Category: UK National Database and ID Card

We’ve blogged before about the disastrous National Programme for Information Technology (see here). NPfIT is the NHS plan to centralise all patient record keeping on yet another Big Brother style supercomputer. Originally budgeted at £2.3bn, it’s now reckoned likely to cost up to £50bn, and it’s the largest civilian IT programme in the entire history of the world. Link… The disastrous Scottish Parliament project was completed pre-blogging. But yesterday’s partial roof collapse shows you can never finally draw the line under a real government spending fiasco. Just as a reminder, the original cost estimate was a range of £10-40m (1997

Great article over at BlairWatch today on just how competent the National Identity Register Database and ‘Identification Gulags’ will have to be (link). Some choice numbers from the article. We’re looking at a system workload in the first year of ten times the long term load. In a new system set up by a Government IT contractor, paying the kind of wages for operating the kind of systems that have led to such high morale and efficiency in organisations like the CSA that’s a hell of a task. This is all supposed to kick off and be working at that

After last nights playing with words that ensures every new UK passport applicant from 2008 will have to attend a Government Appointed ‘Gulag’ Identification Centre to prove who you are, then be fingerprinted, have your eye iris scanned and recorded, given a database identifier number, and forcibly placed on the central Orwellian database. You’ll have an interview to determine every address where you have lived previously, where you live now, if you are allowed to leave the country, … and a 4 digit PIN code to keep it all secure on your ID card. But if you don’t want to

Last week, Andrew Burnham, a junior minister at the Home Office, confirmed the anonymous email by admitting that the ID card scheme would now include chip-and-pin technology because it would be a cheaper way of checking each person’s identity. The sophisticated technology on which this bill was sold will cost too much to operate, with millions of checks being made every week. That is a very important admission because the government still maintains the fiction that the ID card is defence against identity theft and terrorism. The 7 July bombers would not have been deterred by a piece of plastic.

“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety are probably British and should be shot at.” Link: /. The decision goes back to the House of Lords. I hope they dig their heels in.