Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Last day of parliament? Serial killer stories still dominating the news? What better day could there be to sneak out a major announcement on changes to the proposed National Identity Register in a written statement?

Accountability is a dirty word to these people.

With the government determined to soldier on with this Orwellian register, the only question remaining is just how disastrously wrong their attempts to implement it will be. No strike that, it's actually fairly obvious; it's going to go very badly indeed. Unlike Orwell's authoritarians, this lot are also hopelessly incompetent a lot of the time. So it's not all bad.

See also NO2ID.

Tags: , , ,

3 comments:

Marcin said...

The most politically unacceptable scenario is that a paedophile exploits the complete trustworthiness of identity verification to impersonate a qualified school teacher.

Anonymous said...

Another important thing is the amount of public money which will be wasted, ponied up to corporations for this coming fiasco. It will be a privatised thing and therefore almost unaccountable to us, with cost overruns and blackmail similar to other privatisations that are put beyond control of the British people

Anonymous said...

Problem here is that the people making the decisions know absolutely bugger all about how a database works, and how you go about expanding one.

The short answer with databases is that when you set one up, you spec out the kit it'll run on based on how big the database is expected to be. You especially spec out the backup systems on how much data there's going to be in there max, and you really do not want to see size increases there.

So, Bungler Reid and his merry men think they're going to stick all the ID cards data in existing databases. Given the "everything including the kitchen sink" approach the ID cards stuff is supposed to have in it, this is a non-starter.

Databases can be expanded over time, but if you do much more than treble the size, you're in potential fuckup territory. The ID Cards stuff will increase database sizes by a couple of orders of magnitude.

Oh dear.

Wait for the failures, folks; this is one feature creep that is so not going to happen.