Roll up, roll up
and watch a collection of goldfish
set light to a £15 million pile of notes
and reduce it to ashes.
The Identity & Passport Service (IPS) is an executive agency of the Home Office.
IPS were meant to issue us all with ID cards.
ID cards were meant to solve all our problems. Terrorism, crime, border control, you name it, think of a problem, ID cards would solve it.
And they were meant to make our lives easier. With ID cards, so it was said, it would be easier to open a bank account, easier to get a job, easier to prove your right to state benefits, easier to travel domestically and abroad, you name it, think of any transaction, ID cards would make it easier.
The UK ID card scheme had unstinting political support from July 2002 onwards from two prime ministers (Blair and Brown), five home secretaries (Blunkett, Clarke, Reid, Smith, Johnson) and the whole of Whitehall. The scheme had unstinting assistance from the best management consultants and contractors. Asked at one stage whether the budget had been exceeded, the Home Office said no, it couldn't be, there wasn't a budget. The media were largely in favour and, to start with, so were the public.
And yet it failed. By December 2010 when the Identity Cards Act 2006 was repealed, IPS had to admit that there was nothing to show for £292 million of public expenditure. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
The effect of complete failure on IPS was traumatic:
- Their chief executive retired and four other members of the board were dispensed with.
- IPS departed its smart new offices at Globe House and moved back home to Marsham St.
- When the Cabinet Office launched its new identity assurance programme, contractors went out of their way to say explicitly that they couldn't be associated with it if IPS were seen to be involved.
- And not just the contractors. The Department for Work and Pensions, IPS's own peers, denounced them.
- Asked why IPS – the Identity & Passport Service – were excluded from the identity assurance programme, the Cabinet Office said simply that they were "still reeling".
The distinguishing feature of IPS's ID card scheme was biometrics. Biometrics would allow people to be identified uniquely. Biometrics would allow people to have their identity verified. The scheme depended on biometrics being reliable. They're not. That's one reason why it failed.
You'd think they'd learn. But no. Here they come round the bowl again and what's this? A castle? No. Face recognition biometrics. Just what we need.
Hat tip to Toby Stevens, IPS today issued an invitation to tender (ITT) for a face recognition system:
They're offering a five-year contract worth between £6 million and £15 million to the lucky winners. Excluding VAT.
II.1.5) Short description of the contract or purchase(s)
The Identity and Passport Service (IPS) requires a Facial Recognition System (FRS) to help determine an applicants entitlement to and eligibility for a British Passport.
The Authority intends to deliver capability to undertake Biometric Verification and Biometric Identification (including searching against a second instance referred to as a watchlist (WL)) checks on all passport
applications.
The architecture will comprise a Facial Recognition Engine, and a Facial Recognition Workflow capability which includes business rules, management information, audit and a data interface from an existing application system.
The solution will use existing IPS biographic and biometric information as part of the FR checks, with appropriate data stored with each check ...
The ITT stipulates a number of throughput conditions that have to be met, e.g. the face recognition system has to be able to:
but there is no stated requirement for the system to be reliable. Which is lucky for the contractors. Because all the published tests of mass consumer face recognition suggest that IPS would be better off tossing a coin than using this flaky technology.
o Return a result from a Biometric Verification in under 10 seconds on 99.5% of searches.
o Return a result from a Biometric Identification search under 60 seconds on 99.5% of searches.
o Return a result from a Biometric Verification (WL) search in under 20 seconds on 99.5% of searches.
What IPS do insist on in the ITT is:
If IPS have a lot of staff on one day, then they might turn the dial up and make it a bit harder for your face to match the photograph stored on their register. If on the other hand there's a bit of a staff shortage, then they can turn the dial down and just let everyone match. Which rather gives the lie, doesn't it, to the suggestion that this charade has got anything to do with your identity, which doesn't vary with demand levels.
the capability to adjust the threshold for matching based on business drivers e.g. demand levels.
Most likely, IPS will lay off a lot of staff and then, like the UK Border Agency, re-recruit them when they re-discover that the technology that was meant to replace them doesn't work.
Lessons learnt? None. Roll up, roll up and watch a collection of goldfish set light to a £15 million pile of notes and reduce it to ashes.
