Ad 'urgently' seeks company to build national e-ID system An intriguing, and slightly concerning, job ad has appeared on freelancing website People Per Hour, entitled: "URGENT!!! Delivery of a National e-ID System". The post is from an unidentified small IT consultancy which is submitting a bid to deliver a National e-ID system, including a biometric enrolment for all citizens and …
You've all missed two proud nations much closer to home, that could be tooling up for an independent future. Yorkshire; oh and Scotland.
And Cornwall!
[1] I'd like to point out at this point that neither my wife nor I are Cornish. Her Dad was though and she was born in Plymouth, so close enough for Government work. We are both Celtiphiles too..
They are already enrolled from a few weeks old - the new passports are biometric worldwide.
The "age of 5" + 4 million is interesting as it is not something I can map to any Eu country (or developed country for that matter). They all already have enrollment from the moment of first passport application.
Like BT, Capita and the rest? You know those that have frankly piss poor records of delivering Government IT Contracts?
But more importantly, is the contract going to stop the inevitable feature creep that (un)civil servants have a habit of piling onto a contract...? You know the ones that totally bugger up any hope of the original project of ever delivering more than "Hello World" to the end user?
There's an obvious way to get an excellent, well-tested ID system: buy a copy of the Estonian ID system, which seems to be generally regarded as best-of-breed.
Then don't let ANYBODY 'adapt it to our needs' because, knowing our wonderful GDS and their pals, doing that will immediately convert it into a heap of steaming turds while at least doubling its cost.
1. Transplant from a donor who is already enrolled in their own right (a. donor is deceased b. donor is alive)
2. Transplant from a donor who is not enrolled in their own right.
Do you scrub the fingers from the donor record in 1.b (or 1. a). Do you have a fingers table with a relationship key to users? What if you don;t but hand transplants become more common?
Reg commentards must be able to pose some other interesting questions for the spec drafters
-->Thumb (but not fingers!) down for ID cards...
Or.....you can say no and they get issued a pin. Apparently my kids can type their pin faster than the other kids read their fingerprints because it can take two or three goes to work. They have to provide pin as an alternative because some kids fingerprints are too hard to read apparently.
4 million is an rough estimate of non-British-but-otherwise-EU citizens that may be living perfectly legally in the UK that might end up having to apply for residency permits depending on how the Brexit negotiations go. It seems that the politicians pushing for Brexit have just realised that there are no accurate numbers, and to get accurate numbers will require some sort of census or audit.
The number of people involved in doing this task will probably be more than there are EU civil servants.
If if is for EU citizens, adults will have an ID card/passport and the child's own country can handle first-time registration. Yes, even if the child is 30 and lived in the UK all their life and thought they were British or slipped through the net because the UK didn't implement registration for EU citizens.
The UK doesn't need to register other countries' citizens if they needed a passport or ID card to get here in the first place. Why make it more costly and slow than it needs to be?
Makes sense with the timing.
Some minister will want to know what's feasible or affordable so that they don't seem quite so dumb in the negotiations. So they ask a civil servant for some proposals.
The Home Office's answer to everything is a National ID Database, so the civil servant who is given the research task just fills in the most recent estimate for the population of EU citizens in the UK and asks around the usual suspects for quotes/tenders.
Some opportunistic company reckons it is worth a punt maybe hiring a few people so that they can claim to be ahead of the game if things come to fruition. So they post the ad.
The exact requirements in the ad are therefore one company's guess based on one placeholder-proposal from one civil servant from a minister who is only asking because he hasn't thought about it carefully yet.
Surely, for the UK to track EU nationals visiting the country, you plug them into the system that tracks immigration and other visas. It might need to be scaled-up a bit, but that's all.
We don't kneed a completely new system.
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