganda. This is exactly the reason that the Identity System is so dangerous and why I object to it. Propaganda I can ignore but who knows what deterrents current and future governments have in store for the free person.