Year: 2006

Yet another link via Schneier.

ID Card Planned for the Borders

U.S. officials announced Tuesday they would start issuing a special identification card this year that would allow Americans who frequently traveled to Mexico or Canada to continue crossing the border without a passport.

Officials said the card would be about the size of a credit card, carry a picture of the holder and cost about $50, about half the price of a passport. It will be equipped with radio frequency identification, allowing it to be read from several yards away at border crossings.

To obtain the card, officials said that citizens would be required to provide the same kind of documentation needed to obtain a passport.

Okay so it requires the same documentation to obtain as a passport does and in effect acts like a passport when crossing the border. I have to ask, why not just use a fucking passport then?

Not only is such an ID redundant but to be equipped with RFIDs that can be read from several yards is a security nightmare and a boon to identity thieves. Jeez.

Tags: security

A quirky but of security humour found via Bruce Schneier’s blog.

How to Survive a Robot Uprising

Schneier’s readers come up with some additions to the list.

Tags: security

On this the most depressing day of the year I attended a course to gain an accredited qualification to enable me to apply for a Personal Licence to sell and authorise the sale of alcohol from a suitably licenced premises.

Depressing? No. Boring? Oh yes very much.

To be fair to the course tutor he did try to liven it up but learning the regulations of alcohol licensing is probably one of the dryest dullest subjects possible.

Tags: me

Well it comes as no surprise to me the news that Lord Falconer has told the BBC that the only way to get full benefit from the Identity Card scheme was for people without a passport to carry one.

It has been the government line all along that the cards would be compulsory. I am worried though that the government is pretty much pushing through biometric identity cards in the form of passports though. Whether the Identity Card bill is passed or not the UK will end up with a massive biometric identity register of millions of UK citizens.

The UK already has the most surveillance cameras per capita of any country in the world and now we learn that the UK also has the largest DNA database of it’s citizens in the world with about 5% of the poulation’s DNA profile being held.

Tags: ID cards, surveillance

A report by Corporate Watch, a Quaker-funded research group in Oxford challenges the feasibility of creating the necessary IT system required for the Identity Card scheme. It will they say based on previous examples of Government IT procurement from the companies involved likely lead to an IT disaster

It blames huge, over-complex schemes that fail to deliver promised benefits. Acknowledging months of controversy over the civil liberty and cost implications of the scheme, due to start in 2008, Corporate Watch says “relatively little attention seems to have been paid to the significant practical problems of implementing ID cards and the National Identity Register”, which will eventually hold data on all 60 million UK biometric identities.

The unprecedented enormity of the scale of this IT project plus the fact that it will be reliant on cutting edge technologies will in my mind almost certainly fail to deliver. Therefore there seems to be even greater reason for extensive oversight and detailed cost analysis than there would for any previous Government IT project.

Failure to create a perfectly functional and secure system will actually create more problems and exacerbate the current problems the scheme is designed to solve.

Tags: ID cards

The Government faces an uphill struggle in trying to get their ID Cards bill passed and once again were faced with defeat in the Lords but the Home Office remains unbowed by their defeat and will fight on.

Ministers refused to back down last night in the face of a defeat in the House of Lords which threatens to block their bill to introduce ID cards until the scheme’s estimated costs have been independently vetted by the National Audit Office.

Tory, Liberal Democrat and crossbench peers joined forces to reject government claims that an ID card and passport, complete with hi-tech biometric identifiers, would cost £93 at current prices, with the card itself costing £30. The government was defeated by 237 votes to 156.

The Peers rejected the notion that set-up costs needed to be confidential.

But the Home Office minister, Lady Scotland, told peers she “simply did not accept that there should be any such unprecedented review of the estimated costs” before the bill passed.

It may well be unprecedented to have such a review of the costs but for such an unprecedented scheme such as the creation of a National Identity Register and the infrastructure to run it then I believe that parliament and the public really should be fully informed of every aspect of it.

They also suffered their second defeat when the Lords voted by 206 to 144 in demanding that the National Identity Register have a secure and reliable method of storing the personal data to be contained with in of every citizen.

I think this is the more serious point. Such a database as the National Identity Register that contains comprehensive data on virtually every adult in Britain will surely be a major target of identity thieves. It could be a disaster if the data contained within it was not securely held and access to the data restricted via a robust authorisation system.

Tags: politics, ID cards

It’s worrying finding yourself on the same side as the bloody Tories in a political debate but I find myself increasingly there in recent years.

I wouldn’t never have believed it 10 years ago if someone told that I’d be agreeing with the views of the Conservative party on the issue of Identity Cards.

Thnakfully there are still Labour MPs such as Anne Begg that are prepared to ask hard questions of the Home Secretary in this debate but the likelihood of get a decent answer are unfortunately remote.

Every one of the arguments that Mr. Bercow raises are wrong are they. Well I’m afraid that simply asserting that doesn’t make it a reality. Surely that’s the purpose of having a debate so that people can raise points that you then convince with detailed arguments why they are wrong. Or, and I know this might be a hard concept to grasp Mr. Clarke but it’s just possible that dare I say it you might actually be wrong.

Tags: ID cards

I watched Johnny and the Bomb yesterday and darn good fun it was too. Johnny and the Bomb is probably my favourite of Terry Pratchett’s non-Discworld books and I’d been waiting for a TV adaptation of it since they did one of Johnny and the Dead about 10 years ago.

Right as rain and twice as ninepence.

The cast is good also especially the lads playing the roles of Johnny and Big Mac as both are exactly how I picture the characters in my head.

Seems that time travel is really in vogue now at the BBC following the success of Doctor Who what with Life on Mars and now Johnny and the Bomb.

Tags: books, TV