U.K. biometric national ID scheme in trouble
The ambitious U.K. biometric national ID project has been plagued with problems and doubts from the start; the latest blow is a leaked Home Office document admitting the that security of the ID card and the database to which it is related cannot be guaranteed — and that, in any event, British companies simply do not have the manufacturing capacity to make the cards and the card readers
There was a suspicion for while now that Tony Blair’s ambitious biometric national ID project was in trouble, and documents leaked to the Sunday Times offer more evidence for this. The confidential, 32-page Home Office report says that the security system protecting the card and the national database are weak, and that both could be infiltrated by criminal gangs engaged in identity theft. This latest news comes on top of assertions that the government’s estimates of the project’s cost were unrealistically low, and that , in any event, British firms currently do not have manufacturing capacity to produce the card. Note that the document leaked to the Times follows e-mails leaked to the newspaper two weeks ago, e-mails in which senior government officials confessed that the national ID scheme might be delayed “for a generation.”
Worries about the impregnability of the IDs and the database to which they are related have accompanied the project from the start, although more and more experts have come forward of late to say as much. The important revelation in the leaked report has to do with the inability of the current manufacturing base to produce the required number of card and card readers. The Home Office contacted companies to give their confidential views on the project. Among the companies were BT, IBM, Motorola, Royal Mail, and Siemens. Some of the manufacturers approached said that they were not in a position to make ID cards. They also said it might not be possible to produce enough iris cameras to scan citizens’ irises and match them to the national database.
