Is it or isn't it? Brown keeps bottling the ID card question
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Straight answers not compulsory either For the third time in four days, Gordon Brown has sown doubts about the future of compulsory ID cards for UK citizens. Speaking at prime minister's question time today, Brown confirmed that it was "policy" for ID cards to become compulsory, but added the rider that this was subject to a vote in parliament.â¦
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After reading Bruce Mohl's article on how people are having a hard time reaching customer service reps, I have to agree in thinking that some companies are making it harder on purpose so that the consumer will give up (" Maytag guy wouldn't have left you on hold ," Feb. 21 ). I recently spent 45 minutes trying to get ...
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By Penman; Sommerland  A HORRIBLY sinister new twist to ID theft begins with an email apparently from a hitman who says that he has been paid by "one I believe you call a friend" to kill you.   He wants a five-figure bribe not to pull the trigger...
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Gordon Brown comes under fire at prime minister's question time after a disc containing the DNA details of thousands of suspected foreign criminals was mislaid for a year
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Comer Wilson hasn't had to show his ID to buy beer in a while. Maybe it's the 66-year-old man's long white beard. Starting Sunday, gray hair won't be good enough. Wilson and everyone else will be required to show identification before buying beer in Tennessee stores &#151; no matter how old the buyer appears.
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One in five people using the new chip and pin credit and debit cards are still signing for their goods, research suggests.
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Hard to keep up with the voting rights section of the Justice Department's civil rights division. Division chief John Tanner recently made some news with a fascinating analysis of how photo IDs for voters actually help minorities.
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QUESTION: What is the best approach to protecting me from ID theft and related activities? Will a software package work best, or must I go to a hardware firewall?
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Comment is free: Timothy Garton Ash: I'd go to jail rather than accept this kind of ID card
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A voter seeking to cast a ballot is first told to produce a photo ID. Is that intimidation or a prudent safeguard against election fraud?
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Tracking with a soupcon of fast... The Telegraph reveals that the UK government is plotting fingerprinting of air passengers as a matter of routine, to check the identity of departing passengers and to tighten up border controls for incoming. Which, given the firmness of the regime's plans for ID cards, is scarcely news in the long term - but in the interim, turkeys are apparently being asked to volunteer for Christmas, now.â¦
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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¦
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The question du jour is this: IsBritney Spears&#39; white-trash marriage legal or will the pop tart have to do it One More Time? Us Weekly rang in with a story yesterday claiming
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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¦
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Tycho:  I uploaded the comic early, as many of you noticed.  I entered the wrong number in the update field.  You may also have noticed that the spelling in these posts has really gone to hell.  So, that's numbers and letters.  I hope to one day discover a set of pictograms with which I can manage some baseline fucking proficiency.
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In 1980, I signed a deal with a company to market a product I was developing. The contract required me to turn over the source code, which I did. One day I went to a meeting at the office of the company, and there on the product manager's desk, right next to a door that opened to the outside, was a floppy labeled "Dave Winer's source code" in big letters.  If you own a Mac you may soon find out what that felt like. It's amazing to me that the tech blogosphere doesn't treat Apple's policy re broken hard disks as the huge gaping security hole that it is.  Think about it. We worry about bad people getting their hands on little pieces of data that, when added together, give them the power to be you in banking and credit transactions.  Think about what you would do if your laptop was stolen. Well, if you own a Mac and its hard disk goes bad, and you make the mistake of bringing it to Apple for service, you will turn over all that data to Apple. Not "may" or "might" but "will." What Apple in turn does with that data is none of your affair. They don't sign anything or offer any guarantees that they won't sell the disk to a data miner. Think it can't happen or that it's unlikely? I don't gain much comfort from your feeling of security. I've been writing about this issue since December 22. Usually when I write something critical of Apple, the results are mixed. Some people are supportive, but far more people attack. This time the ratio is very different. Almost everyone who has commented gets that there's a huge problem here. Can we solve this problem? Of course we can.  Some say that other vendors do this too. That gives me less comfort, not more. That means there's no escaping this crazy way of treating user's confidentiality. Ultimately it hurts the vendors because people can't use their computers for things the manufacturers say we can.  Further, it's got to be an issue for the banks, brokerage firms, credit agencies. If you are a newspaper and you employ reporters and they use a computer, how exactly are you guarding the confidentiality of your sources? If you're a confidential source, don't you have an interest when the reporter gives their computer manufacturer all their data to do with as they please? Imagine what you would do if it turned out there was a bug in a Netgear or Linksys router that allowed, under special circumstances, a mailicous person to gain access to the full content of your hard disk at any time. Would you have a problem with that? This is worse than Microsoft's neglect of malware that got me to stop using their computers. In that case it was Microsoft being neglegent. This time Apple itself is the cause of the problem. It's as if they planted a virus in their operating system that entitled them, under special circumstances, completely out of the user's control, to gain access to everything on your disk, with as much time as they want, with no way for you to prevent or even detect the intrusion.  See also: My letter to Steve Jobs.
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(InfoWorld) - The U.K. is delaying the start of the procurement process for the IT systems that will eventually issue ID cards for an estimated 50 million U.K. citizens over the next decade. A "major" procurement process was set to begin, but "we're not quite ready yet," said James Hall, chief executive of the U.K. Identity and Passport Service, which is in charge of the ID card project. Hall spoke Monday at the Gartner Inc. identity management conference in London. Hall did not say when procurement would start. The delay confirmsÂ doubts that surfaced a year ago about whether the ID card project could be kept on the government's schedule. A leaked memo released about year ago written by an official in Prime Minister's Tony Blair government outlined ongoing worries about whether the first ID cards could be delivered by 2008, in keeping with the government's schedule. The memo cited concerns over procurement, costs and program management. The U.K. government has several large IT projects under way, including a massive IT revamp of its National Health Service (NHS), which has also fallen under criticism for delays and difficulties with suppliers. The ID card program will cost an estimated Â£5.4 billion (US$10.6 billion), according to the Home Office. Once the ID card project is under way, the U.K. government will issue cards to citizens as they apply for a new passport. The ID card program met wide opposition over privacy concerns, but the government hopes the cards will enhance national security, reduce benefits fraud and strengthen immigration controls. The cards will be issued to those over 16 years old. Hall said it's hoped that businesses will embrace the national ID card as a form of identity, as long as it meets its goals of security and privacy. Hall, a 30-year veteran of Accenture Ltd., admitted he was initially a "skeptic" of the ID project at first, but now is a "passionate believer." "If we get this right, we can actually deliver some huge benefits," Hall said. Â