Owain wrote:


The govt don't have to make them overtly compulsory - they will become
the standard for all occasions where identity is desired (even if not
neeed), whether de facto or de jure. Sign up with a doctor or dentist,
sign up for evening classes, open a bank account, rent a flat /
television / car, start a new job, buy a new consumer unit ....

Indeed. But I can't see most of these simpler "ID checks" being done by
Fully Authorised Users with biometric readers and links to the Central
DB. (To be specific: enrol at NHS provider: yes, but emergency treatment
won't need an ID card; evg classes - no; open back acct - yes-ish; rent
a flat - no; rent a teli - unlikely unless TVLRO enforce and/or
subsidise readers at point-of-rental, and in any case the TV rental
market's almost dead now that cheapie TVs are, wot, 40 quid at Tesco;
rent a car - not at most sites, *expecially* airports (short-stay
overseas visitors won't carry a UK-issued ID card); start new job - no,
most employers won't have on-line readers; buy a new CU - yes of course ;-)

All of which suggests to me that there will be a great deal of purely
visual ID-card "checking" - "yup, that looks like your photo on that bit
of laminated plastic". Which will make trivial forgery well worth while:
and because the majority, law-abiding population would (if the
legislation came to pass) carry genuine Govt-issue ID, the aura of
Officially Issued ID would make using non-reader-checked use of
forgeries *more*, not less, attractive to fraudsters.

If you want to think those example through some more - the 'start a new
job' is one where there's a whole variety of cases depending on the
'officialness' of the employer. At one end of the scale is applying for
a permanent job for a large private- or public-sector body: there the
personnel dept will prolly have an on-line reader. The big range in the
middle will be at smaller private companies, where they'll copy down
details manually from the card you show them, but if the NIRN (National
Identity Registration Number) on the card turns out (when they pass
details on to the tax-n-benefit authorities) not to match the name you
gave, expect uncomfortable questions from your new employer. At the
purely casual end, 'employers' will look at ID cards and write down
details for the valid-looking ones, so that they can vaguely plausibly
claim to have checked; many will push responsibility for such checking
on to agency intermediaries anyway.

Stefek, appearing to drift from uk.d-i-y topics - but what's more d-i-y
than forging plausible-looking State ID cards? Oh, silly me, it'll be
*illegal*; so that'll stop everyone, expecially criminals, from doing it...