Avoiding Responsibility

I have been watching from afar with great amusement as the Australian government tries to force everyone to provide a DNA sample for their national identity database - under the guise of combatting, you guessed it, terrorism (oh, and welfare fraud).

The government is replacing our apparently 'dumb' medicare cards with so much more intelligent 'smart' cards. Firstly, lets dispel this 'smart' thing - there is nothing smart about these cards. They work in pretty much exactly the same way as the swipe cards we've been using to access credit and bank accounts for, say, 30 years. The little shiny chip is no more secure than the brown magnetic strip on the back. Yes, the data on the little shiny chip is encrypted - meaning that people who steal it can't read it straight away. The problem with this is what is called the 'psychology of security' - it gives us the illusion of safety, when in fact none exists.

The problem is that the little shiny chip to be of any great value for security has to call back to a central database every once in a while. The question then becomes - why would someone who has the ability to steal one persons details go the trouble of doing so when you could steal say 13 million people's information. Rather than stealing your details from the card, they will just crack into the central database and take them all. Then they will have your life:

* full name
* previous names
* date of birth
* place of birth
* current address
* previous addresses
* telephone numbers
* your photograph
* your fingerprints
* your DNA

which as far as all our public and corporate institutions are concerned, is pretty much the entirerty of you existence. Don't think it will happen: I'm sure thats the the 45 million people (thats right, more than twice the population of Australia) who had their credit card details stolen from a database in the US thought. And lets not kid ourselves - corporate computer security is vastly more stringent than government systems. Government departments have not been able to in the past, and still cannot, compete against the private sector for IT talent. So if the private sector can't keep your data secure - when it comes to the government - you're fucked.

Now of course, getting one of these new smart cards is not mandatory - in the same way that registering for, or providing, a tax file number is not mandatory. But if you want to access government services - and what doesn't the federal govrenment run these days? - you'll need a smart card. Very unmandatory.

Anyway, this is just one more reason why I really feel no desire whatsoever to move back to Australia. What I'm hoping is that by the time I'm ready to come home, this system will have been as successful as all the other major IT projects funded by the Australian Federal Government - like that one to get rid of pornography from the Internet.