Identity Documentation

Earl of Erroll Excerpts

Thursday 14th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Erroll (CB)]

My Lords, I want to look at this from a practical point of view. Will the ID cards or a national database work? The first thing I want to know is what is it for? People think that it will help with payments and with fraud but what I want to know is that someone has paid their bill, I do not really need to know who they are. With travel and passports, is this a great reliable thing with the Government issuing it? In 2007, it was admitted that there were 10,000 fraudulently obtained but real passports issued by the Passport Office, because even it cannot protect against everything.

In terms of access, we have House of Lords passes to get in here; we do not really need an ID card especially for that. On medical and NHS matters, we have a number for that. Could it be amalgamated with something else? The problem is that expatriates go abroad; that is why there are more NHS numbers than we have people. All those expatriates can come back here at any point and demand services.

You might want to prove your qualifications; you have a driving licence for that. I suppose you could try to amalgamate things into one card but would you have to change the card every time you got a different qualification? Actually, everything is online now—all they do is look you up. You are not even going to have the paper part any more that says what your speeding offences are and so on.

The other thing such a document could be for is collecting tax, with the NINO, or the national insurance number—but, “Oh, there are far too many of those”. Foreigners working here receive entitlements by paying in and if they come back here to work later on, they are entitled to benefits. If they come and retire here they are entitled to their past history. We have lots of people on the system who may come back. It is not one-to-one so we should not want it linked to ID cards.

So the ID card is going to identify the bad guys—great. Will it work? Does it say “terrorist” or “crook” on it? What does the CRB check, as it used to be called, tell you? What it says is that you have not been caught yet. This is the trouble with these things. The 2004 Madrid bombers, for instance, were stopped by the police, who had no idea that they were terrorists and let them go. Does a card tell you where the bail-jumper is? It does not have a special tracking device on it to tell you who is a bail-jumper; it does not do anything like that.

I point out that 35 million tourists come to this country every year, for eight days each on average—that is just the tourists; there are also all the businesspeople. That is an awful lot of foreign identity documents, issued by all sorts of places which I do not think I had better name; let us call them Ruritania in general, although I can tell you that an awful lot are issued by states that have no interest in helping us whatsoever. How do you check that a document belongs to a particular person, otherwise it is just a flash-and-go card; you look at the picture and maybe it looks sufficiently like the person: “You’ve grown a beard, okay, I won’t worry”? There are portable biometric readers but the trouble with biometrics is that they change with age; even DNA can change a bit but I do not know enough about it to know whether all or just a critical bit changes. What I do know is that, within the limited accuracy of laboratory test results—because they are always reduced to a set number of points that can be compared electronically—you will find that you have duplicate thumb or finger-prints, which, visually, you might be able to see are different. It is the same thing with a portion of DNA; usually it is said to be a one-in-6-million match. That means that, with that level of accuracy in the testing, there are 10 people in the UK with the same DNA as you. Given that most of the population are in the south-east, it means that quite a few of them are close to where you are. So, by coincidence, quite a few people could be stopped who might be mistaken for you.

Another big problem is false negatives. You stick your cash card into the wall to take out some money and you stick your ID card in alongside, you put your thumb on the reader and it then says you are not you. But you have a bill to pay or you have to pay a chap who is trying to do you for dropping litter on the ground—with all these new police powers or local authority powers we are getting. You cannot take out the money so you have to spend the night in jail because it has said that you are not you. The false negatives are very difficult; the moment you try to eliminate them, you lessen your biometric uniqueness. You have to blur it a bit more, because there are huge problems around that.

What I really worry about, which has been mentioned already, is the Gestapo/Stasi issue. Whenever the state has had a huge amount of knowledge about us, it has used it for its own ends. I will mention that at the very end.

It also helps fraud if you have a single number. The US experience of having a single tax number to link all your details makes it much easier. If you can get that off someone plus a couple of other bits, you get everything on them. It is much easier to impersonate them there. Here, it is much harder to get everything and there is therefore friction between the different silos, when something does not quite match if you catch the crooks. They have half your information but not all of it. Of course, if we link up all the databases it will be a magnet for the crooks and spies. The first thing I would do as a foreign agency would be to have someone in there to get the details so that I could put in implants, create identities and so on. It will only give us a false sense of security.

You can actually get a good feel for how someone is by building up a profile of what they do online. Their digital footprint is probably much more critical nowadays. With online feedback and references, you can discover whether people are good or bad by other people in the community telling you whether they are all right. That is how we do things in real life: we get references about people.

To finish off, I recommend a very good miniseries of “Doctor Zhivago” that was done in 2002. Interestingly, it was nothing like the old David Lean romance but all about how a powerful apparatchik with access to information can control a family for his own nefarious ends. We should just be careful that we do not end up with a J Edgar Hoover in the UK starting to control things because he has access to the databases. I am not entirely paranoid but, just because I am, it does not mean to say that they are not out to get me. Another thing I do not want to see is cordon and search to trawl for illegal immigrants or bail-jumpers, for example—how else are these people to be found?—because of the ID card. All I can say is that if you are eating your dinner and the waiters at your great occasion have all been hauled off for checking but did not have the right ID cards, you are going to be pretty cross.