WRITTEN ON May 16th, 2005 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Identity

Over at the Identity Blog, crucible of the laws of identity, Kim Cameron reports on the UK identity card debate as it heats up again.

Several of us who are involved with identity issues have commented on the situation from a technlogical point of view: governments would be well advised to look at advanced technologies through which they can achieve their governmental objectives while better protecting privacy and lowering the risk of an identity catastrophy.

His verdict on the LSE interim report was -

It is a breakthrough piece of work in exploring, in a holistic and all-sided way, the relation between social issues and technologies of identity. I suspect that government technology leaders and policy makers around the globe will pay increasingly more attention to the thinking it represents – if they want to avoid the missteps against which it is a reaction.

This is a wonderful presentation of various ideas which have animated these pages for some months, and which lie behind our fourth law. The discussion of how – technically speaking – unnecessary data centralization leads to increased and unmotivated risk also resonates deeply.

Ignoring the laws of identity will result, he warns, in unintended consequences just as surely as if civil engineers ignored the laws of gravity.