• Home
• Subjects
• Blog Roll
• Blindside
• Kable
• Advanced Search

• 

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
Trackbacks (0)  Permalink

Ideal Government

Let's say what we want from e-enabled government. Let's observe government first-hand. Let's say "Wouldn't It Be Better If" (WIBBI). Become an ethnographer of bureaucracy today! It beats getting frustrated with public services.

Categories

• "What do we want?"
  • Wibbipedia/MindtheGap
  • Design: Co-creation
    • Online Maps
  • Design: user-oriented
  • Foundation of Trust
    • Identity
    • Data nitwittery
  • Save Time and Money
• Greener government IT
• Pertinent Art
• Power of Information
• Political engagement
• "Transformational Government"
• Government Procurement
• Across the Board
• Ideal Goverment - project

Comment

Anyone is free to comment. Or mail with an article if you want to be an author. I'll post it up and send you a password. This whole thing is supported by Kable.

Authors

Sign up for new articles

Copyright

Designed by...

Statistics

This page has been viewed 1372054 times

Entries: 1622 | Comments: 2660 | Trackbacks: 206
Most Recent Entry: 10/06/2008 10:46 am
Most Recent Comment: 10/06/2008 12:08 pm

Members: 185 | Logged in: 0 | Guests: 41
Most recent visitor: 10/06/2008 02:59 pm
Most visitors ever: 443 on 10/12/2005 02:21 pm