[UK] David Blunkett and authoritarianism.

The BBQ Pit
41

Exactly. You can’t. This is a reality that we all know, accept and is part of what all security policies must contend with.

The danger of ID cards is that they give a pretence that there is a way of proving who exactly everyone is. Once you have the information on the card the matter is closed, no further checking required. Which makes forged, stolen or incorrect identities twice as dangerous to the innocent and twice as useful to the criminal.

42

The odds of two people having identical fingerprints are 64 billion to 1 but I have no idea what the odds are of our flawed equipment identifying two non-identical fingerprints as being the same. A great deal less I imagine.

Let’s suppose that it is 10 million to one, for example. But that means that, on average, there are five other people in the UK with a fingerprint functionally equal to mine.

As it is, I have never been suspected of a crime so my prints are not on record. As such, when the police try to match fingerprints they can only do so for those under suspicion already and we are left with the odds of their innocence given that their fingerprint matches that at the scene and the other evidence already against them. This conditional probability is a lot greater than 10 million to 1.

But in a world where all of our fingerprints are on record, the police will simply do a trawl of the database to discover who is a match. They then come up with five innocent people and one guilty (maybe, assuming the print isn’t smudged enough that they get 12 innocent and no guilty.) Those five innocent people will then, basically, have the job of proving that they are innocent. Juries that don’t understand basic statistics will just be told that the odds against the person on trial is “1 in 10 million”… or even “1 in 64 billion”.

I foresee some serious miscarriages of justice.

pan

43

A lot of my thoughts have already been very well set out by you lot. A few quick point, though, as I see 'em.

  1. Hoo boy, there are a lot of weak points.
  2. There’s no weak point so weak as the one you’re in denial about. And the Government appear to be in denial about pretty much all the weak points. New policy bravado, perhaps ? but that’s not to say they’ll back down from it.
  3. It’s one thing to have nothing to hide from today’s government. It’s another to have nothing to hide from tomorrow’s government, or the government 10 years down the road. What if a group considered innocuous today is tomorrow’s folk devil? I think people should be cautious before declaring that they have nothing to hide.
    3a) It also depends on your definition of “something to hide”. Are we talking serious crime, or are we talking general undesirability and moral turpitude?
  4. As kabbes points out, being falsely accused under a supposedly infallible system is A Bad Thing.
  5. It would be better to spend money making sure that existing databases are correctly maintained - so that, for example, Ian Huntley’s records aren’t thrown away unless they really need to be.
  6. My, the introduction of the Passport Office’s computer system a couple of years ago sure went well, didn’t it? Mmm hmm.
    The real biggie is that if you believe a fallible system to be infallible, you are FUCKED. You can’t argue that one away.