Biometrics are definitely not the answer to the HMRC debacle.
How many civil servants does it take to post half the nation's data to the darknet? This was the question on many people's lips after the National Audit Office published emails implicating senior officials at HM Revenue and Customs in the release of 25 million confidential records. That HMRC's CD blunder might not have been simply the work of one misguided 23-year-old exposed the first of what will no doubt be many attempted cover-ups of Whitehall's, and Westminster's, cavalier attitude to Britain's privacy.
For technologists, the most chilling development since HMRC's data debacle has been ministers' attempts to use it as an excuse to push for the roll-out of biometrics as a means to "secure" identity. The logic, one imagines, is that spoofing someone's fingerprints is much harder than typing a stolen National Insurance number into a computer. But the facts tell a different story. As biometric experts wrote to the Commons joint committee on human rights on 26 November, the government holds "a fairy-tale view of the capabilities of [biometric] technology".
Biometrics have in fact performed poorly even in low-scale trials in this country, and have a generally poor performance across mass populations. The elderly, the disabled and some ethnic minorities have particular problems being enrolled and, thereafter, being identified using biometric schemes. Biometrics are demonstrably forgeable, and systems have already been shown to allow compromise by spoofing.
Beyond the science, what is important to realise about the biometric myth is that it would not have stopped something like what happened in HMRC from happening again. In each of the mega-databases that have become synonymous with the rule of new Labour - the children's database ContactPoint, the National DNA database and the NHS data spine - the government has already discounted the possibility of insider compromise of the type witnessed at HMRC in system design.
There is no reason why the National Identity Register will be designed any differently, and once the NIR has been breached, the government cannot issue you with new fingers and eyes. Such a breach would make Alistair Darling's House of Commons announcement last month look like the stuff of a good news day.
So how do you design a system that is safe from insider breach? Well, if you want to aggregate data about the population centrally, then the short answer is, "You don't." As Professor Ross Anderson, the UK's leading computer security expert, explained on BBC2's Newsnight: "If you take 50 million medical records and make them available to 300,000 people there's no way you can create procedures that will protect that. It's too valuable an asset to which too many people have access."
As William Heath at the Ideal Government blog put it - think how valuable one complete bank record is to identity fraudsters on the black market (between £15 and £200), and now multiply that by 50 million. The temptation to pilfer the data is irresistible.
The government has ignored this expert and fairly simple advice for years. Why? Because it doesn't fit in with its plans. HMRC is a long-awaited wake-up call.
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