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UK ID card Bill 'within four weeks'
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RiotGibbon
1527 posts

Re: more details
May 04, 2004, 11:47
oh shit, forgot about this ...

basically, smartcard technology just doesn't work on a large scale. No-one can make any money out of it, not in the public sector, anyway. People are just too unreliable and crap (in a nice way) to be trusted with something as fiddly as a smartcard

you can just about run the card systems for a small group if there's clearly something in it for the holders (eg getting through the office door everyday), but for a large population, most of whom don't care, forget it

each card is *really* expensive, and slow and difficult to encode. For the system to be worth having, you have to get all the correct details for all the correct people all at once, otherwise by the time you've got halfway through the list, the first lot of people have started losing and selling and destroying their cards - for confidence in the system to hold up, they have to be reissued, thus forming a new version of the Xeno's (?) paradox - you never actually get it done because you have to keep going back ...

The other thing that's making me chuckle is the idea of having all this biometric info on a card. In other words, the biggest ever roll out of a fairly new and still unreliable technology. On budget, on time and accurate? Don't think so.

The idea is to stop forged id by taking iris scans and finger prints. But you've got to collect all this data in the first place. When the scans are being taken (60 million people, shouldn't take more than a morning), how do you know who the person is who they are claiming to be? Why, by the production of various documents. All of which can be forged and currently illegally used. So, all the card will mean is it will require you to carry a smaller form of possibly forged info. And more expensive

All the September 11th hijackers had valid id. ID wasn't the problem, the fact that they were learning to fly and not land was ...

But in short, there are little pockets of ID Card fanatics scattered around local, national and european government. They've been trying to get ID cards brought in for *years*, and always failed (for a number of reasons, but basically because ID Cards Are A Bad Idea). Since 911, they've jumped at the chance to bring them in. The first line in the "discussion document" that came out a couple of years ago was that TERRORISM was responsible for the re-evaluation of the idea, even though they would have no effect. Now, Blunkett just wavers between saying it's about preventing terrorism or illegal immigration, depending on what day it is

is this giving you a clue? The whole smartcard thing came about because European phonelines were never good enough to do online credit card clearing (US phone lines have always been much better). Since the telecommunications infrastructure in Europe has improved, smartcards have been desperately looking for a purpose. Chip and Pin is good, because it's relatively simple - is the person trying to use the card allowed to. That's all it does, it's pretty good at it. Anything more complicated ...

now, how about eVoting? the happiest 3 months of my life, delving into eVoting cryptographic systems ... pretty much the same problem as smartcards - nice idea, unworkable in practice on a national scale with clever, well-motivated, well-funded people with a financial incentive to break it ...

now, who's got a job for me ...

RG
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