My earlier piece on Hamas and the ‘cloned’ passports has been picked up by Spy Blog, who watches like a hawk everything to do with UK government surveillance and other technologies.

He adds some useful expert points on just how difficult it is to come up with any foolproof scheme for catching people travelling under false identities:

Charles Crawford’s points apply equally well to the older non-biometric Passports, which were apparently used in Dubai, as well as to the newer International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) compliant "biometric" ones, since these only currently contain a digitised image of the passport photograph and what is written on the face of the passport, and do not yet contain any fingerprint or iris scan biometric identifiers.

Facial Recognition is pretty useless at a passport control checkpoint, where there are lots of variations in ambient lighting etc. The UK Passport Service and some other foreign government equivalents do try to use it on their centralised digitised Passport Photo databases (which is why there are stupid rules on the size of such photos, in which you are now forbidden to smile), to try to spot obvious multiple applications in different names, but this is hardly an infallible automatic system, which needs plenty of experienced human facial recognition effort as well.

Spy Blog links all this to unconvincing official claims that UK ID cards would reduce ‘identity theft’. He makes an interesting point about the impact on intelligence work if robust identity identification technology (linking names to identifiable individual people) were actually set up everywhere:

If biometric fingerprint Passports ever do work and centralised computer linked biometric readers ever do become universally installed at every border post, then where does that leave British or other intelligence agents, undercover policemen or special forces personnel ?

It may be possible to officially fake the UK National identity Register database entries and issue them with a genuine UK Passport and / or ID Card, under their cover name alias, but if they have ever crossed a foreign border in the past, perhaps when on holiday or business before they were recruited into a secret role, and had their fingerprint biometrics scanned, then, in theory, the mis-match in names using different Passports, should automatically be flagged up on the foreign government system.

Read it. Complicated. But fascinating.