Alternate Seat of TYR

Genius. Not only can the Chaos Computer Club tell you how to fool a fingerprint reader, but they’ve got Wolfgang Schauble’s dabs.

ACPO is no longer tolerable as an organisation. It’s a freefloating lobby for ever-greater authoritarianism. Seriously.
Gary Pugh, director of forensic sciences at Scotland Yard and the new DNA spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), said a debate was needed on how far Britain should go in identifying potential offenders, given that some [...]

Via comp.risks, across the wire the electric message came: German students crack encryption on over 2bn RFID smartcards made by NXP Semiconductor. The cards in question are NXP’s MiFare Classic type, and are used for public transport….but also for access control in sensitive government installations, it turns out. Inevitably, NXP threw up its hands - [...]

So, the Obscurer snagged an interview with Gordon Brown. And what did he have to say? Well, he spoke of identity cards. And the news is not good at all. It seems that Brown is ill-informed about his own proposals (something which we have seen already from past ministers), is still committed to the most [...]

To my utter astonishment, our neighbouring local authority has joined the movement of councils refusing to cooperate with the National Identity Register. Spelthorne Borough Council - that’s the area north of the Thames that was taken over from London by Surrey in 1996 - passed a motion on the 13th of December rejecting ID cards [...]

Well this is impressive; Polly Toynbee arguing that anyone who disagrees with ID cards is objectively pro-illegal immigrants being beaten up. Seriously; the argument is not that we need ID cards to keep the immigrants out, but that we need to cut the government some slack in order to stop them beating up illegal immigrants.
This [...]

I can’t begin to imagine why LibDem polls are up; especially as at the same time more of the population now oppose than support ID cards.

The Biggest Data Fart In The World Ever (BDFITWE) just keeps on getting better/worse. Check this out:
Sir John Bourn, the outgoing comptroller and auditor general, told a secret session of the public accounts committee that a senior business manager at Revenue & Customs had authorised the information to be released in its full form. His [...]

It’s usually the Home Office that leads the way in the British government’s eternal Olympics of stupidity; but now and again, someone is inspired to go that bit further, to be a tiger, to raise the bar.
Having built a monster centralised database of every last child in the UK, the Revenue burned it to a [...]

In Texas, a man suspected of homicide has escaped from prison. How he did it tells us something about the inevitable failure of ID cards, and the importance of false positives. Via Bruce Schneier.
What happened? Well, the suspected killer was in a cell with another remand prisoner, a car thief named Garcia. He memorised Garcia’s [...]