John Lettice continues to warm to his theme on ID cards over at the Register.

"Regular readers
will recall that Home Secretary David Blunkett justifies the ID card scheme on the basis
that most of the cost is money we'd have to spend anyway, because we need to upgrade
our passports to meet US and ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organisation)
standards...

...when David Blunkett tells us that what he is
proposing is necessitated almost entirely by the new passport regime, he is simply (as
we've pointed out before) not telling the truth. ICAO's requirements are for a biometric
machine-readable passport, with the face as the primary biometric, and ICAO is entirely
silent on the subject of vast interlocking National Identity Register databases - if you want
to implement one of these, that's up to you, it's not compulsory. Similarly, the US wants
visitors' passports to be ICAO standard, which is only reasonable, given that the ICAO
standard seems to have been devised more or less in accordance with State Department
wishes. Once you've done that the US will happily (we fear, very happily) collect personal
information on the bearers all by itself - you don't have to do anything, and you never
know, they might even share some of it with you.

The biometric passport system the US intends to use simply seems to be an addition of
the necessary machine readable capabilities to the existing system. Passport applications,
including photograph, will still be accepted via mail, and the picture will then be encoded,
added to the database and put onto the chip that goes in the passport. As you may note,
a picture is in these terms a biometric, while a camera is a biometric reader, which they
are. But don't noise it around, or you'll screw the revenues of an awful lot of snake-oil
salesmen."

It's worth repeating that last sentence: As you may not, a picture is in these terms a biometric, while a camera is a biometric reader, which they are. But don't noise it around, or you'll screw the revenues of an awful lot of snake-oil salesmen.

Keep up the good work, John.