[privacy] Government admits ID card project won't be fully tested

[Gordon Darling <gordondarling () dsl pipex com>]

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/business/0,39020645,39284263,00.htm

"The government has admitted that it will not rigorously test all
aspects of the identity cards scheme before putting it into practice.

The comments were made in the government's official response last Friday
to a report by the House of Commons science and technology committee,
entitled "Identity Card Technologies: Scientific Advice, Risk and
Evidence".

The committee had recommended that changes to the programme, based on
trial results, should be implemented "even if they impact the delivery
timetable". However, the government responded that "trial results need
to be used in a pragmatic way and should not distract from the need to
deliver a workable solution in a timely and cost-effective manner".

"It would not be realistic to rigorously test everything before the
scheme ‘goes live' to the point where the government can be sure that no
further changes need to be made to the design of the scheme," the
government insisted, adding that "some parts of the solution will not be
tested but will use ‘off-the-shelf ' technology that has been adequately
tested elsewhere".

The government also refused to assure the committee that it would not
"limit the number, scope or quality of technology trials in order to
stay within the allocated budget", explaining that "trialling has to be
managed within the usual budgetary disciplines and so while the
Government can assure the committee that trials will be well-funded it
will also fulfil its obligation to achieve value for money".

"The committee's recommendation suggests that the procurement phase
should be extended to include all appropriate trials. The government
believes that better, more reliable results and better value for money
can be achieved by rolling out the scheme incrementally and collecting
data from these early stages with a view to using it to modify the
scheme's design as it grows," the government's response also noted.

However, the government demonstrated a different attitude towards the
value of "off-the-shelf" technology elsewhere in the same document, when
it responded to the committee's enquiries about the UKPS Biometric
enrolment trial in 2004. 

That trial demonstrated significant shortcomings in iris-recognition
biometric technology — a part of the scheme that has now been shelved
for the near future. But the government said on Friday that it did not
accept the validity of the results, because the technology was not
optimised or set up for the requirements of a national identity card
system.

The government quoted a Dr Mansfield of the National Physical Laboratory
(NPL), who said: "The trial was not devised as a performance trial but
it illustrated that if you just buy off-the-shelf systems and deploy
them with no adaptation to the ID cards programme the performance would
not be terribly good".

The government went on to add that those trials had produced useable
results, in that they had showed  "the base level of the performance of
the technology... i.e. the level of performance which can be achieved
with off-the-shelf equipment without any specific evaluation or
configuration".

Questions surrounding identity-checking processes that may be used — and
what pieces of identity data might be used by various organisations —
also remained unanswered by the government, which said they would be
impossible to answer "until the card has entered widespread usage for
identity verification".

A recommendation from the Science and Technology committee that a
specialist information and communications technology (ICT) assurance
group should be established to monitor the project was welcomed, but the
government cautioned that it was "difficult to put a firm timescale on
the establishment of the group". It did, however, acknowledge that it
was "fully aware that, in order to be useful, the group would have to be
established early enough to influence technical policy and architectural
decisions during procurement".

However, the government did not commit to providing a detailed breakdown
of the scheme's costing, explaining: "Whilst we are keen to remain open
and transparent on the level of detail provided to the public in the
cost estimates for the programme, we must also protect the commercially
sensitive information of our suppliers."

Last Thursday the government admitted it had not yet finalised its plan
for the scheme's implementation and management, although it claimed that
such a plan would materialise "in the coming weeks".

-- 
gordondarling<at>dsl<dot>pipex<dot>com

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