JAMES KIRKUP - 22nd March 2006

A NATIONAL identity card scheme will be a "present" to terrorists, criminal gangs and foreign spies, one of Britain's most respected former intelligence agents has told ministers. The warning from Daphne Park, who served for 30 years as a senior controller for MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, came as the parliamentary power struggle over the identity cards bill dragged on.

The House of Lords once again defeated the government last night. Peers backed a joint Conservative and Liberal Democrat amendment that would prevent ministers making identity cards compulsory until at least 2011. It is the fourth time the Lords have sent the bill back to the Commons in a parliamentary ping-pong game that could go on for months.

At issue is the "voluntary" nature of the proposed card. Labour ministers insist that the cards will be optional, but also want to create a rule meaning that anyone renewing a passport after 2008 must also buy an identity card. Opponents argue that is "compulsion by stealth" and question Labour's mandate for the scheme. The Labour manifesto at last year's election promised the cards would be "voluntary at first". Baroness Scotland, speaking for the government in the Lords, insisted that MPs have already voted for the document link and that should stand. "The Commons did discuss this issue," she said. "This is not compulsion by stealth as has been suggested."

While ministers have hinted at using the Parliament Act to force the ID cards bill through the Lords, peers insist they will continue to resist.

The former MI6 agent will be a key part of that resistance. Baroness Park, who was made a peer by Margaret Thatcher, passed a withering verdict on the proposed cards, ridiculing ministers' suggestions that the system will make people safer. In fact, she said, the complete opposite is true. "The very creation of such an enormous national identity register will be a present to terrorists; it will be a splendid thing for them to disrupt and blow up," she said. "It will also provide valuable information to organised crime and to the intelligence services of unfriendly countries. It will be accessible to all of these," she said.

The warning about the risk of foreign spying comes at a time when MI5, the domestic security service, has cut its counter-espionage budget, prompting concerns among MPs who oversee the UK intelligence services.

Baroness Park concluded: "I find it extraordinarily difficult to believe why anyone would voluntarily and enthusiastically come forward and say: 'Do let me join this dangerous club'." Baroness Park is not the first former intelligence officer to question the value of a national ID card. Dame Stella Rimington, the former head of MI5, last year said she did not believe the cards would make Britain any safer from terrorist attack; they would quickly be copied, she said.

Whereas Dame Stella's background was in combating internal threats, especially the IRA, Baroness Park has extensive experience of foreign intelligence operations. Now in her eighties, her career began during the Second World War, when she volunteered for service and was assigned to train Resistance fighters who were being parachuted into France in the run-up to D-Day.

When the war ended, she was posted to Berlin where she was ordered to locate and secure German military scientists before they fell into the hands of advancing Russian forces. That work brought her to the attention of MI6, who made extensive use of her services using the Cold War. Although she has repeatedly refused invitations to publish her memoirs, many of Baroness Park's exploits as a spy are in the public domain - she is something of a living legend in the British intelligence community. Among her Cold War postings were extensive service in Moscow, running agents inside the Soviet regime. During the Vietnam war, she was a covert operative in Hanoi. She is also known to have been in Congo during the turbulent 1960s, at one point smuggling a defecting official out of the country in the boot of her car. - scotsman

Mark Ballard / The Register | March 22 2006

The House of Lords' appeals for MPs to resist the march of ID Cards were finally laid to rest in the House of Commons yesterday.

The Commons summoned enough energy to stick to the government's guns rejecting (by 284 to 241) a truce offered yesterday by the House of Lords, who had seen their attempts to liquidate government plans for covertly compulsory ID cards rejected by MPs three times.

The Lords had proposed a compromise on Monday that they hoped would end the current round of legislative ping-pong. Compulsion would have been put off until 2012, making it an issue for the next election. But that idea's been kicked out of Parliament too.

Before Parliament's vote yesterday, Edward Garnier, shadow minister for home affairs, compared the centres where people would have their fingerprints taken, their eyes scanned and their photographs taken for the government database, to the Soviet gulags.

"If compulsion by stealth is so good and so popular, why do not the Government have the self-confidence to try voluntary take-up? If the public are sufficiently attracted and follow the arguments on cost, they will flock into the gulags and processing places so that their information can be put on the national identity register," he said.

For a moment it almost conjured an image of country as concentration camp... but this evaporated as Garnier was promptly forced to withdraw his remark by home secretary Charles Clarke.

Nevertheless, David Winnick, Labour MP for Walsall, North, and a critic of the "jackboot jibes" that have been thrown at the government's ID plans, urged the government not to force a bill with such serious implications for citizenship through parliament without having it proposed clearly to the electorate first.

Which brings us to the New Labour manifesto commitment that has now been parsed ad nauseam: that the cards would be voluntary when someone applied for a passport. This argument has been wrung dry, leaving the government to argue its case for compulsion on two key points, as it has done since Monday: uncertainty and cost. As Clarke said yesterday and Baroness Scotland of Asthal, Minister of State for Criminal Justice and Offender Management, told the Lords on Monday, any delay to the imposition of ID cards or voluntary take-up of the scheme would complicate it because the government would have to rewrite the business plan for system and confuse the tendering of suppliers.

Clarke accused opponents of a "deliberate plan for delay and destruction of the process in the Identity Cards Bill."

Opponents said delaying the imposition of ID cards would do no such thing. The government had not even finished drawing up plans for the system and certainly had no idea how much it would cost. New proposals for ID card readers had only just been floated when the Lords debated the issue on Monday.

"If I wanted to be difficult, I could say that they are making it up day by day. But I don't want to be difficult," said Baroness Anelay of St Johns. - theregister.co.uk

March 29 2006 (Bloomberg) --

Britain's House of Lords approved a bill that would impose a national identity card system for the first time since 1952, part of Prime Minister Tony Blair's plan to combat fraud and terrorism.

The upper chamber of Parliament agreed to a compromise plan that would allow people applying for new passports to opt out of applying for an ID card until 2010. The Lords had sought an entirely voluntary system. Blair wanted to make it mandatory.

The move defuses an argument about the constitutional duties of the unelected Lords, who by tradition restrict themselves to amending and revising legislation. The House of Commons, controlled by Blair's Labour Party, voted down the Lords' amendments five times before.

``The amendment will allow us to draw a line under the more disturbing aspects of this episodes,'' Baroness Patricia Scotland, Blair's manager of Home Office affairs in the Lords, said in Parliament today. ``Actions in holding out have put at risk this house's reputation.''

Today's compromise plan was tabled by Lord Robert Armstrong, a former Treasury and Home Office civil servant appointed to the upper house in 1988 and affiliated with none of the political parties. Lords voted by 234-56 to back his amendments, including support from the Conservative opposition.

The Labour government, which controls a majority of 69 seats in House of Commons, will approve the measures when it returns to the lower house, Baroness Scotland said. That ensures that the ID cards measure will clear Parliament and go to Queen Elizabeth II for royal approval.

Tighter Security

The Home Office argued that the cards are necessary to beef up security at Britain's ports and airports and to combat identity theft, which costs consumers 1.3 billion pounds ($2.3 billion) a year. The cards will complement plans to add biometric details to U.K. passports, part of a European Union- wide effort to improve security measures on travel documents.

Conservative and Liberal Democrat lawmakers had fought the Labour government's proposal, saying it would infringe on civil liberties and force people to pay 90 pounds or more for a card. The government estimates the system will cost taxpayers 5.8 billion pounds in the next decade.

``We still don't know the cost, we don't know who would run it or how they would run it,'' Nick Clegg, a Liberal Democrat lawmaker overseeing domestic policy in the House of Commons, said today before the bill passed that chamber. The Liberal Democrats opposed today's compromise.

Loans for Lordships?

Blair's government, fighting accusations it awarded peerages permitting people to serve in the Lords in exchange for loans to the Labour Party, had argued that the upper chambers' resistance upset the constitutional balance in Parliament.

The Lords under agreements, understandings and traditions dating to 1911 don't block measures outlined in the government's election manifesto. Blair promised the ID cards program ahead of the May 2005 election. No party has a controlling majority in the Lords.

``This is an issue which many feel strongly about,'' Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott said in Parliament today. ``Our manifesto pledged to end this absurdity'' and ``rid the remaining 100 hereditary peers'' from the upper chamber.

Lawmakers from all the main political parties plan to resume discussions in May about how to reshape the upper chamber of Parliament, considering whether to begin electing members to the house. Less than 100 peers who inherited their seats remain in the chamber.

Previous Cards

Britain had ID cards from 1939 to 1952, originally to bolster security, enforce conscription and administer food rationing during World War II. By the time courts ended the system, 39 government agencies were using them.

John Major's Conservative government proposed a voluntary ID cards plan in 1996 after a Parliament committee found there would be advantages to having them. Major called an election the following year before the government could publish a draft bill. Blair's Labour government didn't take up the idea again until the terrorist attacks in the U.S. in 2001. The first attempt to pass the legislation failed when the House of Lords ran out of time before parliament was dissolved for the election in May 2005.

Blair reintroduced the measures after the election. When explosions killed 52 in London in July, Home Secretary Charles Clarke acknowledged the cards would have done nothing to prevent terrorism of that sort.

By Philip Johnston, Home Affairs Editor (Filed: 31/03/2006)

More than half a century after Britain got rid of its wartime identity cards, laws to set up a similar scheme were given Royal Assent yesterday.

The ID Card Act will allow the Government to establish a national identity database containing the biometrics of all adults. A new Identity and Passport Service, which will oversee the reform, will come into being tomorrow.

The Government is free to begin the tendering process for running the scheme, which is likely to prove a hugely lucrative exercise for successful bidders. Companies will be needed to set up the database and supply the biometric readers to carry out checks.

Some of the world's largest IT companies are likely to line up for the work, with EDS, BT, Fujitsu, Sun Microsystems and Accenture among those rumoured to be interested. A report published by the London School of Economics last year - and fiercely disputed by the Home Office - estimated the cost of implementing an ID cards scheme at between £10.6 billion and £19.2 billion.

It will be a high-risk project, with the prospect of its being scrapped never far away, so the private sector will probably demand hugely profitable fees. The margin on a major government IT scheme is usually up to eight per cent but some in the industry expect a 10 per cent margin to be required for the ID cards project, though the Government normally refuses to provide commercial details of contracts.

After a titanic parliamentary battle, the Lords finally agreed to let the legislation through on Wednesday night, with the Liberal Democrats - who held out against it - accusing the Tories of ''caving in''. The one concession offered by the Government would allow people who are entered on the database when they renew their passports from 2008 to opt out of having a card until January 1 2010.

But Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, made clear that these people would have to pay the price for both the card and the passport, which is estimated at £93.

"I don't think there is any benefit in opting out at all,'' said Mr Clarke, who called yesterday a ''red letter day'' for his department. "Anyone who opts out, in my opinion, is foolish. . . Being able to prove who we are is a fundamental requirement in modern society."

Even if people decide that they do not want a card, once they apply for or renew a passport, their biometrics will automatically be taken for entry on the database.

This will involve a visit to one of 70 offices around the country to give all 10 fingerprints, two iris prints and a photograph. It is expected to begin in late 2008. Because about six million people each year renew or apply for a passport, the register will, within a few years, cover more than half the country, at which point Parliament would be expected to extend the scheme to all who are not included.

Although this is likely to begin after the next election, Mr Clarke said that he did not think the Conservatives, who have been both for and against ID cards in recent years, would pledge to reverse the scheme because it would be too far advanced by then.

However, David Davis, the shadow home secretary, said: "Under a Conservative government, the scheme would be scrapped and the savings put to other uses - including strengthening our security."

Phil Booth, the co-ordinator of the NO2ID campaign, said: ''In Parliament, round one may have gone to the Government but in the country it's a different story. Millions are already opposed and the Home Office will have to round them up and force them to be finger-printed. This is a self-destructive policy to dwarf the Poll Tax.'' Telegraph

11 April 2006 - biometricnewsportal.com

The Cyber Security Knowledge Transfer Network (KTN), funded by the DTI, will provide a single national platform for drawing on security expertise from across industry, academia and government. Its purpose is to address a number of important information security challenges, including cyber crime, identity management and biometrics.

The network will be managed by QinetiQ and will be instrumental in helping UK enterprises develop innovative products and services that address the challenges posed by the need for improved digital security. These challenges include the increasing demand for biometrics for business security and passport applications and the growing awareness of the need for solutions to identity fraud and theft.

The creation of the network is therefore a move towards ensuring a joined-up approach from security experts across a wide range of public and commercial sectors. The KTN is expected to inform current Government initiatives such as E-Borders, identity cards and E-Government.

The Cyber Security KTN will be overseen by an expert panel in the form of a steering committee. The committee, chaired by BT's Robert Ghanea-Hercock, has been drawn primarily from industry and includes representatives of Aviva, BP, Visa, British Airways, Cisco and Microsoft. The DTI, Home Office, MOD, other government departments and various leading universities are also represented.

The steering committee will decide on strategy direction and allocate funds from an initial £1.8 million budget for individual projects and working groups. The KTN will also lead in collecting the views of the community on what should be covered by the £10 million Network Security Innovation Platform announced by the Technology Strategy Board on November 2005, which is expected to include calls for collaborative research and development grant projects, demonstrator projects and the development of standards.

Alan Travis, home affairs editor - Wednesday April 19, 2006 - Guardian via STATEWATCH

A £400m scheme put forward by the chancellor, Gordon Brown, to create a new national population database dubbed a building block of the "surveillance society" was finally killed off yesterday.

The initial plans for the citizen information project won the Office of National Statistics the 2004 Big Brother award for the "most heinous government organisation" from the campaigning organisation, Privacy International.

The aim of the project, which was to go live in 2008, was to create a "master list" of everybody's name, address, date of birth, sex and a personal identifying number which could be shared across the public sector.

But Des Browne, chief secretary to the Treasury, yesterday said this should be done through the national identity card scheme instead, "on the basis that the scheme eventually becomes compulsory". The decision is expected to add £200m to the cost of the ID card scheme.

By Andy McCue - Published: Wednesday 19 April 2006 silicon.com

The government says the ID card database will become a national population register of basic personal information for the public sector to verify identity and has called for the development of a children's register as well.

The Treasury confirmed this week that the newly created Identity and Passport Service (IPS) will take over the work being done by the Office for National Statistics on the Citizen Information Project to create an adult population register containing a person's name, address, date of birth and a unique ID reference number.

Des Browne, chief secretary to the Treasury, said in a statement to parliament: "The IPS should be responsible for developing the national identity register (NIR) as an adult population database. Over time public sector systems, business processes and culture should be adapted to use the NIR as the definitive source of contact details in the longer term."

The NIR will only contain details of adults over the age of 16 but a national child population database could also be on the cards.

Browne said: "The Department for Education and Skills should also consider whether there is scope to realise further efficiency and effectiveness benefits through a child population register."

Until the NIR is up and running the Treasury said it should be a priority for HM Revenue and Customs and the Department for Work and Pensions to look at short-term arrangements for wider use of the National Insurance number and ways to better share personal information.

Browne said: "There is significant value to both citizens and the public sector in greater sharing of contact details - name, address, date of birth, reference numbers - in a secure way across the public sector."

By Manek Dubash, Techworld 19 May 2006

IBM researcher Michael Osborne, whose job is research into secure ID cards, slated the UK government's ID cards scheme on the grounds of cost, over-centralisation, and being the wrong tool for the job.

Based in Big Blue's Zurich research labs, where the scanning tunnelling microscope was invented and won its inventors a Nobel Prize, Osborne said that the problem is neither the cards nor the fact that the scheme is intended to use biometric technology.

The big issue is that the UK government, plans to set up a central database containing volumes of data about its citizens. Unlike other European governments, most of whom already use some form of ID card, the central database will allow connections between different identity contexts - such as driver, taxpayer, or healthcare recipient - which compromises security. Centrally-stored biometric data would be attractive to hackers, he said, adding that such data could be made anonymous but that the UK Government's plans do not include such an implementation.

Osborne added that biometric technology is still immature. "It's not an exact science", he said. In real world trials, some 10 per cent of people identified using iris recognition failed to enrol - which means the system didn't recognise them. Even fingerprinting is no panacea, as four per cent failed to enrol. Scale that up to a whole population - the UK contains nearly 60 million people - and the problem of biometric identification becomes huge, he said.

Osborne also criticised the government for the potential cost of the system. He said that it will cost a lot more than anyone thinks, pointing out that a project of this size hasn't been tried before, so the government's projected costs are not necessarily accurate.

Finally, Osborne also used a dozen criteria, including whether or not such as system is mandatory or time-limited , to show that on all but two, the UK Government's scheme fails - even before controversial civil liberties issues are considered.

And as for whether ID cards are the right tool to defeat terrorists in the first place, security expert Osborne said: "ID cards won't solve the problem because terrorists don't care about identification - and they'll have valid IDs anyway. The issue is the central database.

"But no-one knows if it'll work, or if it'll be accurate enough - it's more about perceived security than actual security."

Osborne suggested an alternative, which involved keeping the data on the card. With such a system, only the template is downloaded and identity processing happens on the card using Java and local data rather using centralised storage and processing.

He added that since terrorists wanted to be identified, having an ID card was unlikely to be a deterrent. "However, in some previous studies, some criminals were found to be deterred by the need to possess an ID card."

Osborne's remarks were made in a personal capacity during a visit to the Zurich labs, and did not reflect IBM's corporate viewpoint.