ID Cards Get Idiotically Insecure

Remember how those magic ID cards would provide strong forms of identity, thus protecting us against terrorists, people traffickers et al.? Well, those plans have been watered-down, somewhat:

High street chemists, post offices and photo shops are to be used to record the electronic fingerprints and other biometric data needed for the national identity card scheme, the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, is to announce today.

The decision to use high street shops sidesteps the need for the Home Office to set up a network of enrolment centres with mobile units to operate in rural areas.

Well, yes, it will save money, but it will also blast security holes through the entire scheme. Without rigorous oversight, it will be much easier to create fake ID cards - just what all those nasty terrorists, people traffickers and other ne'er-do-wells need. Which goes to show that the government isn't interested in increasing our security, just in gaining even greater control over us - and security go hang.

The Retreat from ID Cards Has Begun

This is significant:

Senior cabinet ministers are privately discussing a plan to scrap the Government's £5bn identity cards programme as part of cuts to public spending, The Independent has learnt.

Once such people start talking about it, even the most timorous will soon pluck up the courage to express their views; quickly we'll reach a classic tipping point when the majority hold the view that ID cards make no sense from any point of view.

But there are always some who remain prisoners of their delusions:

Your article of 28 April on ID cards is simply wrong on two fundamental points. The Government is committed to introducing ID cards.

Er, why would that be Jacqui?

ID cards will provide the public with a single, simple and secure way for individuals to prove their identity and safeguard their personal details – protecting the community against crime, illegal immigration, and terrorism.

Oh, I see. Why don't we just look at those, eh?

a single, simple and secure way for individuals to prove their identity

Well, no, it won't do that unless ID cards become compulsory for *every* occasion when I have to prove who I am. Now, that may be coming, but until then I'm still going to need to prove who I am by logging in to online services, or showing my library card. Is she really suggesting that the ID card replace *all* of those? If not, it will simply *add* to all of the other proofs that I need. ID cards only make sense if they satisfy a vital new need to prove who we are - for example, when stopped by the police in the street....

safeguard their personal details

How on earth does a centralised database "safeguard my details"? The ID card certainly doesn't - it's just a bit of plastic with a chip in; and as anyone who's been in computing for more than a couple of months knows, bringing data together in any way makes it less secure, not more. So what on earth is she rabbiting on about?

And as for

protecting the community against crime, illegal immigration, and terrorism

these were all debunked ages ago as the UK government desperately shopped around for some kind of justification for ID cards. It won't stop illegal immigration and it certainly won't stop "terrorism".

It hard sometimes to work out whether Ms Smith actually believes the nonsense she spouts, or just believes we're stupid enough to believe her. Either way, news that her colleagues are rapidly placing clear water between themselves and her deranged ideas on this one is welcome indeed. (Via OurKingdom.)

The Super-Stupid Super-Snooping Database Idea

This is just a jokette, right?

The private sector will be asked to manage and run a communications database that will keep track of everyone's calls, emails, texts and internet use under a key option contained in a consultation paper to be published next month by Jacqui Smith, the home secretary.

I mean, not content with attempting to put into place a total surveillance system, old Jacqui now seriously wants to out-source it? Which will effectively means that it can be owned by anyone - including a foreign entity - that buys the company with the contract.

I can see the political advantages of doing so - "oh no, *we* didn't lose all your intimate data, blame the company" - but this is stupidity squared.

Wot Police State?

Papers acquired by the Liberal Democrats via Freedom of Information requests show that the 1,500 officers policing the Kingsnorth climate camp near the Medway estuary in Kent, suffered only 12 reportable injuries during the protest during August.

The Home Office has now admitted that the protesters had not been responsible for any injuries. In a three-line written answer to a parliamentary question, the Home Office minister Vernon Coaker wrote to the Lib Dem justice spokesman, David Howarth, saying: "Kent police have informed the Home Office that there were no recorded injuries sustained as a result of direct contact with the protesters."

Only four of the 12 reportable injuries involved any contact with protesters at all and all were at the lowest level of seriousness with no further action taken.

The other injuries reported included "stung on finger by possible wasp"; "officer injured sitting in car"; and "officer succumbed to sun and heat". One officer cut his arm on a fence when climbing over it, another cut his finger while mending a car, and one "used leg to open door and next day had pain in lower back".

Keep up the good work, Jacqui.

gIMP My Foot

Jackboot Jacqui is at it again:

The government Interception Modernisation Programme (gIMP), a plan by spy chiefs to centrally collect details of every phone call, text, email and web browsing session of every UK resident, will be in place by 2012, according to a Home Office minister.

Apparently:

because communications providers already hold information about who contacts whom, when and how, the gIMP would not represent a major change. "We are not proposing that data that have never been collected are held," he said. "The question is how in the future, with all the changes that are coming we can still have access to something that we regularly use today for serious crime and counterterrorism." The final system will be fully compatible with human rights legislation, he said.

This shows once again that the Government either doesn't understand - or feigns not to understand - that putting together disparate information *is* a huge change, precisely because it allows all kinds of *new* info to be gathered about the public thanks to correlations and cross-linkings that are not evident when the data is held separately. Crudely speaking, this is putting together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle to see something whole.

Jackboot Jacqui Strikes Again

Our dear Home Secretary decides to ignore what we proles think again:

His warning follows an admission yesterday by Jacqui Smith that the technical work on creating a giant centralised database of all email, text, phone and web traffic will go ahead, despite the fact that ministers have decided to delay the legislation needed to set it up and instead put the proposal out to consultation.

Democracy? I've heard of it.

Why Stella is a Star

That's Stella Rimington, former head of MI5. Her Guardian interview is so packed with good sense that I'll have to quote it at length:

A former head of MI5 today describes the response to the September 11 2001 attacks on the US as a "huge overreaction" and says the invasion of Iraq influenced young men in Britain who turned to terrorism.

In an interview with the Guardian, Stella Rimington calls al-Qaida's attack on the US "another terrorist incident" but not qualitatively different from any others.

"That's not how it struck me. I suppose I'd lived with terrorist events for a good part of my working life and this was as far as I was concerned another one," she says.

In common with Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, who retired as MI5's director general last year, Rimington, who left 12 years ago, has already made it clear she abhorred "war on terror" rhetoric and the government's abandoned plans to hold terrorism suspects for 42 days without charge.

Today, she goes further by criticising politicians including Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, for trying to outbid each other in their opposition to terrorism and making national security a partisan issue.

It all began, she suggests, with September 11. "National security has become much more of a political issue than it ever was in my day," she says. "Parties are tending to use it as a way of trying to get at the other side. You know, 'We're more tough on terrorism than you are.' I think that's a bad move, quite frankly."

Rimington mentions Guantánamo Bay, the practice of extraordinary rendition, and the invasion of Iraq - three issues which the majority in Britain's security and intelligence establishment opposed privately at the time.

She challenges claims, notably made by Tony Blair, that the war in Iraq was not related to the radicalisation of Muslim youth in Britain.

Read it and weep.

Where China Leads...

...can Jacqui be far behind?

All visitors to internet cafés in Beijing will be required to have their photographs taken in a stringent new control on the public use of cyberspace.

...

According to the latest rules, by mid-December all internet cafés in the main 14 city districts must install cameras to record the identities of their web surfers, who must by law be 18 or over. There are more than 250 million internet users in China, approximately 10 times more than there were in 2000.

...

All photographs and scanned identity cards will be entered into a city-wide database run by the Cultural Law Enforcement Taskforce. The details will be available in any internet café.

Well, if it's got a centralised database, Labour's bound to want one to add to its growing collection....

Jacqui Wants "Openness"

Jacqui Smith has set out plans to give the police and security services more powers to gather phone and e-mail data.

But wait:

"I want this to be combined with a well-informed debate characterised by openness, rather than mere opinion, by reason and reasonableness," she told the IPPR.

Well, that's alright, then. Except:

"What we will be proposing will be options which follow the key principles which govern all our work in this area - the principles of proportionality and necessity."

What, like ID cards, you mean?

Note, too, that when she says this:

"There are no plans for an enormous database which will contain the content of your emails, the texts that you send or the chats you have on the phone or online."

There is also this:

Plans to collect more data on people's phone, e-mail and web-browsing habits are expected to be included in the Communications Data Bill, due to be introduced in the Queen's Speech in November.

Which, assuming it's correct, means that "web-browsing habits" - IP addresses et al. - *would* be stored, which are potentially even more incriminating that email, texts or chats....

ID Cards: Hope and Hopelessness

There's hope:

academic John Daugman, a former member of the Biometrics Assurance Group (BAG), which reviewed the scheme, said its reliance on fingerprints and facial photos to verify a person's identity will cause the system to collapse under the weight of mismatched identifications.

Daugman, an expert on iris recognition, said fingerprints and facial photos are not distinctive enough for telling the UK's 45-million-strong adult population apart.

Daugman said that, even if the error rate was as low as one in a million, the 10 to the power of 15 comparisons needed to verify the indentities of 45 million people would result in one billion false matches.

And there's hopelessness:

Speaking at the launch of the UK's first ID cards on Thursday, home secretary Jacqui Smith claimed problems with taking or recognising fingerprints pose no threat to the effectiveness of the ID-card system.

Presumably because the whole scheme will be utterly ineffectual anyway....

Let's Frame This...

....just in case they need reminding:

Dominic Grieve has said it is “high time” Labour abandon their "ill-fated" ID cards project after Jacqui Smith unveiled the design of ID cards for foreign nationals.

The Shadow Home Secretary stressed, “ID cards are an expensive white elephant that risk making us less - not more - safe.”

And he said the Government were “kidding themselves” if they think ID Cards for foreign nationals will protect against illegal immigration or terrorism - as they don't apply to those coming here for less than three months.

A Conservative Government would abandon the ID cards project, and Dominic said he hoped Labour had taken that into account when they negotiated the contracts.

“If they have not acted on this to protect the British taxpayer, it is reckless in the extreme at a time of heightened economic uncertainty.”

PA Consulting? Pah!

Since we now know this:

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has blamed a private contractor for losing the details of thousands of criminals, held on a computer memory stick.

Ms Smith said the government had held the data securely but PA Consulting appeared to have downloaded it, contrary to the rules of its contract.

...it's clear they don't have the foggiest idea about security or managing personal information, giving us yet another reason to scrap the doomed ID card project which they have played a major part in driving.

Microsoft on the Side of the Angels

No, really:

In recent years Microsoft has shown every sign of knowing which way is up when it comes to identity management. The company already has on board Kim Cameron, its chief architect of identity and one of the key thinkers in the field, and with the arrival of Dr Brands - who joins Cameron in the company's Connected Systems Division - it adds a second. Cameron cleared up the mess and set the new rules after Microsoft's monolithic, centralised and panoptical Hailstorm ID management policy collapsed under its own weight. Dr Brands is author of the seminal Rethinking public key infrastructures and digital certificates, and the developer of 'blind' or 'minimum disclosure' credentials.

Together, these support a privacy-friendly and user-centric view of identity management - the antithesis, effectively, of the controlled, centralised vision that's currently crashing and burning at the Home Office.

Now all we have to worry about are the patents....

Anyway, great article - worth reading all of it.