Government plans for a national ID card scheme, voted
through in the House of Commons last week, are too complex and too
expensive, former government research organisation Qinetiq has
warned.
Qinetiq, which advised the Home Office on the development of the ID
card scheme, also raised questions about the reliability of the
proposed biometric card-reader infrastructure.
Neil Fisher, director of security solutions at Qinetiq, urged the
Home Office to simplify the design of the ID card proposals.
The focus should be on its core function as an ID card, rather than
trying to fulfil a long wish list of objectives - from fighting
terrorism and reducing illegal immigration to tackling fraud.
The government was making the scheme more risky and had almost
doubled its cost from £3.1bn to £5.5bn by insisting on a system
capable of matching fingerprints, iris or facial images against a
remote central database, when this was not necessary to simply
verify identities.
"The Home Office wants matching online because it wants to keep an
eye on the bad guys and keep an audit trail. But that means talking
over the internet to the central database. We are saying it is a
step too far," Fisher said.
Keeping audit trails would vastly increase the complexity of the
scheme, Fisher said. However, criminals and terrorists would simply
avoid using ID cards, limiting the value of keeping trails.
More thought was needed about ways of verifying identities, Qinetiq
said. Even if biometrics achieved 99.999% accuracy, on a database
of 100 million people, this could lead to thousands of false
matches.
Power outages, communications failures, fires or other disasters
could also disrupt access to the central database, which would
become a key part of the critical national infrastructure. But
there has been little public discussion of business continuity,
said Fisher.
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