{"id":1181,"date":"2011-03-27T11:50:30","date_gmt":"2011-03-27T19:50:30","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=1181"},"modified":"2011-03-31T03:41:09","modified_gmt":"2011-03-31T11:41:09","slug":"broken-laws-of-identity-lead-to-systems-destruction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/?p=1181","title":{"rendered":"Broken Laws of Identity lead to system's destruction"},"content":{"rendered":"

Britain's Home Office<\/a> has posted\u00a0a remarkable\u00a0video, showing Immigration Minister Damian Green<\/a>\u00a0methodically pulverizing the disk drives that once held the centralized database\u00a0that was to be connected to\u00a0the British ID Cards introduced by Tony Blair.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

“What we're doing today is CRUSHING, the final remnants of the national identity card scheme – the disks and hard drives that held the information on the national identity register have been wiped and they're crushed and reduced to bits of metal so everyone can be absolutely sure that the identity scheme is absolutely dead and buried.<\/p>\n

“This whole experiment of trying to collect huge amounts of private information on everyone in this country – and collecting on the central database – is no more, and it's a first step towards a wider agenda of freedom.\u00a0 We're publishing the protection of freedoms bill as well, and what this shows is that we want to rebalance the security and freedom of the citizen.\u00a0 We think that previously we have not had enough emphasis on peoples’ individual freedom and privacy, and we're determined to restore the proper balance on that.”<\/p>\n

Readers of Identityblog will recall that the British scheme\u00a0was exceptional in breaking so many\u00a0of the Laws of Identity<\/a> at once.\u00a0 It flouted the first law – User control and Consent – since\u00a0citizen participation was mandatory.\u00a0 It broke the second – Minimal Disclosure for a Constrained Use – since it followed the premise that as much information as possible should be assembled in a central location for whatever uses\u00a0might arise…\u00a0 The third law of Justifiable Parties was not\u00a0addressed given the centralized architecture of the system, in which all departments would have made queries and posted updates to the same database and access could have been extended at the flick of a wrist.\u00a0 And the fourth law of “Directed Identity” was a clear non-goal, since the whole idea was to use a single identifier to unify all possible information.<\/p>\n

Over time\u00a0opposition to the scheme began to grow\u00a0and became widespread, even though the Blair and Brown\u00a0governments claimed\u00a0their polls showed majority support.\u00a0\u00a0Many\u00a0well-known technologists\u00a0and privacy advocates attempted to convince them to consider privacy enhancing technologies and architectures that would be less vulnerable to security and privacy meltdown – but\u00a0without success.\u00a0 Beyond the scheme's many technical deficiencies, the social\u00a0fracturing\u00a0it created\u00a0eventually assured its irrelevance as a foundational element for the digital future.<\/p>\n

Many say the scheme was an important issue in the last British election.\u00a0\u00a0It certainly appears\u00a0the\u00a0change in government\u00a0has left the ID card scheme in the dust, with politicians of all stripes eager to distance themselves from it.\u00a0 Damian Green, who\u00a0worked in television and\u00a0understands it, does a masterful job of\u00a0showing what his views are.\u00a0 His video<\/a> posted by the Home Office, seems iconic.<\/p>\n

All in all, the\u00a0fate of the British ID Card\u00a0and centralized database scheme\u00a0is exactly what was predicted\u00a0by\u00a0the Laws of Identity<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"Those<\/a><\/p>\n

[Thanks to Jerry Fishenden (here <\/a>and here<\/a>) for twittering Damian Green's video]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“The hard drives that held the information on the national identity register have been wiped and they're crushed and reduced to bits of metal so everyone can be absolutely sure…” <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":68,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6,3,47,11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1181"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/68"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1181"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1181\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}