Big Blue boffin slams Brit ID cards

IBM RESEARCHER Michael Osborne has slammed the UK's plans for ID cards as too expensive and the wrong thing to do the job.

Osborne, who is based at IBM's Zurich research labs, said that the planned central database containing volumes of data about citizens is an extremely bad thing.

He said that people would be able to create connections between identities such as driver, taxpayer, or health-care recipient, which will compromise security.

Any central store of biometric data would be attractive to hackers, Osborne said.

He added that biometric technology was still too immature to try on something as widespread as a national ID scheme.

Osborne said that a project of this size had not been attempted before and would end up costing a rack of coins. Certainly, far more than the government has budgeted for it.

He told IT World Canada that these were his personal views and not that of his employer. µ