Of course, whatever is done concerning National ID cards, they need to be more secure than any other form of identification.
You have hit the nail on the head here, because how do you do that??? It's not easy. Our ID card will contain 13 pieces of biometric data (10 finger prints, 2 iris scans and a photo) but a good percentage of the population do not have readable fingerprints, and all are liable to change. The ID Cards Bill makes a criminal offence of not informing the Government of any changes to biometric data. This means that the second Granny comes out of an operation to remove cataracts, she is a criminal! The statistics for false positives on fingerprint scans are not good (1 in 100,000). The Bill doesn't provide the power for the police to trawl the NIR for a fingerprint match, but how long will it be before they start clamoring for the power to do that? What the ID cards come down to, in their essence is tying legal identity down to a single number and this is dangerous.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2006-04-21 07:37 am (UTC)You have hit the nail on the head here, because how do you do that??? It's not easy. Our ID card will contain 13 pieces of biometric data (10 finger prints, 2 iris scans and a photo) but a good percentage of the population do not have readable fingerprints, and all are liable to change. The ID Cards Bill makes a criminal offence of not informing the Government of any changes to biometric data. This means that the second Granny comes out of an operation to remove cataracts, she is a criminal! The statistics for false positives on fingerprint scans are not good (1 in 100,000). The Bill doesn't provide the power for the police to trawl the NIR for a fingerprint match, but how long will it be before they start clamoring for the power to do that?
What the ID cards come down to, in their essence is tying legal identity down to a single number and this is dangerous.