of a department with policing
responsibilities and will differ from
departments responsible for trade
and industry.
IDENTITY MANAGEMENT AND
IDENTITY FRAUD
The U.K. government has delegated powers for implementing
identity management solutions to
the Home Office (equivalent to
Interior or Justice
departments in other
countries). As a result,
the U.K.’s efforts to
combat identity fraud
are closely aligned with
other parts of the Asia
Home Office policy
agenda. These include Australasia
crime, policing, pass-
Europe
ports, and immigration; the scheme they
developed directly reflects this
wider policy agenda of the Home
Office.
The Home Office proposed
issuing biometric identity cards,
linked to a central identity register.
Through a combination of extensive biometric collection (at one
point including 10 fingerprints,
two iris scans, and a face-recogni-tion biometric) and a detailed,
semi-automated biographical footprint check, the government
intended to develop a de novo,
clean database of all U.K. residents.
Once issued, the biometric identity
card could be verified against the
National Identity Register in such
a way that it would be virtually
impossible, in theory, for someone
to impersonate another individual.
For example, every time a new
bank account is opened or a credit
card is issued, the bank or issuer
would have to verify the card (and
perhaps the biometrics of the card
holder) against the national register. The lack of standards for the
representation of biometric data at
this time would mean that all
banks and other such institutions
across the country would need to
have the same types of sensors to
verify biometrics of their clients as
Region
Africa
Americas
Americas
Country
South Africa
Canada
U.S.
Government Department
Department of Home Affairs
Office of Consumer Affairs
Federal Trade Commission
South Korea
Australia
Ministry of Government
Administration and Home Affairs
Attorney General
U.K.
Home Office
Government departments responsible for
combating identity fraud.
were used to enroll people in the
scheme, at each of their tens of
thousands of branches.
A large centralized system
seems almost inevitable once it is
decided the policing arm of government will be responsible for
combating identity theft. It is no
surprise the resulting scheme has
been widely criticized [ 5, 6] in
part because the U.K. government
has a relatively poor record of successfully implementing very large
IT systems [ 3].
By choosing a high-tech solution, drawing on the state of the
art in biometric technologies, the
scheme is also high-risk. Few of
the constituent technologies have
been used on the scale envisaged
by the identity cards scheme ( 60+
million citizens are expected to be
registered once it is up and running).
Another question merits asking:
Why the inclusion of fingerprints
into the register? They are no
more, and more likely much less,
effective than iris-scanning tech-
nologies. The answer was provided
in an email message from Prime
Minister Tony Blair to those who
had signed a petition against the
introduction of identity
cards: “The National Iden-
tity Register will help police
bring those guilty of serious
crimes to justice. They will
be able, for example, to com-
pare the fingerprints found
at the scene of some 900,000
unsolved crimes against the
information held on the reg-
ister.” 4 Thus the decision to
locate measures against iden-
tity fraud in a government depart-
ment that is also responsible for
policing results in a scheme that
seeks to address both of these pol-
icy agendas.
This centralized scheme,
together with a single National
Identity Registration number, has
the potential to make the problem
of identity fraud greater, 5 as the
problems with the U.S. Social
Security number and Australian
Tax ID have shown [ 1, 4]. Though
the U.K. government would argue
that a government-certified high-tech solution would make it more
difficult to perpetrate such fraud, it
is likely the new solutions are only
4Tony Blair, PM’s response to ID cards petition, 2007;
www.pm.gov.uk/output/Page10987.asp.
5Young, K., Microsoft slams UK ID card database:
Central database could lead to ‘massive identity fraud’.
VNUNet.com 2005; www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/
2144113/microsoft-slams-uk-id-card.