ID cards
In July 2002 the government released
a consultation document in an attempt to gauge the public mood on compulsory identity cards. I am personally quite worried about the civil liberty implications, but after some thought decided that there might be a way of using asymmetric encryption techniques to avoid some of the biggest problems. The result of these musings can be found in the PDF document below. There is also a ZIP archive containing an example implementation of the system which I talk about, and this will run under both RISC OS and Windows (2000/XP).
In spite of what I discuss in the document, I still feel that any form of ID card would be an unnecessary interference into people's lives, largely because it will inevitably be tied to a national identification database.
The consultation process ended some time ago now. The results of the consultation process could be seen on the home office's
Identity Card page (archived version), which is now defunct. Some of this information may still be accessible from the
Official Documents Archive. Unfortunately the government is now committed to introducing ID cards and a national ID database.
The document 'Liberty, Security, Identity' and an example implementation of the ID card framework described in it can be downloaded below.
