Mulling over Rene Laederach to Steve Asher 27 Jul 2003

Hi Rene ...

SA> UK Cabinet ministers are considering plans to charge [UKP]39 
SA> for a biometric ID card  

 RL> The price is pretty steep, considering the fact that this is
 RL> mandatory. A new tax?

A tax, for sure, but I would be very surprised if it is called a tax.

SA> card would contain biometric data u likely to be an image of a person's 
SA> iris -- and could also incorporate passport and driving license 
SA> information.  

 RL> Looks like a central registration to me, so the Brits can find
 RL> their subjects easier.

That is what it looks like to me too, but again, the powers that be will
"sex it up" to use one of their phrases to make it sound like something
desirable, to protect them from on-line fraud, "identity theft", etc.

SA> According to a report in the Sunday Times, in his leaked letter 
SA> dated 25 June, Blunkett hit out at civil rights campaigners and 
SA> said that people favoured ID cards over entitlement cards.   

 RL> Did he find this out with a non-faked poll?

IIRC, he used a faked poll that summarised the bulk of the opposing views.

SA> access via the card and the central database. Privacy will be protected, 
SA> as it is in other advanced democracies that have identity cards.  

 RL> At least down here, our ID does not store anything except the name,
 RL> the DOB  and  the fact that you're a Swiss national.

So far, Australians have resisted compulsory ID documents, such as the
"Australia Card", which was proposed in the late 1980s. There has been
quite a bit of "positive" press coverage of the concept lately, due
to "9/11", identity theft etc. I suspect that anyone planning to board
an aircraft & hijack it etc will make sure that they have suitable
credentials to fool the airline & gate staff, & probably leave plenty
of "evidence" behind, in the form of copies of the Koran, last will
& testament, box cutters (stanley knives), just like they did in the
USA.

SA> "Nor will it be compulsory for people to carry a card, though as
SA> now with driving licences, the police or other agencies could 
SA> require its 

 RL> I doubt this will stay this way for long. Look at Germany and it's
 RL> "Ausweispflicht".

I didn't really need Google to guess what that is, but I did anyway.
Its translation feature is quite handy for that. One page I found is 
pushing for the inclusion of criminal convictions, along with the
biometrics etc. It wouldn't really be necessary to put that stuff
on the card, which would just act like a password to the masses of
data held online about the person.

SA> Critics have said that the costs of the cards could be much higher, 
SA> however. The Foundation for Information Policy Research has said that 
SA> independent estimates put the cards at around [UKP]100.   

 RL> So what the heck do they store on the card? 100 pounds is two
 RL> thirds of the money I spend on food for me alone every month. Looks
 RL> to me like they have to buy some awful lot of database software
 RL> licenses.

And when they find that the contractor(s) cannot deliver, or the software
is too buggy, or whatever, the cost will blow out even further. By that
time, there will be a change of government, & the new govt can spend its
term blaming its predecessors, while stuffing it up even more.

Cheers, Steve..

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