Loss of Privacy

National ID cards will be issued before the end of the year in Tanzania.

The $176 million (about Sh200 billion) project has been delayed for decades now with documents, meetings and tendering moving from one office to the other. And now it has attracted the international community, including the World Bank.

Currently, five companies have been cleared for the final stage of the tender competition from which the authority will select one to start designing and making the ID cards.

Armenia is due to start issuing their ID cards sometime this year.

The current passports will not be valid in Armenia in 2011. They will be replaced by biometric passports and ID cards. Most probably, the social security cards will not be necessary, either.

The biometric passports and ID cards will contain more information about the citizens than the current documents. They will include a photo, the name, the surname, the middle name, the date of birth, the address, the prints of four fingers and the signature of the citizen.

The ID cards will be used inside Armenia, while the passports will be provided only when leaving the country, Head of the Passport and Visa Department of RA Police Norayr Muradkhanyan said. The new documents will be valid for ten years.

The unique attribute of the GE-SABIC IP holographic material is that it can be processed like a conventional plastic and the holograms are recorded within the holographic material. The holographic materials can be laminated within the card itself, making it virtually impossible for a card to be altered.

Holograms are recorded within the thermo-plastic based holographic material, which can then be processed like a normal plastic and can be laminated within the card itself. A single card can have multiple holograms embedded in the plastic for maximum flexibility, personalization and security.

The Daily Mail and ComputerWeekly are reporting that computer expert, Adam Laurie, was able to clone the UK national ID card in 12 minutes.  The British government claims that it is uncloneable.

Using a Nokia mobile phone and a laptop computer, Laurie was able to copy the data on a card that is being issued to foreign nationals in minutes.

He then created a cloned card, and with help from another technology expert, changed all the data on the new card. This included the physical details of the bearer, name, fingerprints and other information.

He then rewrote data on the card, reversing the bearer’s status from “not entitled to benefits” to “entitled to benefits”.

He then added fresh content that would be visible to any police officer or security official who scanned the card, saying, “I am a terrorist – shoot on sight.”

The new ID card for foreign nationals and British passports also use this same technology.  And the ID cards are mandatory if you want a driver’s license or passport.  So, you can now be forced by the government to have your information placed in a central database, have a card that can easily be cloned and your identity stolen, and, best of all, you get to pay for the privilege.

What a joke the United Kingdom has become.  Not happy with turning themselves into a surveillance society, they can’t even make their own surveillance devices work properly.  It has now been reported that British police and border guards can’t even read the ID cards that have been issued to its citizens.

Currently no police stations, border entry points or job centres have readers for the card’s biometric chip, the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) revealed in response to an FoI (Freedom of Information) request by silicon.com about the £4.7bn identity cards scheme.

That’s right, apparently, everyone in the world, except the United Kingdom, can read these cards.

The news comes in spite of the first ID cards being issued to foreign nationals in November last year, with the IPS expecting to issue 50,000 ID cards by April this year.

Way to go Britain.  These cards have only been in use for three months.  When are you going to get around to actually making them work?

With no readers in place, police and immigration officers are currently still relying on traditional methods of checking ID cardholders’ identity, running a fresh set of prints against existing identity databases.

Identity minister Meg Hillier told silicon.com last week that the chip is a “vital part” of the ID card scheme because the “fingerprint coded into the chip … links you to the card”.

These cards are really, really vital to the safety of our country, but we haven’t figured out how to get people readers to actually use them yet.

“I would have thought that the government would have tried to get the readers rolled out as soon as possible as it is only when you get serious deployments that you start to learn what can go wrong.”

No firm timetable has been given for the rollout of chip readers. According to Hillier, it will be up to each police force to decide when it is necessary to invest in the machines while the technology will be rolled out to immigration officers over time.

I would laugh if this wasn’t such a pathetic waste of time.