UK's Privacy Chernobyl (Bruce Schneier)
...[T]he UK's loss of 25 million child benefit records -- including dates of birth, addresses, bank account information, and national insurance numbers -- is turning into a privacy disaster, threatening to derail plans for a national ID card.Read more here.
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Story #2:
Government offered alternative national ID scheme that doesn’t require national database (ComputerWeekly.com)
A biometric security firm is pitching a national identity scheme designed to allay fears caused by the government holding and trying to manage a national identity base.Read more here.
The biometric smartcard system proposed by UK Biometrics is being promoted as the government tries to address the outcry caused by HMRC losing the child benefit records of 25m people.
Americans should learn from the UK about how invasive identity cards can be. The ComputerWeekly story points out that governments want to reduce citizens to the level of a can of soup: "Scannable" at any time:
When required by police or authorities to positively identify themselves, the card holder would slot their smart card into a hand-held biometric scanner, place their fingertip onto the reader and have their identity confirmed.Before jumping off the biometric cliff, lemming-like--maybe we should rethink the importance of the 4th Amendment and our heritage of freedom.
Our freedom has cost an awful lot. I'd hate to toss it away.
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