$6.6B British ID Program Has No Card Readers

Politics and religion
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$6.6B British ID Program Has No Card Readers

Britain’s ID card program has become the poster child for problems of the weird variety. The program seemed very promising, with the intention of putting a wealth of information at law enforcement’s fingertips and making it harder for criminals to enter or exit the country. The carding program, run by the Identity and Passport Service (IPS), cost $6.6B USD (£4.7B). The IPS offered cards with a wealth of data including biographical data as well as facial and fingerprint scans.

While such information would certainly be helpful to law enforcement efforts, there was one critical problem. British officials forgot to buy readers for the cards.

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A friend of mine was teling me the US Army did the same thing with new ID cards around late 2001… but didn’t get readers for those cards out to administrative units until 2003.

Governments are good at technology.

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Was Children of Men released in the UK?

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$6.6B USD (£4.7B)

Sorry for the de-rail here, but WTF? The pound has been brutalized if that’s the exchange rate now!

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Yeah. The exchange rate is currently $1.4 to the GBP. And considering how poorly the dollar’s doing, that says even more about the pound.