UK Can't Read Its Own ID Cards 205
An anonymous reader writes "Despite the introduction of ID cards last November, it has emerged that Britain has no readers that are able to read the cards' microchips, which contain the person's fingerprints and other biometric information. With cops and border guards unable to use the cards to check a person's identity, critics are calling the £4.7bn scheme 'farcical' and a 'waste of time.'"
No readers? No surprise! (Score:5, Insightful)
While I won't go as far as being paranoid about "it was always the governments plan and they just want the data on everyone", it doesn't surprise me that our government isn't even capable of introducing both halves of an ID scheme at the same time.
Until they fix it they've basically just introduced an over-expensive photo ID. Well done, Labour!
Re:No readers? No surprise! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm even more cynical than that. While the government will probably get some data on people, judging from other such projects that have gone before it will be extremely poorly coordinated and it will be a far bigger security risk than anything else because they won't be able to keep a lid on the data. It just strikes me that a lot of companies have got cosy with the government, promising them things that are almost certainly not going to work in order to fleece them of billions of pounds. Billions of borrowed pounds in the current climate, that is.
Re:No readers? No surprise! (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm more convinced by "it was always the government's plan and they just wanted to dole out juicy contracts to the private sector."
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you stopped your sentence too soon, should finish with "for kickbacks, contributions and favors"
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On two seperate occaisions I've seen someone trying to use national ID cards as proof of age when buying alcohol. Both times they were refused because the staff didn't recognise the card.
The whole thing is a total waste of time and (our) money, all with the goal of filling a void that does not exist!
privacy (Score:5, Funny)
Re:privacy (Score:5, Funny)
except everybody BUT the gov't can read them...
it's funny, but sad-funny.
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Re:privacy (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:privacy (Score:4, Funny)
It's like "plug and play" - that worked 50% too. As in, "plug" always worked, it was just the "play" bit that had problems...
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Look at Belgium (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Look at Belgium (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Look at Belgium (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Look at Belgium (Score:5, Funny)
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Where you have to buy two, to get one, which you don't actually get. :-D
Re:Look at Belgium (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Look at Belgium (Score:5, Insightful)
*puts mayonnaise on his fries*
Joking aside, it seems like the Belgians have done this right: You need a code to access the information from the passport, similar to your bank/creditcard. Not perfect, but at least it isn't readable by everyone.
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No, not everyone, just the people with the desire to get the code... which won't be hard.
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Here in america we just slap in an unencoded RFID chip readable by anyone driving by. They tell us this makes us safer and more secure.
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*puts mayonnaise on his fries*
Joking about what? Sounds like you didn't use good mayonnaise.
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Stop making fun at Belgium and follow in their food steps.
How will eating lots of mussels help?
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The police have enough readers now, so it's not necessary anymore.
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Yeah, I'm craving Belgian Waffles now!
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So, eat 'frites' then?
Happily -- but mayo on them?
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Although I can't imagine how drunk they must have been to invent 'tartarsauce' for on their fries...
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So do the Brits, they like it so much they named a square in their capital to it. Piccalilly Circus is one of the most visited tourist spots in London!
Re:Look at Belgium (Score:5, Funny)
Where exactly are these cards? (Score:3, Informative)
The cards dont exist yet and wont until 2011 or 2012.
Still, dont let truth get in the way of a good rant.
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Its partly true, part headline grabbing. Some foreigners have been issued with cards, more as a trial than anything else, and readers outside this trial havn't been bought yet.
Not much of a story really.
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Maybe thats the plan - just say "sorry, just wait over there until we can read your card. You should be allowed into the UK sometime soon".
Re:Where exactly are these cards? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Where exactly are these cards? (Score:5, Informative)
HRH Queen Elizabeth the Second?! (Score:5, Informative)
Her Royal Highness? Did Her Majesty abdicate?
Re:HRH Queen Elizabeth the Second?! (Score:5, Funny)
Sad (Score:2)
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Uh, Limey was slang for British sailors. There's no special "Englishness" about it.
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Re:Where exactly are these cards? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, the first ID cards were issued last year (2008).
Dad's Army (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Offtopic? (Score:5, Informative)
It is offtopic. "Dad's Army" was at best tangentially related to the government.
What you want is "Yes, Minister". Down the corridor, third on the left.
/oblig "fixed that for you" (Score:5, Funny)
I'm sorry, this is abuse. You want "Yes, Minister". Down the corridor, third on the left.
Stupid git.
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In fairness the mod was just overly suspicious of the man who rang the doorbell claiming to be a burglar.
Identity crisis (Score:4, Interesting)
Right now most bookmakers will give you very good odds on the current government actually being in power by the end of 2010. Since the other lot are supposedly going to get rid of the scheme, and there's been no large-scale rollout of the cards to the general population, it probably doesn't make a lot of sense to buy all the readers just now. Not that 'sense' really comes into this, of course.
You don't say. (Score:5, Funny)
Britain has no readers that are able to the cards' microchip
Hey, we all know how hard it can be to a card's microchip.
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Re:You don't say. (Score:5, Funny)
I accidentally the card's microchip, is this bad? :(
not if you didn't the chip on purpose, then you only have to money, not to jail.
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I was going to explain this meme to people but someone seems to have accidentally the whole of encyclopediadramatica.org
Google cache tiem:
http://74.125.77.132/search?q=cache:w7oVzuVvJRYJ:encyclopediadramatica.com/I_accidentally_X+accidentally+encyclopediadramatica&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=uk&client=firefox-a [74.125.77.132]
Re:You don't say. (Score:5, Funny)
That sentence no verb!! You have no idea how much that me. >:(
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Well, if you would pull your smurfing smurf out of your smurf, you would smurf it perfectly fine.
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Help! I accidentally microchip!
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At least it seems no-one has been able to clone these cards. That can not be said from smart passports issued in other [slashdot.org] countries...
Oh wait. It seems the UK government is the only one that can not read their own passports. These guys [slashdot.org] did not have that problem, and apparently had their hands on more equipment that could also read the UK passports.
Kids these days (Score:2, Informative)
Enough about it. Get off my lawn.
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Can't you see the irony here?
The government does something no one wants, acting as if it knows best, then fucks the implementation up in ways few thought about making it worthless for the time being. It's like the drunk who swears he is able to drive, refuses to give up his keys, then gets into an accident before he gets out of the parking spot.
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A comment recommending "Write-only memory" modded informative?!
I take it nobody read your comment properly or followed the link from it, then.
t Britain has no readers that are able... (Score:3, Funny)
Britain has no readers that are able to the cards' microchip,
No problem, can't we just take them round to the Russian embassy? I'm sure that they are quite capable of reading all our microchips.
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can't we just take them round to the Russian embassy?
The embassy of USA would be more appropriate - that's where all this crap is coming from.
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Trotsky and Marx are where all this crap is coming from.
I agree that all sorts of nasty authoritarian ideas have come out of the US in the last decade, but there is a reason why the UK government thinks that ID cards and the National Identity Register are a really fantastically great idea. It has nothing to do with terrorists or US foreign policy, and everything to do with the revolutionary "heroes" that our Government worshipped when they were younger, people who saw nothing wrong with abolishing freedom i
"in response to an FoI request"?!? (Score:2)
Re:"in response to an FoI request"?!? (Score:5, Informative)
About 9 years ago.
Re:"in response to an FoI request"?!? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:"in response to an FoI request"?!? (Score:5, Informative)
Exceptions include information other that that covered by the Official Secrets Act.
There are also a whole lot of exemptions, such as data that is commercially sensitive, related to criminal investigations or where disclosure would contravene the Data Protection Act etc. When a request is refused the reason for the exemption must be given to the requester.
In practise the Act has meant a lot of information is now public where it wouldn't have been before.
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There's also an exemption that basically covers "We can't be bothered", to an extent. The TVLA/BBC loves that one.
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The Act is really good, and you can tell that because it is annoying [bbc.co.uk] the fuck [guardian.co.uk] out of the present government.
Re:"in response to an FoI request"?!? (Score:5, Funny)
About 9 years ago.
It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of The Leopard.
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the uk has a FOIA? srsly, when did this happen?
I can't disclose that. It's a state secret.
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It was never about reading the cards at the border (Score:5, Interesting)
It was about biometric databases, computer-recognizable photographs and humongous amounts of fingerprints.
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...and cowing the populace into accepting such a relationship with the State as being normal. First, get the soft targets: the foreigners. Then start slicing away at the rest of us, one soft target at a time.
Our rulers - by which I of course mean the half dozen media moguls that control the teeming masses - will be the last to have to submit to carrying and showing Ze Papers. Up until then, they'll be running this as a "Ho ho, how British!" mirth piece, rather than leading the revolution.
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The media moguls are no more our rulers today than when Hearst more or less invented the modern concept of the media serving the government (but it has been always thus, back to the criers of Rome, wtfever they were actually called, and presumably then some) but they may be said to be in some measure of control.
The media outlets are instructed as to what they may or may not air, and I am not talking about the thin veneer of respectability constructed through mock moral outrage and the efforts of the FCC.
Be careful (Score:5, Interesting)
It's easy, and quite tempting, to react to this news with patronizing contempt - and think, "Well, at least we're fairly safe - such a bunch of bunglers couldn't do any real harm".
Unfortunately, a look back at history reveals that appalling inefficiency and incompetence have usually gone hand-in-hand with authoritarian government. But whereas we can still laugh about it, the time may come when doing so is distinctly unwise. People made fun of Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini throughout their careers, and some got away with it. Others were arrested, beaten up, imprisoned, tortured, shot, or hanged with piano wire.
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Why is this news? (Score:4, Insightful)
They've only just started finalising and using these cards. Why is it surprising that there are no readers around?
It's akin to saying that Blu-Ray or DVDs were a waste of time because initially there were no players for them - Hello, you need to wait for people to catch up, especially if the equipment is expensive (and although they're not consumer products, the same rules apply - places need to wait for grants or work out their budgets before buying or using said machines).
Besides, practically no-one has these cards yet - and I doubt anyone will for a while, especially since they cost cash to get (It was ~£50 last I heard)
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Well, at least with BluRay and DVD, there were people who actually wanted them. Yes, really, these people did exist.
Now show me one border patrol person that is eager to get yet another thingamajig into their hands that means more work for the same pay?
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It's a little different in this case for a number of reasons.
This system was paid for by the taxpayer and sold to the taxpayer on all sorts of spurious grounds. With DVD and Blu-Ray, people can decide not to buy and the investment is lost - and if you object to R&D a company is carrying out right now, you can avoid funding it by not buying one of their products.
With ID cards, you can't just write to HMRC and say "I won't be paying £100 worth of my taxes this year because they're going on a
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I'd hope there was at least one BluRay and DVD player on the market when they were first released. If not, who is going to buy them? When you've got a medium like a disk and a partner player they should be out at the same time. Granted, the early ones might not be great, but what's the point of having (say) a padlock without having produced any keys?
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I would hope that any moderately functional government would have developed use cases for these cards, analyzed the effect of using them on length of queues, effectiveness at preventing fraud etc, AND ACTUALLY TESTED THAT THEY WORK IN AN END-TO-END PILOT, which would require working readers. It sounds to me like a sweet contract was handed to some company without any thought of the implications of implementing this plan.
Do you think BluRay disks were developed in a vacuum without a working player (or at l
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It's a trap! (Score:2)
Don't fall for it.. they want you to think they can't read the cards so you wont be so worried about getting one.
After all they only need to call this guy [slashdot.org] for a quick solution. ;)
Pythonesque... (Score:2)
No this is the department of silly cards... you're looking for the department of silly walks... four doors down and on the right. Now shove off you ya git!
The readers aren't important (Score:2, Insightful)
On the other hand, there isn't much point having the readers unless there's a reason to suspect the bearer's identity. As the scheme is voluntary, those with suspect identities won't be the first in the queue for the cards. As law-enforcement will only interested in those without cards, then there's not much po
No problem (Score:3)
Google will fix it (Score:3, Insightful)
The thing that worries me is that the downturn means that people now working at Google, Microsoft etc. will be released into the community and will then get Government jobs. One thing worse than pervasive Govt paranoia and spying is efficient pervasive government paranoia and spying.
Well done, that man (Score:2)
May I congratulate the nameless civil servant who threw this spanner into the wrench. I'd like to hope that this particular "error" can be attributed to competence, rather than oversight.
Ok, now therwe is proof brits are really dumb. (Score:2)
Ok, so either the brits are really dumb, as they didnt forsee this happening, the budget cuts to all police hqs means they can't afford one of these new machines, or it was the most brilliant scam, tally up all the loses over a period, tack it to a scapegoat of a project that you know will fail. ...voila, hands washed clean of any mess....7 billion huh....that's a pretty good cover up!
See?!? Told ya! (Score:2)
And all you people were worried about big brother.
Why would they? (Score:2)
Why would the government have readers for the cards? They're a huge waste of money unless you actually had a use for them. Why is it that people presume that the British government wanted people to have the cards. The British government's support and legal system was necessary to assure that everyone got a card, sure, but now that everyone's got a card, extragovernmental agencies can leverage them -- which was the original point of the exercise, was it not? No point in making the taxpayer pay for a reader y
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Nope - the money went strait to the pockets of the well-connected. Just like very other Labour sponsored big budget project.
www.bribe-a-lord.co.uk