Passepartout

If anybody is still sitting on the fence about ID cards, please read this article from the Guardian (damned liberals!). It brings up the sort of questions that the Government are trying to brush under the carpet and hope nobody kicks up a fuss about. Paying over £90 for something that won't be mine? That sounds like taxation to me, no doubt Blair et al will shy away from that word.

In a related topic, I have recently received a new passport which now has a biometric chip in it. It took three false starts and innumerable hours wasted re-photographing my ugly mug to get one (which they then really badly printed directly onto the passport - no more photos stuck to paper anymore). This, like ID cards, won't do much to stop anybody intent of purpose to steal your identity. In fact it may make it easier.

The radio chips being used to encode your statistics on these passports will likely not be encrypted (it won't be in America, as the time taken to unencrypt and read the data would delay departures too much, and it's their idea). This will mean that anyone with the right equipment (i.e. criminals) won't even need to steal your passport - they can download your details at a safe distance and once they have them, can take all the time they need to unencrypt it. In fact, the encrypted version on trial in Holland has already been cracked!

I have emailed the passport office to discover whether UK passports will encrypt the data or not (if not, I'll be buying some tinfoil or one of these wallets - which we will probably see more of in the future). These are the sort of practical questions that everybody should be asking about passports and the advent of ID cards (these guys already are of course). Practically speaking, the ID card will be a nightmare, which is why the Government is keen to argue the case on generalities of 'fighting' terrorism and illegal immigration, in both cases of which it has been forced to admit the ID card will not help one bit (the Madrid train bombers had ID cards and the July 7 bombers would have as well).

In the age of information being available at your fingertips, it seems less and less people are getting the full facts (or care about the consequences). The Government reckons it will deliver the ID card scheme for a nominal fee of £5.8 billion. Do you think the Government will implement the largest IT scheme to date effectively? I didn't think so.