Britain plans national ID cards
113203
London -- Invoking a global threat of terrorism, the British government announced plans Tuesday to introduce national identity cards for the first time since the World War II era.
631562
Tony Blair says fingerprints collected for ID cards will be cross checked against crime scene prints.
270253
You're on an identity parade. Forever. The National Identity Register will allow police to add the entire adult population of the UK to their suspect list, giving them the opportunity to check fingerprints left at scenes of crime against those collected from ID card and passport applicants, says Tony Blair. Nor are fingerprints in other EU countries necessarily safe - the introduction of biometric technology, he adds, will "improve the flow of information between countries on the identity of offenders.â¦
659081
The U.K. government is proposing legislation that would create a system of ID cards with embedded biometric identifiers that everyone living in the U.K. would be required to have by 2011 or 2012.
758985
Americans seek international database to carry iris, palm and finger prints
469855
While making love to his car Letters Before we kick off this week's musings, a couple more thoughts on the UK's plans to scrap the mooted ID card for youths.â¦
282534
Serious doubts are raised on the accuracy of a new identity system being introduced on all new UK passports next year.
288699
An alternative take on the week so far... Letters In the postbag this fine Tuesday, we discovered a multitude of mail on the subject of cutting the cost of the ID card scheme. You had much to say about minister Liam Byrne's suggestion that using existing government databases might help trim the budget a little:â¦
602412
(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
431221
Two government ministers called Tuesday for the creation of a national day for Britain to boost unity and identity, as well as a points-based path to citizenship.
183414
UK lays down...proposals The UK has proposed a transatlantic arrangement for sharing biometric data about travellers as US coalition countries in the "war on terror" push for a global system to control migration.â¦
271215
The Tories are to back controversial government plans to introduce ID cards in the UK, the party has said.
484229
Britain said on Tuesday it plans to force non-European foreign nationals to register identity details such as fingerprints and iris scans from 2008.
501297
Britons will not be required to have ID cards until 2012, two years later than originally planned, the opposition Conservatives claimed on Tuesday, citing leaked government documents they obtained.
83396
Still horribly intrusive, though A Home Office minister has said the cost of the proposed ID card could be dramatically reduced if the government used its existing databases as a foundation for the scheme.â¦
265662
PM appears to contradict himself in Commons over whether identity cards will be compulsory
11275
Proposals for identity cards and a population register are opposed by Britain's information watchdog.