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.