Documents leaked to the UK Conservative party suggest that the roll out national ID cards for every citizen may have been delayed to beyond 2012 for UK residents.
The controversial ID card scheme which would see 50 or more points of data about an individual held on both a card and a national database has been heavily criticised due to the British governments apparent inability to protect personal data.
Both the Conservative party and the Liberal Democrat party oppose Labour’s ID card scheme on the up to £19.2 billion cost, the risks to civil liberties and the significant increase in risk of wholesale identity theft. The new Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg has advocated civil disobedience should the scheme be rolled out.
Often Labour politicians will tell you how ID Cards are needed to ‘prevent id theft’. The opposite is unfortunately true. The only way to be sure that a database will never be compromised is to disconnect it from all other networks. The NIR (National ID Register) would be connected to a myriad of other networks and it only needs to be compromised once for all of the data to be invalidated, including your personal identity. Another risk is that such credence would be put in this card for verifying identity that criminals who had stolen data either from cards or the NIR would find identity fraud exceptionally easy.
In 2008 it now seems true to say that the only way to be sure a database will be compromised is to place it under government control.
Tags: conservatives, labour, lib dems, national id cards, nir
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