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ID cards: the truth
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Passport Service 5 Year Plan Prepares For ID Cards?A close look at the Passport Service 5-year-plan shows that it is in fact going to set up the infrastructure & procedures for operating a national ID card scheme & identity database - a significant increase in the number of passport offices (or ID registration processing centres as they'll be) - remember, these plans were already in place well before the Identity Cards Bill was anywhere near becoming law. The full article by Privacy International is much longer than the quoted excerpt here, and comments on biometrics, international standards required for passports, the Personal Identification Project (essentially an undebated 'back-up' for an intrusive ID database), and the transformation of the Passport Service into a body responsible for Identity Cards. 29 Mar 2005 From In an eagerly awaited announcement, the UK Home Office declared that new passports may be issued from the end of this year. These 'ePassports'will include a scanned image of the face of the individual, i.e. a digital photograph on a chip. It was previously thought that these new passports would also include extended information such as fingerprints and iris scans, but these plans have been abandonned for the moment. There will be an interview for first-time applicants, however. These announcements followed the release of the five-year plan from the Passport Service.
This is a surprising development as the Government continually argued that the national ID card was an inevitability because of the international obligations placed upon the UK to develop biometric passports (see the LSE interim report for an analysis of the speeches by Home Office Ministers, the Home Secretary, and the Prime Minister). In its enrollment trial last summer, the Passport Service captured iris scans, fingerprints, and facial scans. The final report of that trial still has not been released, even ten months later and following debates in Parliament. Now it appears that these ePassports will contain little more than a digital photograph.
The Government is still claiming that ID cards will be built on top of the passport infrastructure, however. According to Home Office Minister Des Browne,
"The UKPS plans set out how the agency will make British passports even more secure and how it will continue to provide a first-rate service to the public. This programme of work will significantly improve the integrity of the UK passport, helping to tackle fraud and ensuring that the UK remains at the forefront of the international drive to improve document security.
"These changes will also lay the foundations for the Government’s proposed national identity cards scheme – which would help tackle identity fraud, organised crime, illegal immigration, and terrorism, as well as making it easier for UK citizens to travel and to carry out everyday transactions securely and conveniently. The UKPS would be a key part of the new Home Office agency that would be established to run the scheme."
UKPS Chief Executive Bernard Herdan said:
"The UK Passport Service’s Integrated Change Programme will put in place key building blocks for the identity cards programme, at the same time as delivering major improvements in the passport issuing process and the document itself.
"Our vision remains focused on stronger identity authentication to continue to provide even better customer service by safeguarding our customers’ identities and reflecting our intended future role in the Government’s identity cards scheme."
It remains unclear how exactly the Passport Service will be implicated in the card scheme if the Passport Office is not required to collect additional biometrics for the passport, or if it will be required to create the national identity register.
This is likely to be a setback for the Government's initiative on identity cards since it can no longer confuse the identity card with the passport. However, in our review and analysis of the Passport Service's five-year plan, released the last day before the Easter holidays, we find that the Government is insisting on its strategy of confusion. By doing so, it is hoping to conceal the fact that passports are going to cost almost twice as much as they do now even without the additional burden of issuing an ID card and collecting secondary biometrics. And the Passport Service is going to be late in meeting the U.S.-imposed deadline for biometric passports, subjecting Britons to applying for visas beginning in the fall of 2005.
Previously, Britons were going to face a higher cost for passports because the Government was trying to conceal the identity card costs within the passport costs. Now, because the Government and the Passport Service have confused identity cards and passports, passports are going to cost almost double, even without the identity card.
http://www.privacyinternational.org/article.shtml?cmd[347]=x-347-168059|full article |
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