The ID card draft bill is proposing to create quite a few new offenses, like disobeying an order from the Secretary of State. I hope one of the draftsmen have put that in as a joke to test how well this thing is going to get scrutinised? Think of it - in a democracy there could actually be an offense of refusing to follow the orders of a public servant. It also includes little incentives like a £2500 fine every time someone fails to turn up for an appointment for a biometrics scan (Section 6(4)). Jailtime for having someone else's card in your possession (don't offer to look after a friend's belongings whilst they respond to the call of nature then). All this draconian stuff is just an initial extreme pitch, so that Mr Blunkett can be seen to be making "reasonable concessions" when the actual law gets passed. Simon Davies of Privacy International is right - this whole shambles is a "disgrace to democracy."

A draft bill for a national ID card is online. There are lots of stories round about the ID card in the UK press today. Ministers are peddling the usual propaganda in favour and by and large journalists are lapping it up unquestioningly. Regarding the test progamme with ten thousand volunteers I have mixed feelings. I'm irritated with it because it's a waste of money and primarily a PR exercise. But at the same time I think it's a good idea because proponents and ordinary people, to whom the idea is intuitively and superficially attractive, will finally get to see how bad this 'state of the art', 'impossible to fool' biometric technology is in reality. The Australians did an ID card trial in the 90s and quietly abandoned the notion, having discovered how many problems it caused. Let's hope the UK version goes the same way

On the day that the UK government launch their controversial pilot national ID card scheme with ten thousand volunteers, Privacy International have released an interim report on a study of the connection between ID cards and preventing terrorism. Not surprisingly, "Mistaken Identity; Exploring the Relationship Between National Identity Cards & the Prevention of Terrorism" concludes that ID cards do not help to prevent terrorism.

NYT: Pentagon Ban on Pictures of Dead Troops Is Broken

EUpolitix has a succinct report on MEPs taking on the Commission and the US over the deal on the transfer of airline passenger data.

Brad Templeton, chairman of the EFF, amongst other things, has produced a thoughtful analysis of the 'GMail Saga'.

The Bush administration is apparently proposing to give ally countries another 2 years to devop biometric passports. Secretary of State Colin Powell says

"Rushing a solution to meet the current deadline virtually guarantees that we will have systems that are not operable... Such a result may undercut international acceptance of this new technology as well as compound rather than ease our overall challenge."

The European Commission have issued a Communication on the Management of
Copyright and Related Rights. In it they eulogise digital rights management (DRM) as the solution to all ills of the copyright variety, most specifically this time royalty collection agencies problems. What is it about biometric national ID cards, DRM, RFIDs, electronic voting machines, computers, technology in general that make them superficially attractive solutions to everything? The right technology appropriately deployed can be a terrific boon but why can't people understand that it is not usually a particularly good idea to start with a [technological] 'solution' and then go looking for a problem, just so you can use the 'solution'?

A Barcelona night club is allegedly implanting RFID chips in VIP customers so they don't need to worry about carrying a wallet about. No comment.

Despite the pending lawsuit against ClearPlay and others by the Directors Guild of America and the movie studios, it appears as though Walmart is going to be selling DVD players with ClearPlay filters built in. I wonder what the demand will be like and how that will affect the dynamics of the court case?

The United States Institute of Peace, which I admit I'd never prviously heard of, have issued a paper saying terrorists use the Internet too but for more routine activities than the hyped-up cyberterrorism feedstuff of the mainstream media. Terrorist organisations are said to have three major audiences:
Current and potential supporters
International public opinion
Enemy publics (i.e. citizens of states they are fighting)
and use the Net in 8 different (sometimes overlapping) ways:
Psychological warfare
Publicity and propaganda
Data mining
Fundraising
Recruitment and mobilisation
Networking
Sharing information
Planning and coordination

The report does imply that steganography is in widespread use by terrorist organisations but there is no direct evidence offered to that effect. The mainstream media has periodically salivated at the notion of religeous fundamentalist terrorists hiding messages in online porn but no evidence to that effect has been forthcoming. Being only 12 pages long the paper is just an overview I assume but it might be interesting to hear more details of the study.

Wonderful Ed Helms skit at Comedy Central about e-voting. Not to be missed. This kind of comedy does more to communicate the problems with electronic voting than all the ranting that I do on the subject.

Jay Rosen has a thoughtful analysis of the recent furore over inappropriate comments by a Democrat-supporting blogger. Another example of the scandalmongering of mainstream politics and media out-manoeuvering the democratising potential of the net.

The Berkman Center at Harvard have done an interesting study on Apple's iTunes service focussing on

Interaction between Copyright and Contract Law
Digital Rights Management
Digital First Sale Doctrine
Fair Use Doctrine

Worth a look.

There are two lovely essays in Bruce Schneier's latest Crypto-Gram, one on national identity cards and the second on the economic incentives to rig electronic voting machines. On national ID cards:

"But my primary objection isn't the totalitarian potential of national
IDs, nor the likelihood that they'll create a whole immense new class
of social and economic dislocations. Nor is it the opportunities they
will create for colossal boondoggles by government contractors. My
objection to the national ID card, at least for the purposes of this
essay, is much simpler.

It won't work. It won't make us more secure.

In fact, everything I've learned about security over the last 20 years
tells me that once it is put in place, a national ID card program will
actually make us less secure.

My argument may not be obvious, but it's not hard to follow,
either. It centers around the notion that security must be evaluated
not based on how it works, but on how it fails.

It doesn't really matter how well an ID card works when used by the
hundreds of millions of honest people that would carry it. What
matters is how the system might fail when used by someone intent on
subverting that system: how it fails naturally, how it can be made to
fail, and how failures might be exploited.

The first problem is the card itself. No matter how unforgeable we
make it, it will be forged. And even worse, people will get legitimate
cards in fraudulent names...

... the main problem with any ID system is that it requires the
existence of a database. In this case it would have to be an immense
database of private and sensitive information on every American -- one
widely and instantaneously accessible from airline check-in stations,
police cars, schools, and so on.

The security risks are enormous. Such a database would be a kludge of
existing databases; databases that are incompatible, full of erroneous
data, and unreliable. As computer scientists, we do not know how to
keep a database of this magnitude secure, whether from outside hackers
or the thousands of insiders authorized to access it.

And when the inevitable worms, viruses, or random failures happen and
the database goes down, what then? Is America supposed to shut down
until it's restored?

Proponents of national ID cards want us to assume all these problems,
and the tens of billions of dollars such a system would cost -- for
what? For the promise of being able to identify someone?"

Tim O'Reilly doesn't understand all the fuss about Google's Gmail and privacy.

Apparently the EU parliament's civil liberties committee has decided to delay the 'ill considered' proposal on biometric passports until the autumn.

Statewatch is also reporting on this "Commission’s EU biometric passport proposal exceeds the EC’s powers
- no powers conferred upon the EC by the EC Treaty, taken separately or together, confer upon the EC the power to adopt the proposed Regulation"

At least one online pundit agrees with me about media having a short attention span. This one sees a possible danger for bloggers and provides an interesting perspective on the hounding of a Democratic party activist blogger, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, who writes the Daily Kos, for posting an inappropriate/tasteless comment on his blog.

Largely unnoticed about a month ago the EU launched PRIME, a four year project to

"Develop solutions to empower individuals to control their private sphere and manage their identities; "

and

"Trigger persuasive deployment of privacy-enhancing identity management solutions. "

-according to the website. Theoretically the EU Commission has been pushing PETs (privacy enhancing technologies) for some time and one of the principles is to minimise the amount of personal data collected. There are two fundamental problems:

1. The Blair/Blunkett and by extension the EU Council of Ministers simple solution to terrorism - collect as much personal data about the entire population of the world as possible, in the hope that you can kid people into believing you're actually tackling terrorism;

And

2. Though we all say, when asked, that we are concerned about our personal privacy, we do very little actively to protect it e.g. how many people think about the privacy implications of their supermarket store cards.

Ah well, at least somebody is working on it.

David Blunkett and Tony Blair are continuing to exploit the Madrid bombings unconscionably, by pushing forward the introduction of biometric national ID cards by 2008, as their "we must do something" response.

This capitalising on others' tragedy is politics at its lowest.

They are prepared to spend billions of pounds on a system which won't work and will, in the process undermine fundamental freedoms in the UK that people have fought and died for, just to extract some transcient and superficial "tough on terrorism" headlines from a media with a short attention span.

If Mr Blunkett does get to be prime minister off the back of this then we will deserve what we get, for letting him get away with propering from this poisonous snake oil he is currently selling. Liberty, price and eternal vigilance come to mind on the one hand and not just the media but a short attention span society and general apathy on the other. It's big, it costs a fortune and hey it involves new technology, so most of us will buy it. Especially because the real solutions, if there are any, are long term and too hard for us to deal with.