George Kerevan: ID cards will help government to spy on all of us

Published on Wednesday 6 May 2009 21:51

THE government's sinister scheme to make us all buy expensive identity cards just got a lot more sinister. The soon-to-be reshuffled Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, has announced she is pressing on with a trial of "biometric" ID cards, to be held in Manchester.

This comes barely a week after the man who first dreamt up the ID card project, former home secretary David Blunkett, admitted he'd gone off the idea and we should use passports instead.

Ms Smith is desperately trying to save her career by appearing to be "tough". There's also the little matter of fending off the British National Party challenge in the English local elections on 6 June. The Home Secretary claims that ID cards will help to combat illegal immigration, terrorism and identity theft. If true, the 60 each of us will have to fork out for our ID card would be a fair price to pay for increased personal security. Unfortunately, she's talking nonsense.

The pilot scheme in Manchester will involve folk going to their local Boots (or Post Office, should any survive Lord Mandelson) and having their biometric data – photo and fingerprints – recorded. Price: 30. Boots will then make the plastic ID card with the data encrypted. That's another 30. Your personal data will then be stored on a giant government computer for future reference.

The theory is that if the police stop an illegal immigrant, they will know instantly because the poor fellow won't be able to produce his ID card with a matching record on the national database. Ditto for terrorists trying to get into Britain under an assumed name. Anyone wanting to use your identity for criminal purposes will not be able to prove they are you, because they won't have the magic piece of plastic with your biometric details.

Yet all this assumes that some smooth-talking gent with a Balkan accent, and a few thousand quid in used notes, does not bribe the poorly paid girl at the local chemist to clone your ID card. Getting your ID card from the local police station is one thing. But getting it from Boots is a positive invitation to organised crime to provide fake or duplicate ID cards on an industrial scale to every illegal immigrant, terrorist, people-trafficker and con artist on the planet.

So why is the government going to all this trouble? Answer: the ID card scheme has little to do with protecting you from al-Qaeda or poor economic migrants from Africa. And if it wants to stop people-trafficking it should just look up the ads for massage parlours and raid them. Rather, the ID project is part of this government's relentless attempts to snoop on its citizens – born of a belief that it alone knows what is good for us.

Ms Smith calls her trial run for ID cards in Manchester a "pilot". That would suggest to ordinary mortals that if the good folk of Manchester prove reticent about forking out sixty quid for a useless bit of plastic, the plan for ID cards might be scrapped. Not a bit of it. Very quietly last month, the Home Office awarded the contracts to set up the entire ID card system for the whole of the UK. Manchester is not a trial, it is a propaganda exercise to soften us up for what is going to happen anyway.

At the heart of the web is the Identity and Passport Service (IPS), created in 2006 to oversee the introduction of ID cards and to register the details of the civil population. In 2008, IPS awarded a four-year contract to Thales, the main French defence provider, to design and build the UK National Identity Register, the computer system that will manage our files.

At the start of April, a 265 million contract was awarded to IBM, the US computer giant, to build and operate the database that will store all fingerprints and facial images taken for passports and visa applications. This will be run by the UK Border Agency but feed into the IPS National Identity Register, as will your biographical and other details which are currently stored on the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) database.

A third contract, worth 385 million, has been awarded to a company called CSC. Among other things, CSC will design and install the system to allow private companies (such as banks) to check your identity via the IPS National Identity Register.

Headquartered in Church Falls, Virginia, CSC bills itself as a leading global IT company. That hardly does CSC credit. It is working for the US National Security Agency, America's equivalent of our GCHQ electronic surveillance chaps, on something called Project Groundbreaker. This is described in the US press as giving the NSA "more supercomputing power than perhaps any organisation in the world".

CSC also does work for our NHS. Surprisingly, while the company was being hired by IPS and the Home Office, the NHS issued an ultimatum to CSC to deliver on its contract to build a new electronic health records system. It was given until November or have its contract terminated.

Ms Smith is also at work eavesdropping on our e-mails. The Home Office now requires Internet Service Providers to keep records of our e-mail and web traffic. Last week the Home Secretary obligingly announced she was abandoning plans to store this information on a "central database". Instead it will stay with the internet providers until the security services have just cause to look up someone's e-mails.

This was followed by a terse statement from GCHQ that it has no plans to "centrally monitor" every citizen's internet usage despite spending 1 billion under the so-called Interception Modernisation Programme. What did they spend the money on?

I hope you noticed the carefully misleading references to "centralised" and "central". More likely GCHQ is using an advanced technology called deep packet inspection, involving thousands of black boxes installed inside communications providers' networks across the UK, rather than storing data under one roof.

Within 200 yards of the house in which George Orwell died in 1950 there are now 32 CCTV cameras. Big Brother is here.