UK CHANCELLOR GORDON BROWN'S SPEECH ON TERROISM Guardian Unlimited Politics Special Reports Gordon Brown's speech on terrorism:



WEBLOG EDITOR'S Note: This FOURTH part of the speech included below deals with IDENTITY THEFT

FOR Full text of the speech given by the chancellor to the Royal United Services Institute in London go to weblink........

"Identity

Fourth,
the requirements for security in identity. There is a common thread running through the new security challenges - and that is the growing importance, and the obvious vulnerability, of identity. The risk to me and you as individuals is that our identities are stolen for terrorist or other reasons and used against us and what we stand for. The risk is also that, using false identities or without proper investigation of who they are, people enter and abuse our country.

This matters in Britain when we know that as many as one in four criminals use false identities and that as many as one in five companies could be hit by identity fraud.

The economic and social cost of identity fraud is into the billions of pounds and growing, with a new estimate from the Home Office of ?1.7 billion.

Just as we have been facing new threats and evolving new responses in national and international security, analogous developments in the private sector - in banking and finance - to ensure the protection of consumers identities show both the need for and the opportunity to change.

Already we have moved on from signatures to requiring, as from tomorrow, a PIN for all debit and credit card transactions. And by 2010, according to the forecasts of Bill Gates, people will, through biometrics, access their phone, email, computer, and bank - through a fingerprint touch of a screen anywhere in the world.

Already one million people have bought and use an IBM laptop which uses fingerprint recognition to control access - and for the future, manufacturers are looking at the same fingerpint recognition technology to make mobile phones and MP3 players worthless if stolen. Today Californian supermarket shoppers are paying with a finger-scan at the checkout new schemes mean people can pay for their goods just by placing their finger on a scanner and without having to carry a card; and Japanese cash machines are asking for a finger-scan rather than a PIN."

The reason is simple: they are more secure against fraud and theft. And across the world in very different cultures most people seem happy to use biometric schemes when they see direct value in greater security, greater convenience, and lower cost.

So it is likely in future that a supermarket or bank may hold your biometrics, but at the moment those charged with the protection of your security - indeed the people who can actually protect your security - do not. As a customer you would, under the private sector initiatives being developed, have biometrics stored, but as citizen you would not.

So the issue is not whether advances in biometrics are being put to use - identity information about us to protect our security is being given voluntarily to credit card and computer companies to safeguard access to finance and computers and now being used also for employment and employee recognition. For example, biometrics are increasingly being used to control access to buildings with particular needs for security. And with passports now requiring biometrics, a necessity people understand, 80 per cent of the adult population will have to register their biometrics to ensure our borders are secure and so they can travel freely across the world. In each case safeguards must be built in to protect misuse of information.

So the question is whether we move to the next stage - to extend this system from the private sector and the borders to a national biometric scheme including an identity card.

And would most people not agree that if there are acceptable safeguards to protect civil liberties in these areas, there are advantages in a national identity scheme that could not just help us disrupt terrorists and criminals travelling on forged or stolen identities - but, more fundamentally, protect each citizen's identity and prevent it being forged or stolen?

The advantages are clear. An identity scheme will not just make the necessary security checks easier for all of us as we travel abroad for our work and leisure, but prevent people already in the country exploiting your identity or mine, and using multiple identities for terrorist, criminal or other purposes. One of the central features of terrorists' activity is their use of multiple identities to avoid laying tracks or patterns for us to spot. One September 11 hijacker used 30 false identities to obtain credit cards and one quarter of a million dollars of debt. Since then, the problem has worsened: over the last few years, the major terrorist suspects arrested typically had up to 50 identities each.

If people cannot so easily operate under multiple identities we can potentially disrupt the modus operandi of terrorists or criminals that rely on multiple or false identities. The key point is that, if someone is in our country and is travelling on multiple identities or running bank accounts in multiple names, we should be in a position to pick this up early. The front line experience of both Sir Ian Blair, Chief of the Metropolitan Police, and Eliza Manningham-Buller, the head of the Security Service, have led them to say that a national biometric scheme would help them do their job and make reliance on multiple identities very difficult.

But the key point is that we should do all in our power to prevent you or I having our identity stolen or abused, and to ensure that, for each of us, our identity is secure and protected. Some have suggested the use of biometrics in identity cards in Britain is a fundamental and unacceptable "change of relationship between state and individual." In the past securing your identity rested on you being given a National Insurance number, on being required to have a birth certificate, being required to fill in the census, and, for travel abroad, being obliged to hold a passport. So the question is not whether we have a national register identity - we have had so for years - but whether we are prepared to consider the most up to date and the most secure means to protect our identity from being stolen.

I believe it is possible in this new world of terrorist threats to build a national consensus around our proposals by showing that there are proper safeguards and proper accountability. In addition to the Data Protection Act an Independent Commissioner should have oversight of the database and how it is used - testing it against data protection laws, ensuring individuals will have the right to see the information held on them and with, in the British way, proper accountability to Parliament, including reports published and laid before Parliament. And it may be right also to consider for the future whether the Commissioner should report to Parliament, taking an overarching look across both the public and private uses of biometrics, so ensuring the proper safeguards.

The legislation coming before the Commons today already builds in important safeguards. Private companies will not be able to see the national database, nor will government departments in their routine business - only for the prevention of crime or the protection of national security. Only if they are accredited and if they have the person's consent will government departments and private companies be entitled to ask to check that person's identity against the database.

And the British way is to write in not just safeguards for the individual but to ensure accountability to Parliament, with the limits to use of the data enshrined in Parliamentary legislation - and a requirement that there can be no additions to the information held or extensions to how the database is used without returning to Parliament for approval. As Charles Clarke has said, any decision on moving from a voluntary to compulsory scheme will require explicit approval of Parliament through primary legislation.
Mechanics matter too. Building a national scheme will take years, but that is hardly a good argument for not starting now. It will be important to build upon our current proposals in two ways. First, I believe that a joint private public partnership in investigating the next stage - involving banks, financial institutions, computer companies, employers generally - can both contribute to the general security efforts of all and release substantial savings in a potential scheme. So I propose a forum of private and public sectors to examine for not just fraud but security a joint project to release the best technology and value for money. On this basis we will report regularly to Parliament on costs as well as benefits.

Second, as part of our public expenditure review, we should take the measures necessary now to bridge the gap before a complete national scheme is in place: including improving the quality of our databases together with their transparency and accountability - making it easier to intercept terrorists and criminals and to spot fraud while also ensuring people have trust in how the necessary information is protected.

Opponents of the identity scheme like to suggest that its motivation is to enhance the power of the state. In fact it starts from the rights of the individual, the right to have your identity protected and secure and to achieve that, the right to have the most modern and secure way of doing so and - as I suggest - the right to have this done so with safeguards for individuals and the accountability of the state.