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Keith Breene looks at the backdown over compulsory inclusion in a national medical records computer.(04'45'')
Welcome back. It was a futuristic vision of efficiency or in our value in nightmare depending on your point of view. The government had been planning two huge computer databases, one to store all of our personal identity information, / the other our health records. Well, yesterday a bank diagnostic compulsory inclusion in the medical records computer, and today we learn the ID card system is not quite going to be as it was first in physics. Let's keep being reports.
It may look like just a photo opportunity for journalists, but this was the home office far in what it called the starting gun for the national identity scheme. But as the noise of that dies down, you notice there is a U-turn, too. The governments decided not to go ahead with one central database for the ID card scheme, the so-called clean system as it promised all along. Instead the information will be stored on 3 existing computer systems to save money. The home office will store your biometric data: fingerprints, iris scans and facial recognition information. The Department for work and pensions will store your biographic footprints, the basic facts about you: name, address and date of birth. And the identity and passport service will store details of card used the issue and use of the ID card itself.
What the government is proposing is something far less secure, and actually very hard to see how they are going to manage or control. Then the clean, new database, the National Identity Register that they have been promising to Parliament from the very beginnings of introducing, are the identity card’s bill. What they are proposing is essentially to just designate pieces of data that are held in existing government databases that are mixed in with other bits of government data and saying: that's the register.
The home secretary wasn't giving interviews today, but did issue a statement: doing something sensible is not necessarily a U-turn. We have decided it is lower risk, more efficient and faster to take the infrastructure that already exists, although the data will be drawn from other sources.
Conservatives have said the move shows costs are out of control, and criticized the home secretary for they say: sneaking out the news in a written statement.
Well, I am joined now by Dr. Adycal Whilly from the London School of Economics. He has a precise project into the ID card scheme. So explain to me first what difference does it actually make to you or me, whether or not the government uses a whole new computer database for this built on top for the existing one?
I think one of the most important differences is that the original plans for the brand-new database was going to have the security built-in from the very beginning because having all of your personal details, your biometric, etc, are very important thing that needs to be kept secure. The current plans seem/ to involve using existing database which is a little cheaper to do, but there is no guarantee that the security will be built-in from the very beginning and adding on security to an existing database is often a recipe for more problems that they tried, then they would actually solve.
But even if you built that completely from scratch, is there really any such a thing as a safe and secure database?
No, and that's one of the problems with the whole bases of the design that the government has in, whether it has 3 databases or one database, still putting all of the data in, in one particular location. It was interesting with the proposals for the children's database that the details of the prime minister's children, celebrity's children would not be stored there because, well, there might be a security risk. And yet all of our data is intended to be put onto these now, 3 databases are other than one database.
The other thing that people get concerned about is whether or not the information is going to be held by them is incorrect, because we know there are mistakes already existed in government records. Does do whether proposing today means it's more likely that the mistakes should be transferred into our ID cards?
Well, that's the big, that's really not clear. They talk about using existing government databases, for example, from the Department of Work and Pensions, but Department of Work and Pensions, for example, has more national insurance numbers than there are people in the country, so using existing data was not necessarily a great way forward because the data is not clean, there're, errors was not put in as carefully, and that was why the previous plan said it will build it from scratch with a completely clean database.
When do you think any of us might actually have an ID card, not wallet?
Well, politically at least 2 people will have a card by 2009, cause they talk about cards and 2009. Beyond that, slowly possibly from 2010 if everything goes well, but once again the government is rushing for political timetables rather than thinking through what really needs to be done to build efficient identity measurement for the country.
Ok, really thanks.
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