By Tom Espiner, 6 November 2008 08:32
NEWS
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith will invite high-street businesses today to tender to be biometrics enrolment centres for the National Identity Scheme, which the government will use to issue ID cards.
The Home Office wants to use the tender process to gauge whether businesses such as post offices and banks would be interested in participating in taking fingerprints from people for the scheme, silicon.com sister site ZDNet UK understands. It also hopes to formulate a document, called the Frontline Services Prospectus, outlining how biometric enrolment would be carried out by businesses.
ZDNet UK also understands that the Post Office has not been approached directly by the Home Office to submit a tender.
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Anti-ID cards campaigner Phil Booth told ZDNet UK on Wednesday that the government was trying to sell high-street firms an idea that would not work. "The Home Office is selling businesses a pig in a poke," Booth said. "What company would want to invest millions in a service that will be scrapped at the first opportunity?"
Booth added that the Home Office proposal "absolutely undermines security".
"If they're taking fingerprints on the high street, they simply cannot guarantee locking prints to details," he said. "The only way they could have done that is in an interrogation centre, with some official scrutinising documentation, then walking you over to the scanner to take your prints."
Booth suggested that a high-street-based system would be open to fraud and systems error, and could lead to chaos.
The Home Office declined to comment on the scheme.
Comments
There are 5 comments. Join the discussion
1. Drew Stephenson
They just don't get it do they? If they start taking biometric data only on the strength of the information that someone can provide in a high-street environment they haven't got any further than we are now! I think i might just go and have a cry somewhere. We elected these people!
2. Richard Davies
I agree with the last part of the article regarding using high-street businesses to enroll / take fingerprints etc.
You cannot trust this to a high-street business. Fingerprints need to be matched to users credentials in as secure a manner as humanly possible otherwise its open to human error and fraud.
E.g. If I'm great friends with enrollment company 'x'...whats to stop them attaching my fingerprints to someone elses data. Alternatively, whats to stop somone who hates their fingerprint scanning job from purposely mixing up lots of peoples records?
3. Karen Challinor
so I go dumpster diving for some documents or invest a couple of days profiling some likely victim and get their name, date of birth and where they work. from this I can get their NI number then their tax records and the more info I have the more I can get, as was demonstrated on a recent Panorama
I then wander into one of the fingerprint centres and register my fingerprints using the documents I found as evidence of identity, so now my fingerprints are on file as someone else
I then go and commit a crime
the police go and pick up the poor sod who apparently left their fingerprints at the scene and because they are on file they don't need taking again for comparison purposes, this poor bugger has a cast iron alibi but fingerprints don't lie so they are locked up
6 months later when their solicitor eventually forces a comparison it is found that the arrested individual is innocent, however they have lost any shred of personal dignity, their job, their family, their savings and their home in the interim
but don't worry, "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear"
funny, I have nothing to hide and I'm terrified
4. Radical Meldrew
Why do they try and sell the ID card and associated metrics as a way of defeating crime? Let's get one thing straight, career criminals are clever, wear gloves and probably won't appear on any database. Opportunist amateurs on the other hand take silly risks and are usually easy to identify as a result. So, leaving criminal aspects aside, I believe that the ID card scheme is actually designed to record and profile the movements and transactions of just about everybody - they are certainly watching us now but in the future they won't have to - a trace of past ID logs will probably reveal all that they need.
5. just ask Jacky
If they (the govt) go ahead with this ridiculous scheme I'm going to get forged cards in numerous - just because I can.