ID Cards: Still think they're a good idea?
Archived Posts from this Category
ID revisited
Posted on Mar 28 2008 | Tagged as: Words, The Stupid, ID Cards: Still think they're a good idea?
A while back, I submitted a Freedom of Information request to the Identity and Passport Service, asking how many ways there are that they know of in which it is possible to compromise the security or integrity of the proposed ID card scheme.
I mentioned their reply here, when they claimed that disclosing their strategies and tactics for dealing with fraud would not be in the public interest. Naturally, I requested an internal review of their decision, on the quite reasonable grounds that I didn’t ask for their strategies to deal with fraud: I asked simply for a number.
Following this internal review, the IPS now claim to have misread my original request, and that they “do not hold information on the number of ways it may be possible to compromise the integrity of the proposed identity card scheme”.
Spot the subtle difference.
They deny holding information on the number of ways in which compromising the ID card may be possible; I asked for the number of ways in which they know it to be possible.
It’s not actually possible for them not to hold the information that I did request. At risk of starting to sound like Donald Rumsfeld:
Either they know of ways to compromise ID-card security, or they do not. If they do, then they must therefore know of x ways to do this. If they do not, then they know of zero ways, which means they still know of the number ways – zero. Else they are claiming not to know whether they know of possible security issues.
Question: are they genuinely this stupid, or are they doing it on purpose?
35
Posted on Mar 11 2008 | Tagged as: ID Cards: Still think they're a good idea?
“The number of people wrongly declared dead every day in the US as a result of data input errors by social security staff.”
(From this week’s New Scientist.)
ID FOI
Posted on Jan 30 2008 | Tagged as: Politics, Work, The Stupid, ID Cards: Still think they're a good idea?
Just before Christmas I asked the Home Office — out of curiosity more than anything else — how many ways there are that they’re aware of in which it is possible to compromise the proposed National Identity Card, as the scheme stands1.
The National Identity and Passport Service replied that they’re not obliged to provide the information as it fails the public interest test, stating:
[I]t is not in the public interest to disclose IPS’s strategies or tactics for dealing with fraud as this information may provide valuable intelligence to the perpretators of crime.
If the Home Office thinks that a simple number consists of “strategies or tactics”, then we’re in more trouble than I thought.
Or, bearing in mind that they took three more than the maximum 20 working days allowed by the Freedom of Information act to tell me that they can’t tell me, could they have refused simply because it’d be embarrasing for them?
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1 This supposes that they know how they’re going to implement it, which I’ll admit is a totally unwarranted assumption.
Raytheon
Posted on Nov 18 2007 | Tagged as: ID Cards: Still think they're a good idea?
The Government’s new e-borders scheme, under which anyone entering or leaving the country must divulge up to 53 pieces of personal information, is to be run by Raytheon.
Raytheon is a business so trustworthy that they’ve previously been convicted of illegally obtaining classified information, have been sued for spying on a rival firm and were caught editing out the “controversies” section on the company’s Wikipedia entry.
Just the people who I’d want tracking my movements.
