ID Cards are crap

It should come as no surprise to anyone who has read pretty much anything I have written on the subject of National ID Cards over the course of the last few years, that I am no great fan of the idea. Not for any great ‘invasion of privacy’ nor ‘big brother’ reasoning, but rather more simplistically based upon the undisputable fact that the UK powers that be cannot do big IT projects without cocking up big time. The evidence is all there in previous and ongoing public sector projects, from massive budget overspends to Heath-Robinson software fixes and the inevitable security holes the size of John Prescott’s waistband (OK, perhaps a slight exaggeration as anyone would be able to spot a vulnerability that big.) Move these concerns into the realm of identity and national security and, well, only a fool would think it makes sense to proceed with such a half-arsed plan as the National ID Card scheme.

It appears that even the government has started to realise this, as it has announced that it is cutting back on the original ID Card plans which included a single ‘mega-database’ which would have held all the information about every citizen in a nice, central, easy to compromise single point of attack location. The National Identity Register (NIR) as it was to be known, was the biggest potential point of failure as it would have held all the personal and biometric data. Anyone involved in IT security will tell you this was not a good idea, and one has to imagine was telling the government the same thing.