Stand: back on its feet
Briefly lying dormant, the electronic campaign machine stand.org.uk springs back into life again, this time to tackle the government’s national identity card proposal.
Well, the government calls it an “entitlement” card, and really the percieved need to establish identity is actually the need to establish entitlement. But if these mandatory cards are capable of establishing identity, this duck is a duck.
The editor of 2600, Emmanuel Goldstein, applies for cedit cards in the names of his pseudonyms. Apparently the credit card companies don’t care if the name on the card is a real name, they only care that the bills are paid, and that the card isn’t used without the consent of the bill-payer. If something’s not an identity card, there’s no reason that it should accuratly refect the identity of the holder.
But, if you actually need to verify identity in the UK a tight infrastucture to do this doesn’t exist. As Markus Kuhn points out in a recent RISKS submission:
In practice, anyone wishing to verify an identity gets only the *minimal* protection of all the ID schemes in common use, because as soon as you break one of them, you can quite easily proliferate your fake identity into several other systems. Get a fake UK birth certificate (fairly easy) and apply with it for a fake UK drivers license (therefore also not much more difficult), use both to get a fake UK passport and all three to comfortably get fake account access, education degrees, travel documents, security clearances, etc. etc.
Last year I needed to renew my passport, of course I only realise this
days before I was due to leave the country. I think back in 1992 I had
this silly idea that by the 21st Century border controls would have been
abandoned. Fortunately the UK passport Service has a fast-track same-day passport service. So I make an appointment by phone and the night before I get panicky gathering together my identity documents: birth certificate, bank statements (unopened in the age of net banking), etc.
- Turn up to the passport office in Victoria early in the morning, about 20 minutes before my appointment.
- Pick up an application and begin to fill it out.
- 5 minutes before my appointment attempt to go through security.
- Have my “hardcore” key-chain confiscated by security.
- Sit down.
- Within 2 minutes my appointment number is called.
- Present my passport application, photos, previous passport to the
guy behind the counter. - He checks the application, checks the photo in the old passport,
enquires if I’m going for work or holiday. - Tells me everything is in order and gives me a ticket to take to the
cashier window.
At this point I’m shocked that I’m not dealing with the shambling Brazil-esque bureaucracy I was expecting, and slightly indignant that I’d spent ages looking for my birth certificate. ”That’s it? You don’t want to check my documents?” I say, waving my (otherwise embarrassing) bank statement at him. “I could be anyone!”
So this member of the public was pacified by having his, apparently superfluous, identity documents carefully scrutinised. At lunch I
came back and a fresh passport was ready for collection.
Other than for the crossing of international borders, I can only think of one time in the last decade when I needed to prove my identity, rather than just prove I lived where I claimed – and that was changing my bank. Given proof of identity apparently isn’t that common for me, I wonder where the impetous for an expensive ID infrastructure is coming from? Potential beneficiaries of lucrative I.T. contracts?
