Category: People

[Dave Birch] Hurrah! My bank, Barclays, tell me that they have a new and improved mobile bank service. Fantastic. I go to the iTunes App Store. Nothing there. Odd. Turns out that the new and improved mobile bank service is just the web service but on a mobile phone. Oh well.

With odd serendipity, this came up at the recent Mobey Forum meeting in Helsinki. While watching a demonstration of Nokia Money, I got a text message from my son who was in London visiting his girlfriend and had run out of money. He asked me if I could send him £10 to get a train home. I was forced to reply that I could not, because we live in the UK and not in an advanced country such as Kenya, where phone-to-phone money transfer is commonplace. I fired up my iPhone and went to the Barclays page, only to discover that I couldn’t log in and send him some money because I don’t know my 12 digit user code (or whatever it is called) and I didn’t have my dongle anyway (it was back home on my desk). (In case you are worried, the day was saved because he was able to go back to his girlfriend’s house and borrow the money from her parents.)

Now, this demonstration of the utter hopelessness of mobile financial services in the UK took place under the watchful eye for Mobey Forum executive director Liisa Kannainen, who promptly showed me how she had responded to an earlier, similar, request from one of her children…

Yes, she still uses the same paper-based Nordea Transaction Authorisation Number (TAN) system introduced in Finland for remote banking years ago, And it still works fine. So to send her kids money, she logs in on the phone and is prompted for the next TAN. She types it in and then crosses it off. Works perfectly. And she always has her TAN list with her in her purse, whereas as I never have my dongle with me away from home.

What I do have with me all the time is, of course, my mobile phone. As do almost all of the population. Surely it would make sense for both Nordea and Barclays to move to some standard mobile phone-based 2FA scheme. And then we could move to a standard set of authentication “levels”. For small transactions, just have the phone. For larger transactions, enter PIN into the phone. For very large transactions have the take your voiceprint, then enter a PIN. Something like that. And if we could use it log in for banking, then why couldn’t we use it to log in for other things as well

Continue reading “There isn’t an app for that”

[Dave Birch] Writing in the June 2010 edition of the US magazine “Liberty” (which is a libertarian journal), Wendy McElroy made a couple of observations that resonate. She says

I am not against ID in general: it serves valuable functions.

She then goes on to distinguish between identification and certification, as distinction that is missing from many ID card-related visions. She then makes a crucial point, one I that endorse wholeheartedly.

The valid functions of ID have a common characteristic: they provide advantages to the individual who holds the ID.

Indeed, an a central reason for the tragic trajectory of the UK ID card scheme was precisely that it did not. She then makes another assertion:

Who benefits from national IDs? The state, not the individual.

I’m afraid I have to disagree with Wendy on this one. Individuals can benefit from national IDs, if they are assembled in the correct way (ie, my way) and I have no objection from the state benefiting from them too (apart from anything else, I pay for it) provided that that precondition is met. But suppose a national ID infrastructure isn’t put together in a 21st-century way? In that case, it still isn’t only that state that benefits: criminals do too. As I said a couple of years ago:

If you were going to create a criminal enterprise based on bogus ID cards, who would you target? Probably the group with the least recourse to the law: illegal immigrants. This is exactly what has been going on in Malaysia, where a fake identity card issuing syndicate which cheated hundreds of illegal immigrants has been broken up by the police

[From Digital Identity Forum: New identity crimes]

Of course, there’s a problem the other way round as well, with illegal immigrants being given documents that they are not entitled to.

In Pakistan and Malaysia a high number of illegal immigrants become legitimate because they acquire a biometric card. Illegal immigrants get into the system usually at entry points of the country. Entry points are governed by human resource. And human resource can be corrupted.

[From The Hindu : Life & Style / Society : A question of identity ]

I found a similar point being made in a story from the Yemeni News Agency.

When a Somali refugee who could not speak purely Arabic and insists that he is from Hjjah province, came to al-Thawra police station in the Capital Sana’a for ID, he was requested by the police station to present his documents. He was ready with his electoral card, neighborhoods’ supervisor recommendation and ID copies of two witnesses as identification documents to get his Yemeni ID. As the concerned policeman wanted to stop the process of granting him the ID, his co-worker rejected that saying there is no excuse to stop or delay it because he has all the required documents and it’s the election committee’s responsibility.

That’s a different case isn’t it? Why shouldn’t people with the right papers get a national ID? The chap in question wasn’t trying to bribe the police to give him an ID. Ah, but…

Police officers affirm that refugees can get IDs by giving bribes to concerned officials. These bribes are ranging from USD 500-1000. “Thousands of African refugees could obtain Yemeni IDs by bribing the brokers who have relations with civil affairs investigations and who in their turn allow the procedures to pass through,” said a police station’s officer. Many Africans had been arrested after finding out that they got IDs illegally, a policeman affirmed, but he did not mention the number, the place of their detention and the number of issues; whether they were referred to justice or not.

In fact what is going here is even more interesting: some officials not only allow illegal immigrants to bribe their way to the papers that will get them a national ID, but they have an absolute incentive to do so, which is that you can’t vote without an ID cards.

An election committee chief in Hajjah province got surprised when he discovered that the number of the registered people in the electoral district is twice the population number.

The same problem crops up time and time again. Identity documents become the target of criminal enterprise and because they don’t work properly they deliver terrific profits to the bad guys without really helping the good guys very much.

The most wanted are Serbian biometric passports, “which cost up to EUR 3,000”, the article claims.

[From B92 – News – Crime & War crimes – “Albanians pay EUR 3,000 for Serbian passports”]

You can see the problem. If the state relies on an ID card to regulate its relationship with citizens and that ID card embodies certain entitlements (that is, it is not simply an identity) then the incentive to get one shoots up, because once you have it then you are “inside the wire”, so to speak, and can act with impunity. So long as the card actually works, of course.

About 10% of the 24 million MyKad identification cards issued since 2001 had been replaced after they were found to be faulty.

[From 10% of MyKad identification cards found to be faulty]

If 1 in 10 ID cards isn’t working properly, then people will get used to that fact, so if a criminal shows up with an ID card that doesn’t work, the shopkeeper/doorman/whoever will assume that it’s broken and take it at face value, so I could stick my picture on any old ID card, that put the card in the microwave to fry the chip. This isn’t really progress, is it.

Continue reading “Who benefits from a national ID scheme?”

[Dave Birch] I was in a meeting recently, the context is not relevant, where some of the Consult Hyperion team were helping a customer to develop a roadmap that included in a future transition to biometrics, and a discussion began about whether biometrics in certain kinds of mass market systems are about security or convenience (I’m convinced that they are about convenience, but that’s another discussion) and, if they are about security, whether existing biometrics are “secure enough”. “Secure enough”, though, is a complicated assertion — I’m glad to say, otherwise our risk analysis business wouldn’t be around for long — and this reminded about about a story from the Gulf about a woman who had been deported and then re-entered because her biometrics didn’t match the ones of hers on the “already been deported” register.

Although there were glitches in the system when it started, “for the past three or four years, we have not heard of a single case of someone getting around this”, the representative said.

[From Iris scan fails to stop returning deportee – The National Newspaper]

But this is illogical, isn’t it? If there were glitches in the system that allowed people to get through, then the bad guys would learn about this pretty quickly. People who are getting through on forged passports and not being recognised by the iris-recognition system are not going to report the system’s failure. So how would anyone know? It’s only when a failure comes to light through some other route that the failure is “logged”. So while the system is apparently working perfectly, in reality it isn’t. Let’s hope that a more detailed investigation in the UAE reveals that this woman’s irises were not scanned on re-entry or it will be back to drawing board for many people.

As readers will know, I like the idea of a “gold standard” biometric database, comprising iris, face and finger biometrics, to ensure the uniqueness of identity numbers (and that’s all). Adding biometrics to any identity system isn’t a “magic bullet”, but having a system that is founded on guaranteed uniqueness achieved through the use of biometrics might just be.

Continue reading “Magic bullet it’s not”

[Dave Birch] I was in the US recently, and had occasion to visit a number of office buildings. At some of these, in order to comply with security requirements, I was asked to provide “picture ID”. A couple of times, I produced my UK driving licence, which the guards looked at and then handed back, waving me through, despite the fact that they couldn’t possibly have known whether it was real or not. So what was the point? This is what is called “security theatre”, where the people involved (in this case, me and the guard) are both acting out our scripts to show security to the people around us. No actual security is involved. Were I a devotee of Osama bin Laden trying to get in to one of these buildings, I would simply have my accomplice call to make an appointment (perhaps posing as a security equipment salesman) using the same John Smith and then show up with a Western Australian driving licence in the name of John Smith with my picture on it. In fact, I’d lay a pound to a penny that I’d get in with Narnian driving licence. What is going on? If I’m going to see a contact at BigCompany, could he just use his digital identity to sign my Consult Hyperion public key, thus creating a credential certificate that I could load into my phone and that the guard could read using his PC, and which his PC could then resolve up the certificate chain to determine, in milliseconds, that I am entitled to enter the building?

In fact, what would be the point of the guard at all? I could just wander up to the building and present myself to the door: the door would ask my phone for a certificate, the phone would present it, but only if I am holding it (by my voiceprint, for example). That wouldn’t be theatre.

Continue reading “Theatrical”

[Dave Birch] Well, it’s bye bye to the ID card. In the end, I shouldn’t think that my constant whining about the scheme made a ha’pence of difference and my time on the IPS Advisory Forum was probably wasted. I did make representations (invited, I hasten to add) to a couple of Conservative think-tanks in the run-up to the election, having previously made a number of representations (invited, I hasten to add) to the Government and its advisors. What I said was, in essence, that the Tory plan to scrap the ID card was almost as bad as the Labour plan to keep it. Neither the existing scheme nor the Coalition scheme (ie, nothing) actually solve any of the problems that the lack of an identity infrastructure creates and I absolutely predict that the lack of such an infrastructure will in turn create a major barrier to improving efficiency in public services: it’s going to be really difficult to move government services online, introduce more self-service and reduce fraud without some form of identification and authentication system.

It’s fair to observe that there a many people (eg, the LSE team who did the original detailed review on the Home Office’s ideas) are enjoying their “told you so” moment. The old scheme, created by the Home Office and their development partners PA Consulting back in 2004, was never going to work. It was flawed from the start, and as a showcase for the British technology industry, it was an embarassment: it provided none of the services that the identity cards systems in advanced nations (eg, Germany, Hong Kong, Estonia) provide and there was never any evidence that it would do so. There were no specifications, no toolkits, no APIs. I should say that I don’t blame the people working on the project over at IPS, many of whom I have great respect for: the project was doomed before they started work.

There has been no single narrative explaining what deficiency the card is supposed to address: instead, it has been sold as a cure-all remedy for a host of problems. One minute it was touted as tackling illegal immigration or benefit fraud; the next it was the magic bullet for terrorism and organised crime.

[From FT.com / World – MPs deride £5.4bn cure-all]

Indeed, and the card that was built was not only pointless but functionless, implementing nothing more than the existing e-passport application. It wasn’t as if they didn’t have the money to scour the planet for the best advice.

In 1997/98, the Home Office’s total spending on consultants was £7.6m. By last year, it had rocketed to £147.9m. Spending by the Identity and Passport Service – the arm of the department in charge of the ID cards project – has gone up in the same period from £237,000 to £30m.

[From High price of launching ID cards as consultants cost us £150m | the Daily Mail]

I can well remember taking part in the “consultation process” at the time. I can also well remember feeling rather angry about it: no-one paid any attention (as far I could tell) to any ideas or opinions about the scheme or the vision for identity management, only about the procurement process. In particular, just as the Home Office never paid any attention to our submissions about the original entitlement card concept (more on this in a minute), they never paid any attention to any modern conceptions of identity and set about building an electronic version of the scheme was abandoned in 1952. An electronic version of a paper card and an electronic version of a card index. There was always an alternative…

Many people do think eID could and should be implemented without full identification, i.e. more granular disclosure with pseudonymity – see e.g. Dave Birch’s brilliant and very readable paper “Psychic ID: A blueprint for a modern national identity scheme” (PDF).

[From Tech and Law]

WH is much too kind, but there you go. Anyway, we are where we are, in an identity limbo. Where do we go from here? It’s traditional for incoming administrations to want short and simple instant fixes, so here’s a practical three point plan…

1. Turn the “Identity and Passport Service” back into the “Passport Service” and rebrand the current ID card as “Passport Plus”, an optional extra for people who are applying for or renewing passports.
2. Start an accelerated consultation process for an Entitlement “Card” that will be mandatory within the lifetime of this Parliament for access to public services.
3. Publish an API for using the service and provide open source software for people to start building services.

I say “Card”, of course, because any such plan would distinguish between the identity application that might reside in a smart card, phone, watch, hat, badge or implantable microchip and the smart card, phone, watch, hat, badge or implantable microchip itself. So, my Entitlement Card might have an identity application on it and my mobile phone (SIM) might have an identity application in it and they both have public key certificates with the same link to my entitlement number (or whatever) in it. I’ll have to turf out our original response to the entitlement card consultation process and tart it up.

The toolkit of technologies needed to do this — everything from digital signatures to biometrics to NFC to OpenID — is already in place. By going back to the original version of the government’s pre-Blunkett plan, the government and the industry together can create a more targeted project that can actually contribute to UK plc. I have to say, as an aside, that Consult Hyperion’s experiences advising the Irish government on their Public Services Card project has reinforced to me that focusing on a clear, simple and specific goal makes a very, very big difference to national infrastructure efforts of this kind.

Continue reading “Back to the future of the ID card”