ID Cards part n

The subject of ID cards in the UK (I live here!) is one that continues to disturd me. I am in opposed on both principle and in practice, and concerned about the motives of those who are pushing so hard for them, oh and it doesn't work (thank you Tom Wolfe).

My opposition in principle is because I don't believe that it should be neccesary to continually "prove" my identity to anyone who asks for it. I am my identity, that's it, end of story. An ID card is simply a thing that may or may not confirm that at a certain point in time there was a correlation between me and that thing. It doesn't prove anything. And as soon as you have an ID thing, you of course have to have the immense central database to support it, as well as the freely distributed "checking terminals" that have access to it. That is scary, oh and it doesn't work.

In practice, something that I am sure that I will expand on given time, there are some real, I was going to say difficulties but really they are show stoppers, issues. One I shall touch on today is this that of easily accessible technology.

One of the problems as I see it is that any identity card is going to be based on some form of mass market technology, e.g. some piece of plastic in roughly a credit card size and shape that has embedded a "chip". Now, I don't expect the UK Government and their agents to invent a whole new and unique way of doing this. That is, to invent a new technology, packaging technology and read/write mechanism et. etc. etc. Oh no, they will use off the shelf components and technologies and who wouldn't? And as soon as they do that (or soon afterwards) it doesn't work.

I can still remember in the 1980's getting my first mag stripe writer (from a project that I worked on) and all of a sudden I was able, simply and without writing any code to clone credit cards! Unbelievable. All I needed was about £200 work of kit and away I could go. Obviously I didn't otherwise I might be posting this from inside Wandsworth Prison not from outside it.

Compare that to the effort and specialist skills and a fuck off printing press and finishing equipment and so on that I would have needed to copy a cheque book.

Today my "official identity" probably consists of documents e.g. Passport, Driving Licence, Birth Certificate etc and snippetes of information held in lots of unconnected databases like is National Insurance (Social Security) number, tax records, employment records, Electoral Register, the list goes on. All of which would have to be created/updated, many of which are pretty closed off.

The bottom line is that to do a good job of creating an identity today you need a lot of time, effort and access to some pretty specialised equipment, with ID cards, you just need to be able to copy one pretty standard technology ID card and update a database that has tens if not hundreds of thousands of terminals attached to it. I know which one I think is easier!

So in a sense ID cards make us less sure of confirmed identity, whilst having the appearance of being more sure due to the "infallable" ID card, oh and it doesn't work.