Britain's Eye Scanning Plan

[Get Boldened]

I'm afraid Great Britain might be the testing grounds for future Big Brother implementations. I heard they have video cameras on every street. And now they're taking the next step:

(Don't be fooled by the supposed "experts and officials reports are casting doubts." Also, take note -- this article is from BBC.)

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Questions over eye scan plan

By Mark Ward
BBC News Online technology correspondent

Experts and official reports are casting doubt on plans to use iris scanning to improve security at national borders.

This week UK Home Secretary David Blunkett reportedly won the backing of his G8 counterparts to rapidly develop an iris-based biometric system as an extra check on the identity of international travellers.

But technical reports in the UK and US have expressed doubts about whether biometrics will be able to do what ministers hope they can.

Experts have also voiced reservations about large scale use of iris scanning which has yet to be tested on significant numbers of people.

 
This could be your passport in the future

Markus Kuhn, a lecturer in computer security at the University of Cambridge computer lab, said biometrics were gaining popularity because they were a relatively reliable way to verify someone's identity.

"There's a great amount of information in the iris that makes it possible to reduce the false accept/reject ratios to less than one in a million," he said.

"Biometrics are useful as confirmation of your claimed identity."

Certainly, said Mr Kuhn, biometrics were better at verifying identities than humans were when asked to match unfamiliar faces with small photographs in passports and other identity documents.

However, he added, their usefulness broke down when used to pick out wanted individuals, such as suspected terrorists, from the mass of people passing through a checkpoint.

With huge databases of biometric records it was likely that many people would be misidentified as being wanted or missed altogether, he said.

In February 2002 the US Department of Defence issued a report that found wide discrepancies between manufacturers' claims of successful biometric identification rates and those seen in the field.

Failed tests

The report found that iris recognition did better than most but one manufacturer's claim of a 0.5% false identification rate ballooned to 6% during the DOD tests.

With 13 million people currently on the FBI's watch list, any large scale biometric system could mean millions of people being detained when crossing borders.


Some biometrics are well established

Other studies of biometrics have also expressed doubts that the technology could be reliably used on a large scale.

A report issued by the US General Accounting Office in November 2002 said that the largest iris scanning system currently in use had only 30,000 records.

By contrast any system used to verify the identities of people travelling to and from the US, for example, would have to contain up to 240 million records. By comparison up to 90 million people travel through the UK every year.

The GAO warned that it was "unknown" how a system with many millions of records would perform.

It noted that any biometric system would do little to stem the numbers of illegal immigrants because most of them did not enter the US through recognised ports, and avoided all identity checks.

A report from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology issued last year said that, so far, not enough records yet existed for it to work out if the iris was a good enough guarantor of identity.

Technical difficulties

Professor Mike Fairhurst, a computer vision and biometrics expert from the Department of Electronics at the University of Kent, said getting large numbers of people to successfully use a biometric system could prove problematic.

"One of the problems is interaction between individuals and the system doing the checking," he said.

Tests of biometric systems by the UK's Communication Electronics Security Group have shown that people can take up to ten times as long to get through them than the existing passport checks.

"People have a natural resistance to different types of biometric measures," he said, "some cultures are not happy about touching surfaces touched by others and some people do not like lights being shone in their eyes."

China has already ruled out using iris scanning as an additional check for its new identity card because of public fears about the damage such scanning could do.

What would also have to be tightened up, said Professor Fairhurst, was the whole process of issuing travel documents or identity papers so only genuine people were enrolled.

He also said that the international standards for what constitutes a valid identity check by iris scanning had not yet been established.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3003571.stm

[Get Boldened]

When I looked for more official articles online, I found out that their parliament is trying to pass a bill for biometric cards.

In the same month that Great Britain wanted to have iris scans for anyone going from and to their airport, they also want to pass biometric cards.

I guess I would be okay with a card that might store all of credit, fingerprint, medical history, insurance information, etc. It could come in handy. When enough people are robbed, the government will suggest "biometric implants" that will never leave you. They'll point out how effective it prevented terrorism. No cars almost blew up. The airport was no longer rammed into.

Anyways, this is from Wired News:

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U.K. ID Card Battle Heats Up
07.01.05 | 10:36 AM

Britain's House of Commons this week moved forward with plans to create a new national ID card, but a sharp reversal in support for the controversial measure signals a rocky road ahead.

British lawmakers voted in favor of the bill on Tuesday by an unexpectedly thin margin of 314-283. At the last minute, some members of Prime Minister Tony Blair's Labor Party revolted against the cards, which would carry fingerprints and iris scans of cardholders and be backed by a national database containing extensive personal information.

The bill still has to pass a number of stages and final votes, but the preliminary vote, along with a report released last week by the London School of Economics showing that the plan would cost two to three times what the government promised, makes some activists hopeful that the plan might be altered drastically or abandoned altogether.

"This was the first test of Tony Blair's new government," said Gus Hosein, a senior fellow at Privacy International, a civil liberties advocacy group, as well as a fellow in the Department of Information Systems at the London School of Economics. "It was critical that they win this and they went hard. And instead the majority (lead) was halved. Clearly the government is going to have to start listening (to criticism) where it wasn't before."

A Home Office spokeswoman said it's too early to comment on the bill's future success.

"We won't speculate on the passage of a bill through parliament," she said. "It still has an awful lot of readings to go through. Anything can happen to it."

The bill still has to go to committee, where it likely will be amended, before a final reading and vote in the House of Commons as well as the House of Lords, the higher chamber of parliament. But local papers referred to the Labor Party defection as "the first real test" of Blair's new electoral mandate after his party's re-election on May 5th. If the bill is made law, it will be the first time Britain has had national ID cards since just after World War II, when the government abolished them.

The bill, introduced to combat terrorism, illegal immigration and fraud, proposes an ambitious and complex plan that, if approved, could be a model for other countries.

Under the current proposal, registration for the cards would initially be voluntary, occurring as people renewed their passports, but it could ultimately be made compulsory. Residents would not have to carry the card at all times, but they would have to provide more than 50 categories of information to be stored in a database, including biometric information, current address and a history of addresses where the cardholder has lived. Cardholders would also have to notify authorities any time they changed addresses.

Government agencies and private businesses, such as banks, would be able to access the database to verify the identity of cardholders. The database would record anyone who retrieved a cardholder's record, which privacy advocates say would effectively provide an audit trail of places the cardholder visited.

Plans for a national ID card have been in the works in Great Britain for more than a decade, with various rationales offered. After the Sept. 11 attacks, the card was proffered as a plan to catch terrorists. The government has since said the cards would prevent identity theft as well as work and national-benefits fraud. The government has also tried to link the need for a card to new international requirements for biometric passports, saying that Britain was simply trying to keep pace with international demands for more secure documents.

Critics, such as Privacy International activists, say that national-benefits fraud and identity theft are minor problems in Britain and could be addressed by other means, some of which are already in place. They also charge that the proposed system could actually lead to a rise in fraud since a criminal would have to counterfeit only a single document or access a single database to obtain the personal information of millions of people.

As for preventing terrorism, they point out that Spain's national ID card didn't prevent the Madrid train bombings from occurring, nor did official documents prevent the Sept. 11 terrorists from boarding planes, since they possessed legitimate ID documents. A national ID card also won't protect Britons from the millions of visitors to Great Britain each year who won't have a card.

Polls show that most Britons opposed to the card do so on economic grounds, rather than civil liberties grounds. They also don't trust the government to administer it with competence.

The government said the plan would cost about ₤5.8 billion ($10.5 billion) over 10 years, or about ₤93 per card. Costs for underwriting the plan would fall to consumers who would have to pay to register for a card. That cost has yet to be determined, but cardholders would also be charged to renew or replace lost or stolen documents and could face penalties for not registering and for not immediately reporting stolen or damaged cards.

The authors of the London School of Economics report (PDF), however, charged the government with underestimating the cost of registering applicants, verifying their identity, purchasing biometric readers and training personnel to use the equipment. They placed the cost between ₤10.6 billion and ₤19.2 billion, or a minimum of ₤170 per card -- a figure that Britain's immigration minister, Tony McNulty, called "complete and utter nonsense."

Home Secretary Charles Clarke did make some concessions during Tuesday's debate, suggesting the government would put a cap on the cost of the cards and re-examine the amount of data collected on residents, but he remained firm on other matters.

In addition to costs, the LSE report also found fault in the biometric plan, saying the technology was unproven and untested for such a large-scale project.

A system of such "complexity and important will be technologically precarious and could itself become a target for attacks by terrorists or others," the report said.

The authors acknowledged that an ID card could produce some benefits, but proposed an alternative, less-expensive biometric plan that would be easier to implement while containing privacy protections that would give residents more control over their data. The alternative plan was drawn up by a team of academics, in consultation with more than 100 experts, including those from the computer security field.

Hosein and privacy activists say that parliament should consider a range of possible plans before it chooses one that Britons will have to live with for a long time.

http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2005/07/68070