Top UK officials doubt national ID card plan
U.K. government officials doubt whether a national ID program will be ready by 2008 because of procurement and project management concerns, according to a series of leaked e-mails. The correspondence, published in the Sunday Times, said that if the government proceeds too quickly with an initial scaled-down version of the program as supported by Prime Minister Tony Blair, it could delay ID cards “for a generation.”
July 10, 2007– Ian of London, England, writes: These details show why proposed biometric ID cards will make bad problems worse and so should not be implemented at any cost. Biometric documents (ID cards and passports) will work fine for organisations where everyone concerned is on the database and every point of transaction has equipment to read these biometric documents.
Nationally it is virtually impossible to satisfy both these conditions and hence these biometric systems will fail. In reality, criminals will be tempted to use fakes of these documents as IDs where there is no equipment to read them. So rather than deterring, this ID card system will boost identity fraud, which will be even more complex to solve.
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