Newsletter – June 2004
World In Focus: Biometric Britain within 10 years?
 "The [British] Government intends to introduce a national compulsory ID cards scheme using unique biometric identifiers linked to a new national database."
The Home Office, 26th April 2004
The UK Government is currently attempting to introduce a national system of identity cards. The plan, being presented by the Home Secretary, would make the identity cards compulsory for British Citizens by 2013. The new identity cards – if they are introduced – will contain biometric information about individual citizens.
Understanding Biometrics
In simple terms, ‘biometrics’ is the science and technology of measuring and statistically analyzing biological data. In the context of national ID cards, biometric information is data containing information about human body characteristics (such as fingerprints, eye retinas or irises, voice patterns, facial patterns, or hand measurements).
The British Government is particularly interested in the idea of putting biometric information related to facial recognition, iris images and/or fingerprints onto compulsory identity cards. This is partly due to recommendations of the International Civil Aviation Authority (ICAO). The ICAO has nominated facial recognition as the primary biometric for travel documents with fingerprint (and possibly iris pattern) as secondary but not mandatory.
The case for biometric data
The British Home Secretary, David Blunkett, explained the case for biometrics as follows:
"We have a tradition of living in a free and open society and we are used to taking people at face value – trusting them to be who they say they are.
Recent events have brought home how, in today’s rapidly changing world, the need for trust and confidence actually require us to move beyond this and take the opportunity of new biometric technology which allows for a completely new level of verifying identity."
Will it really work?
Assuming that the Government is successful in convincing parliament to approve its Identity Cards Bill, and biometric identity cards are introduced, will the cards actually succeed in verifying identity? Many groups – including New Scientist – are not convinced.
Many groups claim that biometric techniques are not yet sufficiently accurate for a database containing so many records. For example, the most optimistic claims for iris recognition systems are around 99 per cent accuracy – which means that for every 100 scans, there will be at least one false match. This is not acceptable for a database containing millions of people’s records. There are also numerous environmental variables which will have to be accounted for – such as differing lighting conditions when attempting to analyze iris information and make a comparison to the data in the database.
The challenge for the IT industry is to make biometric data reliable and accurate before 2013... Lets hope we can do it.
More information:
http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/comrace/identitycards/
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