By John Lettice for The
Register.
This story has been reproduced with permission.
Blair made the pledge to collar the lot of us, and some, as part
of a rag-bag of warmed-over, half-baked, misleading, and just plain
untrue claims issued in an email to the near-28,000 signatories of
the Downing Street petition calling for the scrapping of the ID
card scheme. The notion of the police having access to the NIR
fingerprint data in order to tackle unsolved crime is not entirely
new (the Home Office document Identity Cards Scheme -
Benefits Overview tentatively suggested this could happen a
couple of years back), but it's not something that has previously
been pushed by senior ministers.
Characteristically, Blair and his delusional wonks find
themselves unable to put forward this unfeasible scheme without
falsifying the data. Blair talks of "fingerprints found at the
scene of some 900,000 unsolved crimes", when actually the 900,000
is the total of crime scene marks found at scenes of unsolved
crimes, so the total number of crimes covered will be lower, and
indistinct prints together will the headache of matching scene of
crime prints to NIR prints reduce the number further.
And how would they do it, anyway? Fingerprints taken for
biometric ID systems aren't particularly compatible with the
fingerprint systems historically used in criminal justice systems.
The point of an ID fingerprint system is primarily to confirm the
identity of a known individual, comparing a standard format
fingerprint previously gathered with a real fingerprint presented
in a standard way. Criminal justice, on the other hand, needs to be
able to deal with partial fingerprints and indistinct marks, and to
have systems in place to support one to many searches. This
explains the historical use of 'rolled' prints, which record a
greater area of print. The kind of print recorded by criminal
justice systems has been changing, but it clearly isn't possible to
get burglars to leave prints under controlled conditions.
Automated one to many searches of the NIR for the purposes of
identifying individuals are possible (necessary, in that checking
your ID against the NIR is one of things it says on the tin), but
they're far less feasible when it comes to scene of crime marks.
Parts of this process can be automated to some extent, but the
machines will miss some and throw up many false matches, so human
expertise of the sort already used by police will be necessary, on
a far larger scale. You'll possibly also have noted that even the
inflated figure of 900,000 for unsolved crimes seems rather low -
yes that's right, it's by no means standard practice for police to
send round the fingerprint squad to scenes of crime.
Logically, in Blair's Wonderworld of Criminal Justice, police
police showing up at scenes of crime will as a matter of course
scan it (um, with what?) for prints, and then compare the images
with the NIR in real time (er, how?) in order to discover... Yes,
that this particular set of fuzzy images unearthed at Anwar's
Doughnut Bar might have been left by any one of several thousand of
the 60 million people on the NIR. The Boys in Blue are going to
love this gear, which doesn't even exist yet (mobile fingerprint
readers do, but these are for taking prints off real people).
We shouldn't leave this demented scheme without noting that the
production of matches that will pass muster in a court of law will
still require the presence of the traditional fingerprint
squad at the scene of the crime. And if police do start to make
routine automated checks at scenes of crime then we're going to
need a lot more traditional squads to chase down the leads, so more
specialists would be needed at this end of the process as well.
Petition signatories are unlikely to be convinced by this or any
of the other claims made in the Blair email. No2ID debunks these
here, and National Coordinator Phil Booth
comments: "The PM's claims on this subject are not exactly lies, so
much as fact-free. Endlessly repeating a fabrication doesn't make
it real, Mr Blair."
The repetition of the claim that identity fraud costs £1.7
billion annually is however particularly worth noting. The £1.7
billion figure has, as No2ID points out, been discredited by
Andrew Gilligan and Andy McCue of Silicon, and is
itself based on the Cabinet Office's 2002 study which we analysed
here. Bear in mind that the £1.7 billion simply
tags a few numbers onto the 2002 ones, and that the claim that it
was "a one-off exercise using the same methodology as the 2002
Cabinet Office Study" is wildly misleading. The 2002 study itself
did little more than take a guess at the order of magnitude of ID
fraud, and at how ID fraud might be defined (ID theft? ID fraud?
ID-related crime? Credit card theft? Who knows?).
One thing that was clear from the 2002 study was that
further work would be needed to provide a clear definition of what
we mean by ID fraud, and consequently take us closer to making a
realistic estimate of what it might cost. The Government was
so interested in this in 2002 that it conducted no further
studies, and didn't even bother to update and expand the data
contained in the 2002 report. It did say "£1.3 billion" a lot until
2006, when it chucked some more numbers into the pile of aging
stats and started saying "£1.7 billion" instead. And there they go again. "Yours sincerely, Tony Blair",
sic.
© The Register
2007
