Recent comments to my last post about biometric passports have raised wider questions about the general purpose, risks and benefits of new government-supplied identification mechanisms (the wider “ID card debate” in the UK). So here is a quick summary of my basic views on this.

For some years now, the UK government has planned to catch up with other European countries in providing a purpose-designed identification infrastructure in order to make life simpler and reduce the risk of identity fraud (impersonation). The most visible of these plans center around a high-integrity identity register that keeps an append-only lifetime record of who exists and how they can be recognized biometrically. People will be able to get security-printed individual copies of their current record in this register (ID card, passport, biometric certificate), which they can easily present for offline verification. (What exact support is planned for remote identification over the telephone or Internet is not quite clear yet, so I’ll exclude that aspect for the moment, although the citizen PKIs already used in Finland, Belgium, etc., and under preparation elsewhere, probably give a good first idea.)

However, such plans have faced vocal opposition in the UK from “privacy advocates”, who have showed great talent in raising continuous media attention to a rather biased view of the subject. Their main refrain is that rather than prevent identity fraud, an identification infrastructure will help identity thieves by making it easier to access the very data that is today used by business to verify identity. I disagree. And I put “privacy advocates” into quotation marks here, because I believe that the existing practice whose continuation they advocate restricts both my privacy and my freedom. Continue reading Identity theft without identification infrastructure →