By Will Sturgeon, 18 October 2005 16:40
NEWS Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, former chairwoman of defence technology and security company QinetiQ, has questioned the wisdom of the UK ID card scheme, saying the current government lacks "the balls" to make the scheme mandatory.
Neville-Jones, also a former foreign office civil servant, said the government will instead force people to accept the cards by making it too problematic not to have one.
She told silicon.com: "I don't think the government has the balls to force people. They will sell this to us as voluntary but make it so inconvenient for us not to have one.
"They can make something which is voluntary incredibly difficult to live without."
She added the main reason given for introducing the cards - the threat of terrorism - is fundamentally flawed.
"I am unhappy about the way the debate is developing in the UK," she said. "The whole thing has been set up in a terrorism context and that's wrong."
Neville-Jones added there is a very real danger of disenfranchising innocent people with 'false positives' - people being told they aren't who they say they are.
She said: "The requirement for 100 per cent accuracy is huge and I don't think we've ever seen a system which is 100 per cent accurate.
"We could get to a situation where we have something incredibly intrusive but also incredibly ineffective."
Comments
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1. Roger Huffadine
Thank goodness that we are getting discussion on 'false positives'.
This is one of the major problems with the whole scheme - yet [despite Michael Foster promising to raise the issue] it has not been debated in parliament.
Over time every one of us will suffer from being a false positive - being identified as a match for some event that is being investigated. Hopefully not too many of us will be locked up for 90 days whilst we attempt to prove our innocence.
The problem arises from the way in which data is searched - we all know that too wide a search leads to thousands of positives from searching with interfaces like google. We also know that if the search is too tight then there are no matches.
Exactly the same problem will beset the ID card scheme to the annoyance of every person who is a false positive.
The wasted police resources used to screen false positives will cost billions of pounds - which could have been spent more wisely on other forms of identity checking - like border control and police on the streets.
Interestingly for every 10 women who are screened as positive for breast cancer at the first screening only one will actually be a true positive the remaining 9 will be false positives.
2. Karen Challinor
A little late for discussion, unless the lords send the bill back for revision it will become law as it stands
3. Mike
The Lords have a duty to kick this out! Not that I am against ID cards in principle. This is the wrong scheme at the wrong time. ID cards will eventually work, but the technology is not yet sufficiently mature.
The data needs to be distributed into more than one database, with strict controls on x-linking.
Some data needs to be kept off line, so that it can be used for resolving conflicts.
There needs to be some fuzzy logic (This is what we humans use) that enables a match to be formed from say 3 out of 4 paramenters to meet the cases where certain biometrics are problematic for some groups of people.
And above all there needs to be a mechanism for destruction in the event of our system ceasing to be sufficiently democratic.