David Blunkett has axe to grind on UK identity cards

EX HOME OFFICE minister David Blunkett penned a missive to The Times a few days back which essentially said that ID cards are the answer to enormous security SNAFUs like last week's news that a government department lost 25 million bits of data.

All crammed onto a couple of CDs.

But his original letter has provoked a bunch of letters, published in The Thunderer yesterday - a day when most people don't read The Times and when it costs £1.40 ($3).

One lass said if the National Identity Register was as compromised as Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, we can hardly expect to grow a new set of fingerprints.

But a person called Garrick Alder from Bedford, in Bedfordshire, made a more telling point.

He alleged in a letter to The Times that Blunkett brushing aside legit concerns about ID cards might be down to the fact he is a paid adviser to a Texas security firm called Entrust. "The company has declared a formal interest in bidding to run Britain's ID card scheme," he said.

We're pretty sure that our tax records were outsourced to the US of A, quite a few years back. Trouble is, most politicians are IT illiterate, so few know enough about databases to ask the right questions anyway.

You can just about get 25 million multiple database fields onto two CDs, by the way, provided it was all text and quite a bit zipped up. No one seems to know or own up to which bit of database software is being used.

We'd have recommended using ex-Borland supremo's Philippe Kahn's fantastic Paradox package, but no one asked our advice you will probably not be surprised to learn. µ

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