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15 Jan 2005

George Mason University glitch is a glimpse of the scale of ID calamity the UK faces

Something bad happened at George Mason University, according to News.com . But when it happens in the UK it will be about 1000 times worse.

The University lost 30,000 names, photos and social security numbers of its students with ID cards to hackers. Kim Cameron says this reinforces the rule that as identity systems aggregate information, they aggregate risk.

Similar incidents happened to Georgia Institute of Technology (57,000 people) and the University of Texas at Austin (55,000), and last year, more than 1 million California residents had their personal information leaked thanks to a pair of incidents at UCLA and the University of California at Berkeley, Kim reports.

The sickening logic is that these ill-conceived university ID systems make appealing targets for identity thieves, and that a compulsory UK ID system will be far more appealing still.

Just how much risk do we want to aggregate here? Pretty much all of it, it would seem.

Kim also points us to Jamie Lewis, and to Johannes Ernst’s blog which checks LID’s conformance to Kim’s laws of identity.

Tell your MP! Please - someone tell Parliamentary Office of Science & Technology! Ian - tell Alan Milburn, Patricia Hewitt or whoever gets things done! We’re only now working out the rules. There seem to be better ways to do this. Let’s evaluate them before Parliament votes and sets in inexorable motion a really problematic ID system.

• Posted by William Heath on 15/01/05 at 7:58pm
• Categories · Identity
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