ID Cards and The Verichip

[lifttheveil]

Bigger, dafter, creepier - Gordon Brown's ID scheme rescue plan

Get the shops to pay for it, and catch villains for us...

By John Lettice
Monday 7th August 2006

The Register's new weekly newsletter for senior IT managers delivered to your inbox, click here. Analysis 'Sources' close to Chancellor Gordon Brown are floating plans to finish off ID cards entirely in the UK - although that isn't quite how they're putting it. Instead, the advance men for the Prime Minister in waiting are offering a nightmare pitch that harnesses the private sector to implement a total surveillance system while raking in revenue for the Government.

Most of the components of what's being run up the flagpole now have already been suggested by mad wonks, with reference to the Home Office ID project. Future generations of cashpoints and point of sale equipment, they've told us, could cater for biometrics and ID cards, and the widespread use of ID checks in association with financial transactions would combat identity fraud (or credit card theft, as we used to call it before we needed to fiddle the identity fraud figures). People would find themselves (happily, not grudgingly, in this deranged scenario) using their ID card several times a day, and all of those lovely ID checks of the National Identity Register would provide the Government with revenue, and detailed records of everybody's financial transactions and whereabouts.

For example, right back at the start in the consultation document for the entitlement cards scheme (remember that?) we were told: "Existing cards such as loyalty cards issued by retailers could use the entitlement card, saving the cost of producing and distributing cards. Organisations might also be able to make use of cards for internal purposes for example access control to their premises or computer systems."

Harsh realities however have meant that we've only seen glimpses of the weird vision of total security, total surveillance in ID scheme documentation. The idea has still always been there, in the sense that the Identity & Passports Agency is being positioned as the UK's identity gatekeeper within a Government monopoly of ID verification services, but the point where the private sector piles in has always been out there in the middle distance, in some future phase where ID cards had already taken off.



So on hearing what Gordon is allegedly thinking one begins to wonder if perhaps this man skipped watching most of the last series. The proposed "massive expansion" of the project certainly suggests he's been smoking the biometric crack, and has bought into the notion of single, centralised ID big-time.

Yesterday's Observer report details some of the benefits Brown and his team see as deriving from a more extensive and pervasive ID scheme, but gives no indication that they've considered the associated costs or the feasibility of the proposed extensions. It is suggested, for example, that stores could be allowed to "share confidential information with police databases" and that this would mean police "could be alerted instantly when a wanted person used a cash machine or supermarket loyalty card."

Well, how does that work then? Clearly people making point of sale transactions would need as a matter of routine to have their ID checked against a list for... For what? Arrests warrants? All arrest warrants, or just for the more serious crimes? Non-payment of fines? Effectively, once you've made the decision to run the check at POS then the structures you put in place could support enforcement action for a wide range of reasons by any organisation. Note also that when a wanted person is using "a cash machine or loyalty card" the network already has a record of their name and the transaction. So you could just as well do the alerting right now if the systems supported it. What they're talking about here is therefore really more a case of using an ID card to verify the cardholder's ID, and bolting on a new deck of state surveillance while they're about it.

We probably shouldn't hold our breath waiting for the civil liberties implications of this to dawn on Gordon, but the complexities and impracticalities of actually doing it will likely come to his attention sooner. How would the check be set up? Would warrants on the police national computer be matched by an automatic flagging of the individual on the NIR? No, because the police don't necessarily want everybody to know who they're looking for, and the 'automagic' linking would be a pig to set up, considering the current state of police systems. What would happen when a fugitive was IDed at POS? Tricky one this - you can't safely alert the checkout operative, or the potentially dangerous terrorist currently buying a kumquat. So it has to be an alert tripped at the NIR level and then a further alert has to go to the police response centre covering the area, then a patrol vehicle has to be alerted... Need we go on? By the time it gets to the response centre you need to have time, location, name and nature of the suspect, and he'll be long gone.

Aside from the obvious technical issues, there's the problem of convincing businesses - what's in it for them? Identity fraud, the Government keeps telling us, is a major concern (but apparently not major enough to warrant the Government measuring it properly) and needs to be fought. Banks, credit card companies and major retailers however aren't automatically going to line up behind 'rock solid ID' at any cost, and nor will their customers. Yes, ID fraud is a cost to business and an inconvenience for the victims, but the costs are bearable, and the more security you have in a system, the more inconvenient it's likely to become. So there's a pretty strong argument that businesses think that they've got just about the right level of security now, and that they can keep losses within boundaries and absorb them as a cost of business. If an ID check at POS didn't take any time and was 100 per cent reliable and didn't require new hardware investment and cost virtually nothing, then maybe they'd see it as useful. Otherwise?

In addition to this, businesses aren't likely to want to trust the accuracy, reliability and security of Government systems. The banks and credit card companies have run customer databases for years, generally fairly effectively and with relatively few security breaches. More recently the supermarkets have got fairly cute at running loyalty schemes, and while these can be vaguely sinister, they're voluntary, and there are limits to what the supermarkets can do with them without triggering massive PR disasters. Government, on the other hand, has shown itself incapable of getting absentee parents to pay for their children's upkeep, while Gordon Brown's own department is the one that gives away money on the Internet after massive ID theft from a Government department. Really, no sensible business that knows what it's doing as regards networks and personal data is going to want to play with these people unless the law forces it to.



Brown's team seems, rightly, to view identity management as a key issue for both the public and private sectors, but then confuses what the Government has been doing with what should be done, and what the private sector will do. "What [the Tories] are objecting to in the political sphere is going to be absolutely commonplace in the private sphere", says the source. That is, Brown still buys the notion that a centralised system with 'rock solid' ID based on biometrics is the way identity management is going to go, and that "as private companies acquire biometric security systems, their spread in daily life is inevitable."

The central fallacy here is that biometric systems provide 100 per cent verification of an individual, end of story. But they don't; the readers have major limitations, biometrics can be spoofed, and the more dependent we become on biometrics as an absolute 'guarantee' of ID, the more likely they are to be spoofed and subverted on an industrial scale. Microsoft UK CTO Jerry Fishenden had a lot to say about this earlier this year, and more recently produced a an illustrative fiction showing how in the near future widespread use of biometrics would lead to their subversion as an absolute 'gold standard' of ID. Nor do you always want 100 per cent rock solid ID that you can't subvert or override, as the cautionary tale of the finger shows.

The private sector, responding to commercial pressures and market requirements, will hone and refine its ID management systems (note that it already has these, and in the main they work), and it will to some extent introduce biometrics. But you won't see it introducing biometrics as 100 per cent across the board ID verification - more likely biometrics will be used to back up other forms of verification, or for highly restricted and policed forms of ID (i.e. if it isn't going to cost much and you can keep a lid on how many times it costs, maybe fingerprint is good enough). Nor will the private sector ID management systems produce single centralised databases that form the key to everything there is to know about everybody in the country.

In the ID world according to Gordon, on the other hand, ID management will proceed down pretty much the path laid out by the architects of the ID scheme. It won't consider more decentralised and secure approaches that tailor levels of security to need, and although such matters will surely have to be considered by Brown's ID management task force (otherwise, what does it have to investigate?), Brown himself seems to be already pre-empting its report. Government ID management will however incur the vast levels of expense and complexity associated with the original ID scheme, and will, if Brown persists with the notion of expanding it to the private sector, collapse in even greater costs and complexities.

Biometric crack alert Careful readers may have noted the Observer's "Cars could be fingerprint-activated, making driving bans much harder to disobey." Something of this ilk might actually happen, as the police have already made noises (to the Transport Committee) favouring both this and remote disabling of vehicles, one of their beefs was that run-flat tyres were making stingers (the ones in the road, not the shoulder-launched missiles) less effective in stopping escaping vehicles. And there are also EU moves towards compulsory black boxes in vehicles. There are obvious problems and disadvantages associated with biometric activation of vehicles, but ask yourself why Gordon Brown thinks this has got anything to do with ID cards, and you get a pretty clear answer. The central idea is that it has nothing to do with the card and everything to do with the biometric that 'proves' absolutely that you're you. You're tagged for life, they always know where you are, what you can and can't do, who's looking for you and who you owe money to. Just thank the stars it doesn't work...

Dyning ID scheme alert: The Sunday Times reports that the Home Office has a more modest wheeze for making the ID scheme pay for itself. Charge every £8 every time they change their details on the NIR. This one's actually quite compelling as an idea - it would kill off the scheme far more swiftly and at less expense than Gordon's longer-ranging mega-disaster, and might just make John Reid even less likeable than he is already. We're impressed.

source - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08/07 ... expansion/

[lifttheveil]

Brown to let shops share ID card data

Opponents warn that linking police databases with the private sector to beat crime will lead to a 'surveillance state' and a big assault on privacy

Gaby Hinsliff, political editor
Sunday August 6, 2006
The Observer

Gordon Brown is planning a massive expansion of the ID cards project that would widen surveillance of everyday life by allowing high-street businesses to share confidential information with police databases.
Far from intending to dump ID cards once he is in Downing Street, Brown is quietly studying how biometric technology - identifying people by unique markers such as fingerprints and iris patterns - could be expanded over the next 20 years to fight crime.

Police could be alerted instantly when a wanted person used a cash machine or supermarket loyalty card. Cars could be fingerprint-activated, making driving bans much harder to disobey.



The plan would make the ID cards scheme cheaper, since companies would pay for access to the national identity register - a government database of biometric information being compiled for the ID cards programme. Brown's plans belie reports that the Treasury, concerned about the cost of ID cards, would ditch them when he became Prime Minister. 'It's almost the opposite - Gordon's thinking about ID cards is that it's part of the answer but there's a much wider picture,' said a source close to him.

There are serious questions about the existing ID cards project - designed primarily for immigration control. The Commons' science and technology select committee last Friday said it was still unclear how cards would be used or what data would be revealed, while a Home Office consultation with the IT industry - to be published this month - is expected to argue that the cards should be phased in so that technical glitches can be sorted out.

Brown has set up a taskforce, under former HBOS bank chief executive Sir James Crosby, on identity management, and a broader review of public services, led by Sir David Varney, on optimising use of existing identity information. He is considering a fundamental redesign of the ID project to fight a wider range of crime. He believes that, as private companies acquire biometric security systems, their spread in daily life is inevitable.

'There is going to be a key issue over the next 10 to 15 years about identity management right across the public and private sectors,' said the source close to Brown, adding that immigration control would be only part of it. 'It's about people coming to accept that this is not only a necessary but desirable part of modern society over the next 10 years. What [the Tories] are objecting to in the political sphere is going to be absolutely commonplace in the private sphere and saying "it's not the British way" is just not going to work.'

Brown believes that, if myriad private databases develop, there is a risk that information will leak or be stolen. The Crosby review is looking at safeguards.

Critics said the ID cards project was already too troubled to be expanded. 'It's a pretty shoddy way of cutting the costs, and it doesn't really alter the fact that all the signs are Whitehall is simply not in a position to deliver even the early stages of an ID card,' said Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat spokesman for home affairs. He said giving the private sector access to centralised databases was a big step towards 'a full surveillance state'.

David Davis, the shadow home secretary, said: 'This is an admission that the government's ID card system as it stands is destined to fail without something else to prop it up. It is regrettable that what the government is proposing will actually worsen the assault on privacy without materially improving security.'

Tony Blair's insistence on Thursday that ID cards would be a 'major plank' of the next Labour manifesto was seen as an effort to tie Brown into the idea, but it appears Brown is already committed.

The Observer recently disclosed that the company analysing police DNA samples was storing them, despite assurances they would not stay in private hands. However, sharing biometric data with high-street companies would be even more controversial.

source - http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/ ... ss&feed=11

[lifttheveil]

Suddenly, the idea of Prime Minister Brown seems a frightening prospect

The chancellor is promising the same policy on security as Blair, except stronger, wider and tougher

Jenni Russell
Monday October 16, 2006
The Guardian

When you hear that a Japanese library is about to start using palm-vein technology to recognise the borrowers taking out its books, what is your instinctive reaction? Do you think, how marvellous - I've spent years worrying that someone might nick my identity and start taking out Anita Desai and Agatha Christie under my name? Or do you think, hang on a minute - that plastic library card has really been no hassle, and I really don't want to find myself living in the tracking and surveillance world of Minority Report?

Gordon Brown is firmly in the former camp. His speech last week, entitled Meeting the Terrorist Challenge, contained passages that were practically a rhapsody to the new, secure world that biometric technology is bringing to us all. Along the way, any hopes some of us had that Prime Minister Brown might bring a new approach to the problems of liberty, privacy, security and defeating terrorism wilted a little further.

This is critical because, although Tony Blair was the politician most embarrassed by the arguments that exploded last week over the conduct of the war on terror, Gordon Brown is the man most likely to have to deal with all the consequences. Whether we are concerned with wars, liberty or the veil, it is Brown's leadership and Brown's beliefs that are going to influence future policy.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of his speech was the absence of judicious scepticism. Take ID cards. Last year we gathered he was unconvinced about their value. No longer. What really seemed to excite him was the terrific efficiency and convenience that fingerprint-swiping and iris recognition could bring to us all. Not only could we now buy groceries and open safes just by swiping our fingerprints across readers, but we would soon be able to harness all these private-sector innovations in order to access public-sector services, by bringing the two sectors' systems closer together.

It is almost as if all the fierce arguments about the merits, costs and threats posed by national databases and greater surveillance by the state had never happened. Brown made a couple of references to the need to protect civil liberties, but they were phrased more as if this is a minor difficulty, easily overcome, rather than a key objection to the entire scheme.

Alongside this enthusiasm for technology, Brown fails to make any case for ID cards defeating terrorism. He claims that their existence will disrupt terrorists' activities - but since foreign visitors won't have to carry them during their first three months in the country, that would allow any would-be terrorist an easy alibi for being without one. He says their existence will prevent terrorists stealing our identities - but that hasn't been a feature of any of the terrorist attempts to date.

Essentially, Brown is promising the same policy as that pursued by Blair, except stronger, wider, tougher. I don't remember Blair lauding the principle of fingerprint access to safes. Some of us - the ones who've watched the movies - shudder at the possibility of burglars detaching fingers from hands. Some of us shudder at the thought of public and private databases, along with their hackers, being able to track every move we make. But it seems Brown lacks our imagination or our fears.

Brown is equally determined to push harder on the issue of detentions without charge. Earlier this year, the government lost its attempt to hold suspected terrorists for up to 90 days. Confronted with outrage over the possibilities of lengthy, arbitrary and unjust detentions, it was forced to settle on 28 days. Now Brown argues that if the evidence shows it necessary, the 28-day period should be extended. The curious element to his argument is that there's no current pressure for it; the major threat which Britain allegedly faced recently - the plots to bomb aircraft with explosive liquids - was dealt with within the 28-day limit. Brown is certain that no one need worry about the justice or fairness of such extended detentions. A little judicial and parliamentary supervision is enough to guarantee that the system works.

In fact, his entire speech displayed a disconcerting degree of faith in the workings of systems, alongside an element of missionary zeal. Totalitarian terrorism is, he says, the greatest threat we face - more crucial than climate change. Defeating it is next year's spending priority.

But it's not just a matter of more money on bombs and biometric readers. Brown would like us all to behave like missionaries, both at home and abroad. We are charged with the year-in, year-out ever-deepening work of isolating and confronting extremists, winning hearts and minds and tearing down old prejudices - that's their prejudices, mind, not our own.

We must win the battle for ideas, and for what Brown says are enduring American and European values. But while we win, we must simultaneously demonstrate that we are not, as al-Qaida alleges, corrupting Muslim culture. We are simply fighting for liberty, democracy and justice. We are fighting for peace and prosperity for everyone.

Those may be fine ideals, but this message, and this strategy, is fatally flawed by Brown's inability to acknowledge to any degree how tragically far we are from practising these ideals. Peace and prosperity, liberty and democracy? How does that sound in Afghanistan, where warlords rule, and where hundreds of Afghans are shot and bombed by us every week? How does it sound in anarchic Iraq, where medics now believe 655,000 people have been killed since the invasion began?

And how are these ideals of liberty and justice upheld at home? Last Wednesday we discovered that two suspected terrorists being tried in secret hearings had been charged on the basis of contradictory intelligence, and that the truth had emerged only by sheer chance. This is not much of an advertisement for the reliability of secret intelligence and secret trials, or for the smooth operation of the west's superior systems and values. If we are charitable, we can believe that Brown recognises all these contradictions, but that at this point in his political life he has no option but to declare his allegiance to all the disastrous policies that Blair and Bush have set in train over the past five years. Perhaps Blair will threaten to sabotage the succession yet again, if Brown refuses to carry on playing his game.

The trouble, though, is that simplistic messages like these look simply hypocritical to the wider world. Our values are worth nothing until we live them. Until we change our actions, we need not waste our breath on missions. We will find it hard to win arguments, or hearts, or minds. But it does seem likely that we will get the palm-vein readers in the libraries.

jenni.russell@guardian.co.uk

[lifttheveil]

The Sunday Times
November 12, 2006

Brown: I'll be terror overlord

DAVID CRACKNELL AND DAVID LEPPARD

GORDON BROWN today makes his strongest intervention yet on national security by saying that he will take personal charge of the fight against terrorism if he becomes prime minister.

The chancellor, in an interview with The Sunday Times, said that only a Labour government led by him could be trusted to protect the country, dismissing the Conservatives as not understanding “the scale of the threat we face”.

With security set to rise to the top of the agenda this week with the publication of the Queen’s speech, Brown supported calls yesterday by Britain’s top police officer for a toughening of the country’s anti-terror laws.



The chancellor said he would also create a single “national security budget” so that resources could be switched around quickly. It is a clear sign that he will put security at the heart of next year’s spending review.

His proposed blueprint comes as David Cameron, the Tory leader, sets out his agenda for the war on terror in an article in today’s Sunday Times.
If he became prime minister, Cameron said, he would create a cabinet post specifically responsible for fighting terrorism, establish a national border force to patrol ports and airports and allow the use of telephone intercept evidence in court.

He criticised Labour for introducing ineffectual laws: “We’ve seen an endless proliferation of new measures coming out of the Home Office, many of which end up never being used. I fear we’ll see more of the same in the coming Queen’s speech.”

The debate on Britain’s security was ignited when Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, the head of MI5, disclosed last week that the security service was investigating
30 active plots in Britain and had identified 200 terrorist networks involving at least 1,600 people.

Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan police commissioner, confirmed the threat in a speech yesterday, citing evidence that up to 120,000 British Muslims tacitly support terrorist activity.

He proposed increasing the length of time that suspects can be held without charge from 28 days, allowing the police to continue to question suspects after they have been charged, and lifting the bar on the use of telephone intercept evidence in court.

Yesterday Brown offered his backing, pointing out that he had already authorised the use of so-called “closed” evidence to allow the assets of suspected terrorists to be frozen. He said he had also indicated that he would favour the extension of the 28-day limit to up to 90 days.

“I completely agree with him,” Brown said. “Given the scale of the threat we face, we must give the security service and the police not just the resources they need, but the powers they need, to gather securely the evidence and use that evidence to gain convictions.”

He said that having studied the US security system, he had become convinced of the need to change the way that Britain manages the fight against terrorism. “I believe we need a national security strategy, updated each year for changing circumstances,” Brown said.

“It must be both domestic and international. It must be about the fight for hearts and minds as well as conventional counter-terrorism.”

Detailing his plans, Cameron said that, if elected to power, he would appoint a minister solely responsible for combating terrorism as a full member of the cabinet alongside the home secretary.

“Action against terrorism deserves a dedicated seat at the top table,” he said.

He repeated Conservative promises to abandon the government’s controversial identity cards scheme, saying that the security services were stretched and the money
would be better spent on increasing surveillance of known terror suspects.

Also backing the use of intercept evidence, Cameron said: “It must be intensely frustrating to listen to tapes of terrorists plotting massacres, yet be unable to lock them up because such evidence is currently inadmissible.”

Brown dismissed the idea of appointing a special minister to fight terrorism. “Every minister and every agency of government must take responsibility for security — each of them must play their part,” he said.

“But, ultimately, because the fight against terrorism must be fought both at home and abroad, it is the prime minister who must take the lead, as Tony Blair has done. If you are prime minister, you cannot devolve responsibility for protecting the nation. It must always be your first priority.”

The chancellor has avoided reciprocating the personal attacks made on him by Cameron but he hit out at the Tory leader’s failure to back identity cards, saying: “You can’t protect your borders or conduct effective surveillance if you don’t have a proper system of identity management.”

In a speech in Germany this weekend, Sir Ian Blair cited a poll which suggested that 120,000 Muslims — 6% of the Muslim population — believed the July 7 suicide bombings in London in 2005 had been justified. “We face a war,” he said, adding that Muslim extremists were “motivated by politics of a twisted sort”.

“Every week the number of targets against which our services are operating in Britain increases,” he said.

His demands for intercept evidence to be accepted in court add to a campaign by law enforcement figures. He also argued for legislation to ban the burning of flags and effigies and to prevent demonstrators covering their faces.

Source - http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0, ... _2,00.html