"The biometrics are awful... and such small portions!"

ID cards have been Whitehall’s wet dream for generations, and now the process is being set firmly in motion. Policy wonks tried for years to find an excuse that would stick—“it’ll stop football hooligans” being probably their weakest effort—but only with the advent of digital technology and the consequent exciting new horizons in the world of ID theft have they finally got themselves a toehold in the public consciousness. The National Identity Register is now being sold to us with the sickly lie that it’s voluntary, but expect full compulsion within a decade or so.

Not to hear them tell it, of course. “We are not going to oblige people to carry the card,” says Lord Bassam of Brighton, delighted with the clever lawyerness of it all. Eventually you’ll need to be on the national register to have a passport, but that doesn’t mean you’re obliged to be on the register—whether you ever want to go on holiday is up to you. Also, even more technically, you won’t be obliged to carry the card at all—you’ll just have to present it at a police station within a short period of an official demanding to see it. So the noble Lord wasn’t exactly lying. Who needs to lie when you can get your brief written by experts at dodging the law?

Assume for the moment that everyone involved in pushing through this legislation is stone-cold wonderful. Competent, entirely trustworthy; leave your kid with them; don’t worry about the rent, they're good for it, etc. Put to them the idea that some future administration might not be so benign, in which case it’ll be grateful for so much oversight and control over its citizens having been handed to it on a plate, and they stare back, as Bill Hicks used to say, like a dog that’s just been shown a card trick. They always like to think they're puzzling out every conceivable contingency, but this line of reasoning isn’t even on their radar. How could authorities think of using this technology in a bad way? We’re using it to fight terrorists and bad guys! Altogether too much sodding dualism around at the moment.

Actually, it isn’t so much the illiberality of the national identity register that bothers me. After all, in these post-9/11 days, we’re all meant to be illiberal now (see Fig. 1). No, even my hatred of the idea of any government owning every personal detail about its citizens is outweighed by my fear of the potential results of outright ineptitude. Even if the technology to capture your biological details works, the verification system at the other end also has to work perfectly so it knows you’re you. And even if that works fine, the security system then has to be watertight so that no-one can gain access to your perfectly-stored data. This wondrous combination of technology and management in celestial harmony—what are the odds?




Critics have grilled the Government about the “security” aspect (subtext: the “competence” aspect), but ministers have been ready and have come right back at them:

Baroness Scotland of Asthal: To date there has not been a recorded security breach or compromise of a government database which is protected in the same manner as that designed to protect the national identity register.

This resembles nothing so much as the alleged last words of General John Sedgwick: “Don’t worry, boys; they couldn’t hit an elephant at this dist—”

The Earl of Northesk: The mathematics of probability tend to indicate that there is a sliding scale of accuracy and deliverability the more biometrics are used. That is a function of probability. To what extent have the Home Office techies and the Government taken account of that simple fact?

Baroness Scotland of Asthal: My Lords, I reassure the noble Earl that all those facts are being taken into account. I am sure that the noble Earl is not suggesting that the coincidence of having biometric data that identify the face, the eyes and the 10 biometric identifiers from the fingers all taken together, if they all coincide, means that it is less likely that it is the person that is so identified.

Actually... sometimes, yes. By a happy coincidence, the search engine on Parliament’s own website is a shining example of this. It’s notoriously unreliable—my favourite moment came earlier this year when it failed to recognise the opening words of the Queen’s Speech—but one of its most curious features is that the more you try to refine your search, by entering the specific name of a speaker; the dates you want it to search; where you want it to search; the exact phrase, instead of some vague, unrecognisable combination of the words you’re (increasingly wearily) typing in... the more parameters you set, the less likely it is to find what you're looking for. But this is obviously because it’s badly designed and poorly executed, and how could that ever happen in a government project carried out by private contractors?



We all know the track record of government IT projects involving technology any more complex than Pong. (This does not mean that everyone who has dealt with, for example, the CSA has suffered from it—just that many people have. Only someone whose livelihood was on the line would claim that was a positive result.) This is one of the reasons they’re keen to involve private contractors, some of whom at least have experience of not stuffing up on such a regular basis.

Another reason, of course, is Tony’s dogmatic insistence on PFI: get the contractors in and give them what they want, at public cost if necessary. This means there’s now almost no area of public life where legitimate requests for information won’t be met with a refusal on the grounds of “commercial confidentiality”. That’s Tony’s “legacy” right there.

So which is better? An honestly inept public service national register, or a shady inept outsourced one?

Let’s see just how many of New Labour’s erogenous zones this project tickles.

(a) It’s modern, so it’s obviously superior to anything that came before. This is, after all, a central Tony tenet.

(b) It’s got all computers and that, so it’s inherently fantastic. The industry itself is making a lot of noise about the fact that the technology will probably never be infallible enough to work properly, but to no avail. The Dear Leader has got his dick ears on about this project, and will be physically unable to hear a single negative word about it until long after he’s spent. Plus, of course, if the Government start farming out ID register contracts to other interested companies, as opposed to just nepotistically handing them over to one of their usual favourites, the industry’s cautious caveats will evaporate like morning dew in Dubai.

(c) It’s invasive. I’m not sure that’s an adjective many Labour members would be proud to be labelled with (how about the more graceful “inquisitive”?), but it is richly ironic that a prime minister so far removed from what socialists would consider socialism should nurse into being legislation closely resembling the kind of remorseless über-state that socialism’s opponents used to fear. Citizens will inform the authorities whenever they move house. Failure to do so will incur a penalty of £1,000. It always used to be possible to tease French friends about senseless French bureaucracy. Not any more. Turns out our civil servants were gazing wistfully across the Channel all along.
     “You look wistful, sir.”
     “I am, Bunty. Give me a form to fill in.”
     “Which one, sir?”
     “Oh… any.”

(d) It will make everyone really safe, except from forgers using the same technology the Government are using, but apart from that, it will make everyone really safe!

(e) Tony will be remembered for it. Oh all right, that's not technically a Labour goal, but L’état, c’est lui, and all that.

(f) Even if it all fails as catastrophically as my cooker, at least they did something.

Basically, ‹voice="Charlton Heston before he got old and went a bit senile"› they’ll give me an ID card when they force it into my cold, dead hand. ‹/voice›