Any time to do the transcription? Also IEEE Spectrum.
In a press conference on 27 June 2005, Blair noted that this year the UK and other countries will begin issuing passports with chips containing biometric data, as recommended by the International Civil Aviation Organization. The introduction of biometric passports, he said, "makes identity cards an idea whose time has come."
Not everyone agrees. That same day, the prestigious London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) released a 300-page report on the project. More than 100 industry and academic experts from all over the world contributed to the study, available at [link|http://is.lse.ac.uk/idcard|http://is.lse.ac.uk/idcard] .
"We're trying to say this is not the only way to do an identity card scheme," says Edgar A. Whitley, a researcher at LSE and one of the coordinators of the report.
The study says that ID cards could in principle have some benefits to citizens, but it criticizes the current proposal for lacking well-defined goals; for example, the government never clearly explained what impact ID cards would have on identity theft and terrorism. Moreover, the report says, the ID cards' proponents hugely underestimated the project's cost. The government projection is \ufffd584 million per year, or about \ufffd5.8 billion for the expected 10-year rollout. But the LSE study estimated the expenditures at \ufffd10.6 billion to \ufffd19.2 billion.
The LSE researchers also concluded that the project's deepest flaws are of a technical nature. "The controversy, challenges, and threats arising from the Government's identity proposals," they wrote, "are largely due to the technological design itself."
First, there is the idea of a single central database, which they note could become a critical choke point if it suffers failures and denial-of-service attacks. And then there is the use of biometric systems, whose accuracy levels may not be adequate to handle such a large number of individuals, resulting in identification errors.
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Cheers,
Scott.