Think tank survey claims 81% support Uk Id cards
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The survey does however signpost several vulnerabilities of the scheme, the 'Madrid' factor and cost, and as the public grasps the full significance of the National Identity Register, this could present a third ...
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Britain's new Home Secretary Charles Clarke said on Monday he was determined to introduce identity cards as part of the fight against terrorism, despite a possible rebellion from within his own party.
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Count them in, count them out, count them all about... Immigration Minister Liam Byrne this week unveiled - to a certain amount of derision - his vision of the ID Card scheme as some sort of 21st Century equivalent of the 19th Century railway network or the 20th Century national electricity grid. It will be pervasive, and in 20 years time it will be a great British institution, "part of the fabric of British life."â¦
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Dan Ackroyd, Eddie Murphy unavailable for comment Government-backed sociologists are aiming to pin economic status, crime and beliefs on our genes in a new Â£15m survey of 100,000 Britons.â¦
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As the new Bank of England 20 pound note makes its debut featuring economist Adam Smith, a survey suggests Britons want better-known and more modern characters on their money.Comment
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As the new Bank of England 20-pound note makes its debut, featuring economist Adam Smith, a survey suggests Britons want better-known and more modern characters on their money.Comment
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Charles Clarke faces his first big test as Home Secretary on Monday - bringing in the government&#39;s proposals on ID cards. Up to 30 Labour backbenchers have threatened to vote against the measures saying they represent an erosion of civil liberties.
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Database revolt Hundreds of thousands of people will refuse to sign up to the UK Government's planned identity register, according to just-published research. Around eight per cent of those surveyed said they would refuse to sign up to the database even if they are fined.â¦
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Great and good say Huzzah! The UK now has its own national think tank for open source and open standard policy.â¦
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Enlightened Conservatism The Conservative Party launched its campaign against the government's ID card scheme today, juxtaposing a libertarian stance on identity against a tough stance on crime, punishment and immigration.â¦
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As passports equipped with RFID chips are adopted more widely around the world, successful attempts to crack them are on the rise as well. Germany, the Netherlands and the U.K. have already reported compromised data, but countries such as New Zealand remain unconcerned about such threats. But what if the goal wasn't data theft but detonation?
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'We will abolish this costly plastic poll tax' Shadow home secretary David Davis has criticised the government's plan to make people travel to interview centres to provide a biometric for the national identity card.â¦
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Will Brown sign up to Blair's baby? The Office of Government Commerce has appealed against an order by the Information Tribunal that it must publish official documents that assess the justification for the government's identity card scheme.â¦
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Keeping tabs on granny The UK's Alzheimer's Society has backed the electronic tagging of dementia sufferers to "empower patients by allowing them to wander", the Telegraph reports.â¦
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The Alzheimer's Society charity  has backed British government proposals to issue dementia  sufferers with tracking devices if patients agree.
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(InfoWorld) - A security expert has cracked one of the U.K.'s new biometric passports, which the British government hopes will cut down on cross-border crime and illegal immigration. The attack, which uses a common RFID (radio frequency identification) reader and customized code,Â siphoned data off an RFID chipÂ from a passport in a sealed envelope, said Adam Laurie, a security consultant who has worked with RFID and Bluetooth technology. The attack would be invisible to victims, he said. "That's the really scary thing," said Laurie, whose work was detailed in the Sunday edition of the Daily Mail newspaper. "There's no evidence of tampering. They're not going to report something has happened because they don't know." The British government, which began issuing RFID passports about a year ago, eventually wants to incorporate fingerprints and other biometric data on the chips, although privacy activists are concerned over how data will be stored and handled. Currently, the chip contains the printed details on the passports, the person's photograph, and security technology to detect if those files have been altered. The attack was executed while the passport was still in its original envelope used to send it from the passport service, since RFID chips can be read from a few inches away, Laurie said. He used a passport ordered by a woman affiliated with No2ID, a group that opposes the U.K.'s biometric passport and ID card programs. The data on the passport's chip is locked until an RFID reader provides the encryption key, Laurie said. The encryption key is calculated using a combination of the person's personal data, such as date of birth, and is contained in the "machine-readable zone" (MZR) -- the string of characters and digits on the bottom of the passport's first page. At an immigration desk, the optical character reader scans the MZR and gets the key. The RFID chip is unlocked, and the information on the chip is matched with that on the passport. However, Laurie was able to do this process himself. He analyzed ICAO 9303, the standard from the International Civil Aviation Organization that been adopted worldwide for machine-readable passports, to see how the MZR is organized. Laurie also knew some of the woman's personal details -- used to calculate her passport's key -- and found out more through Internet research. He then wrote what's known as a "brute force" program, which repeatedly tries different combinations of data to discover the key. After about 40,000 attempts by the program, he cracked the key. To scan the chip, he used a common RFID reader from ACG ID, now part of Assa Abloy Identification Technology of Germany. The attack could then let Laurie begin the process of making an exact copy of the woman's passport. "[The biometric passport] has been sold to us as something that increases the security of the passport, but so far I don't see anything about it that increases my security," Laurie said. The greatest weakness with the passports is using relatively easy-to-find data to compose the encrypted key, Laurie said. It would be better to include more random elements that would render brute-force style programs nearly useless, he said. Laurie's work spawned from concern over how users can know what's on their passport's chip. "At the moment, if you want to see what's in your own passport, you have to go to passport office," Laurie said. "With my code, you can do it at home." Laurie has published a library of open-source tools written in the Python programming language that will run on RFID readers made by ACG and by Frosch Electronics, based in Austria. Â
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A controversial scheme for national identity cards has been approved by the British House of Commons.