A report in today’s issue of the Independent on Sunday by Francis Elliott, Andy McSmith and Sophie Goodchild reveals that Ministers plan to sell your ID card details to raise cash
Personal details of all 44 million adults living in Britain could be sold to private companies as part of government attempts to arrest spiralling costs for the new national identity card scheme, set to get the go-ahead this week.
The Independent on Sunday can today reveal that ministers have opened talks with private firms to pass on personal details of UK citizens for an initial cost of £750 each.
This seems to be a desperate move by the Government to ensure that they regain the public support for the scheme as the expected cost has continued to rise the support has decreased.
In seeking to offset the cost by selling off information they hope to gain the public’s support again. Of course if they follow through with this proposal they not only will have rescinded on their pledge that “unlike electoral registers, the National Identity Register will not be open for any general access or inspection” but will compromise the security of the National Identity Register.
The greater the access to the Register there is the more likely that the information will make it into the hands of criminals or terrorists therefore increasing the likelihood of identity theft that the Identity Card scheme is designed to prevent.
The National Identity card bill will be going before parliament yet again this coming Tuesday. Government whips are confident of winning Tuesday’s vote, but opponents are predicting that the process can be killed off before implementation due to the ever-rising costs and the now apparent risks of database breach or failure.
EDIT: Thanks to Murky.org I’ve discovered some additional links of possible interest.
ID cards: a child’s view, even a child can see how flawed the scheme is.
In today’s Sunday Times we discover that costs may force ID cards to be cheap ‘chip and pin’, thus doing away with the biometric system that although imperfect and flawed in many ways would be a much more secure system for verifying that the card was held by the true cardholder. Ironically one of the primary motives for the proposed card in the first place was that the US was insisting on taking biometric data on all visitors to their country.
It really does seem that the government wishes to install an ID card system by any means possible even if those means totally undermine the security of the system and make the ID card utterly unable to fulfil any of the objectives it’s introduction is meant to.
Edit: 28/06/2005
The Home Office has denied a report the personal details of millions of Britons could be sold to help pay for the introduction of identity cards in this BBC report ID card database ‘not for sale’.
