A few weeks ago, the House of Lords finally passed Blair's identity card legislation. By 2010, it will be required for new passport holders in the UK to carry these ID cards. The cards contain biometric data which include retina and iris data, fingerprints, and voice patterns. On top of that, it will have personal information such as nationality, insurance number, and any number for any other IDs issued. Read here for the full list.

From the point of view of privacy, you're talking about one huge database to house all this information in one place for everybody with a UK passport. Who's going to construct the database? Write the program for the database? Who's going to have access to this database? Have access to every single bit of data on your life, including physical characteristics? Is Clerk #52 going to be able to alleviate his boredom by surfing the database? Even if it's Special Officer #52 with super secret security clearance, that doesn't mean he couldn't also be a pedophile. And just how easily can this database be hacked into? Well, let's ask the Dutch:

"Despite strong encryption, the Dutch biometric passports have already been hacked. What if someone hacks the UK system and uses this to forge cards? Obviously this would make a mockery of the whole ID card system. The government needs to tread carefully with the implementation of these cards, or the seeds of disaster will be there from the making."

But privacy issues aside, it's not even likely to stop forgery and fraud. This article in New Scientist from 2003 says that it won't prevent people from having mulitiple cards and multiple identities. Not only that, scans are so sensitive to environmental factors that even if you are you, a scan of you now compared to the data saved might not match.

A plan to introduce biometric ID cards in the UK will fail to achieve one of its main aims, New Scientist has learned. The proposed system will do nothing to prevent fraudsters acquiring multiple identity cards. ... The problem, says [Simon] Davies, [an expert in information systems at the London School of Economics and director of Privacy International], is the limited accuracy of biometric systems combined with the sheer number of people to be identified. The most optimistic claims for iris recognition systems are around 99 per cent accuracy - so for every 100 scans, there will be at least one false match.

This is acceptable for relatively small databases, but the one being proposed will have some 60 million records. This will mean that each person's scan will match 600,000 records in the database, making it impossible to stop someone claiming multiple identities.

...
Davies sees no prospect of improvements to the technology solving the problem. Bill Perry, of the UK's Association for Biometrics, agrees that there is an upper limit to the reliability of iris scans. There are too many environmental variables: scans can be affected by lighting conditions and body temperature, so much so that a system can fail to match two scans of the same iris taken under different conditions.

Well, I suppose we can be positive and hope that by 2010 the technology will have improved. Take heart. Forgerers and hackers are a lazy, unmotivated lot. That's why they don't have proper jobs. I'm sure they work slowly. And how many legal citizens and immigrants could they possibly mistakenly detain and rendition in that period of time? Couldn't be more than several hundred, right?