Biometric Passports in the UK
The UK government tried, and failed, to get a national ID. Now they’re adding biometrics to their passports.
Financing for the Passport Office is planned to rise from £182 million a year to £415 million a year by 2008 to cope with the introduction of biometric information such as fingerprints.
A Home Office spokesman said the aim was to cut out the 1,500 fraudulent applications found through the postal system last year alone.
Okay, let’s do the math. Eliminating 1,500 instances of fraud will cost £233 million a year. That comes to £155,000 per instance of fraud.
Does this kind of security trade-off make sense to anyone? Is there absolutely nothing better the UK government can do to ensure security and safety with £233 million a year?
Yes, adding additional biometrics to passports—there’s already a picture—will make them more secure. But I don’t think that the additional security is worth the money and the additional risks. It’s a bad security trade-off.
And I’m not a fan of national IDs.
Israel Torres • April 21, 2005 1:31 PM
I’m a big fan of NID (boo hiss) since it is inevitable, but I do think that from the article other answers may provide a better solution to their overall dilemma. It doesn’t appear many mass scale operations handle biometrics in a robust fashion. :/
Israel Torres