Report - Guardian

The LSE Identity Project Report: June 2005 1993. The police and many other organisations will have almost unconstrained accessto data held in the NIR, thereby creating serious new risks for honest UKcitizens and significant new opportunities for criminals.4. Parties who are able to access the National Identity Register will be able todiscover the subject’s passwords and related security details and will thus beable to impersonate them in situations where these items are intended to provideevidence of the subject’s consent to access.5. The Bill fails to establish a sound basis for identity verification that is capable ofsatisfying the essential interests of the three parties involved (the subject, theverifier and the state).6. The lack of any explicit obligation to ensure the security of data held in the NIR,and the weak controls on access to this data, will facilitate ‘identity theft’ andwill lead to serious increases in the risks faced by those who need to restrictaccess to identity data in order to ensure their safety or security .7. In particular, these serious deficiencies will facilitate the operations of terrorists,animal rights activists and others who wish to identify suitable targets for theirillegal activities.8. It seems likely that the scale and complexity of the National Identity Registerwill make it impossible to maintain the integrity of the data that it holds; declinein its integrity over time seems inevitable and will undermine its value, thushaving a negative impact on all services that become dependent on it.9. Most importantly, it is possible that the centralisation of a massive amount ofidentity related data in a single database such as the National Identity Registercreates an inherent and serious security risk.