Ex-MI5 chief calls national ID cards "useless"
posted by:Mohamed Layouni // 11:26 AM // November 18, 2005 // Digital Democracy: law, policy and politics
Dame Stella Rimington, the former head of the UK Security Services MI5, declared -- following the government's recent defeat on its ID card plans -- that ID cards are forgeable and thus useless. She said:
ID cards have possibly some purpose.
But I don't think that anybody in the intelligence services, particularly in my former service, would be pressing for ID cards.
My angle on ID cards is that they may be of some use but only if they can be made unforgeable - and all our other documentation is quite easy to forge.
If we have ID cards at vast expense and people can go into a back room and forge them they are going to be absolutely useless.
ID cards may be helpful in all kinds of things but I don't think they are necessarily going to make us any safer.
For more, see the full BBC article here.
