A national identity card is unlikely to deliver all the things expected of it

[R. A. Hettinga]

<http://www.economist.com/world/europe/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=2629019>

The Economist

 Identity cards

Will they work?

Apr 29th 2004
>From The Economist print edition


A national identity card is unlikely to deliver all the things expected of it


BRITONS like to think of themselves as plucky individualists, resistant to
authoritarianism both foreign and domestic. It's a self-image that is
becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. This week, David Blunkett, the
home secretary, unveiled a draft bill that, if enacted, would create the
most ambitious and intrusive national identity card scheme in Europe. For
many, the only complaint was that it was long overdue.



Over the past decade, opinion polls have consistently shown 75-85% in
favour of ID cards. Oddly, people want them even though they don't trust
the government with personal information. MORI, a pollster, reports that
just 10% are "very confident" their details would be kept secure. A YouGov
poll carried out last September found that two-thirds didn't trust civil
servants to keep information from one another, while half suspected they
would share it with outsiders. Clear majorities also predicted disruption,
inconvenience, and a rash of forgeries.

 This puts unusual pressure on the scheme. Britons want cards to help stop
illegal immigrants from working or using public services, and to fight
terrorism and reduce fraud. They will compromise on personal privacy
because they reckon the system will deliver on these things. Will it?

The government's plans are certainly ambitious. Starting from scratch, it
wants to build a central register that will hold the name, date of birth,
current and former addresses, nationality, passport number and national
insurance details of everybody residing in the country longer than three
months. The register will also record every occasion on which this
information is accessed or changed, and by whom. Keen citizens will be able
to add more to the register if they find this insufficient.

More ambitious still are plans to link the register to other government
databases, and to incorporate biometrics such as fingerprints and iris
scans. This is handy for deterring forgers, but it raises the price and
complexity of the system well above anything that exists, or is being
contemplated, elsewhere in Europe.

Building a secure ID-card system is not difficult, says Richard Barrington,
head of government affairs at Sun Microsystems. The real problems (and the
costs) arise elsewhere: in collecting people's images or iris patterns,
"binding" these to paper documents such as driving licences, and managing
the system so that false and multiple identities are expunged. "If this is
not done in a disciplined way, the register will become like every other
government database-that is, full of junk," he says.

 This becomes exponentially more difficult as the job progresses. On the
current, rather relaxed timetable for building the register (a pace forced
by cabinet sceptics), it will capture about 80% of the economically active
population by 2013. Then comes the challenge. The final 20% includes people
on the fringes of society-those who do not work legitimately, drive, vote,
or hold British passports; in other words, precisely the sort you would
want in a database. Capturing them will be desperately difficult, despite a
proposed #2,500 ($4,500) fine for non co-operation.

A larger problem is one of function creep. There is likely to be pressure,
not just from politicians but also from convenience-minded citizens, to
make the card do more. Data will inevitably be added to the register, and
(as MPs have themselves hinted) companies will make increasing use of it to
check identities. The problem, say security engineers, is that the more
uses for a card, the more rapidly it degrades. Even in Belgium, which has
had compulsory identity cards since 1919, social-security information is
kept on a separate bit of plastic.

Those lonely souls who worry about the erosion of civil liberties might
take comfort from the fate of the various "smart card" schemes already in
existence in Britain. The most ambitious one was launched three years ago,
in Southampton. By now, every resident was supposed to have a card, which
would allow access to, and payment for, a wide range of council services.
Electronic voting was mooted. But it proved difficult to get banks,
transport operators, or even council departments on board. Today, the card
is used mostly to check out library books and get into leisure centres.

-- 
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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'