Ex-managing director, Ian Watmore, head of e-government and ultimately the ID project, will see his former employer bid for the biometrics contract to support the incoming cards and database.
Disclosures obtained by the newspaper reveal a system designed to collate whole-hand fingerprinting, iris and facial recognition is close to completion.
The London School of Economics estimates the overall identity scheme could cost up to £19.2 billion, but no figures are available for the specific expenditure on biometrics.
However LSE has warned to operate on a national scale, the technology “would have to be close to perfect” – a difficult task for biometric suppliers as, “any claim of infallibility is incorrect.”
Jerry Fishenden, national technology officer at Microsoft UK, has reportedly said biometrics experts believe it would be preferable to store biometrics locally, contrary to the government’s plans.
Central control of over 65 million people’s records, the final number expected to be covered by the scheme, already forced IT contractor Thales to admit its biometric technology would exclude 2 per cent of participants.
In June last year, the LSE reflected how, “A central register on a scale of 50 million records would need to contain very accurate biometrics, and the verification process would have to involve high-integrity devices.
“All biometrics have successfully been spoofed or attacked by researchers. Substantial work has been undertaken to establish the technique of forging or counterfeiting fingerprints, while researchers in Germany have established that iris recognition is vulnerable to simple forgery.”
The warning reflects comments tabled last week by Parliament’s Science and Technology Committee , which expressed doubts about existing technology’s ability to handle the demands of the ID card system.
But responding in the Commons, Katherine Courtney, director of the Identity Cards Programme, said the National Physical Laboratory had tested the feasibility of the key biometric and smart card technologies.
“[The] studies came back showing that the technical risks to a programme like this were medium risks and were manageable and actually, the important thing to focus on was of course the business risks and making sure that we are getting the business process right ,and all the other factors around how you identify a person and register their identity,” she said.
“I find that answer, with the greatest respect, absolutely astounding,” the Committee chairman replied.
“Two weeks ago, the Committee was in the United States talking to the Department of Homeland Security who said exactly the opposite to what you have said.
“They said that in terms of their starting to go out to procurement on their major project involving biometrics for ID cards, the technology was not there and that they were not in a position even to recommend to the administration that a procurement process should start.”
Smaller scale biometric projects have recently showed competency with the required technologies, Ms Courtney insisted.
“We have done quite a lot of looking at programmes in other countries that are using biometric technologies quite successfully,” she said.
“We have quite a successful asylum registration scheme which uses biometric technologies. We have been running very successful pilots on the e-Visa, the biometric visa programme. We have had good success with our project IRIS as well through the eBorders programme and the Passport Service has also experienced some very good success with the facial biometrics it has already implemented.”
Quelle: Contractor UK, 03.04.2006
