WRITTEN ON October 19th, 2005 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Uncategorized

There may be a flurry more UK identity activity (I know we’re meant to be concentrating on Europe). There’s an IAAC identity symposium tomorrow I’m speaking at. The sterling Stefan Brands points us to this piece by Niels Bjergstrom, editor of the Information Security Bulletin. Bjergstrom agrees with the LSE analysis and finds the Home Office plans “particularly unimaginative”.

These goals seem to be missing: ‘enabling and facilitating a society based on e-commerce’, ‘increasing individual freedom by enhancing anonymity and privacy’, ‘enabling irrefutable authentication of humans to machines’ and ‘providing individuals with transactional security’. These are some of the positive drivers of an eID system, some of the drivers that will actually be able to underpin the acceptance by the public and justify the huge expenses initially associated with establishing and not least running an eID system.

He finds it – technical issues aside – an obnoxious piece of legislation that introduces important components of a totalitarian state by stealth..

Technically, it builds on a range of false assumptions, including the pie-in-the-sky idea that technologies to solve these issues exist and can be deployed. This is not the type of project you can simply give to a vendor or two and expect them to be able to deliver. More than anything I can recall ever seeing, this project requires a top-down architectural design process. It is not a vendor-problem that you can throw existing components at. This problem is so complex that it requires close co-operation between scientists, government and vendors. It will take a small extremely competent work group at least a year to identify possible solutions and consequences.

Unfortunately the current bill is so poorly drafted that it can’t form the basis for discussion and amendment – back to square one. Normally that would make me complain bitterly over waste of my tax money but in this case there are only a handful of people in the world competent to do it right. Those are the individuals the UK government needs to find.