Don't mention the Australia Card
While the idea of a national identity card in Australia has always been controversial, the case for introducing one on security grounds has never been stronger. The federal government is proposing virtually all Australians be issued with a card -- a biometric equipped smartcard, no less -- to cut welfare and Medicare fraud.
The card, which will have the holder's photograph printed on it, will also have a biometric scan of the photo stored on its chip. But can a national ID card protect Australians against terrorist attacks?
Many Australians remember the debate that raged over Prime Minister Bob Hawke's proposed Australia Card in the '80s. The public's reaction to the proposed scheme was severe enough to see the idea labelled Orwellian and binned for good.
Ben Rothke, AXA director of information security
At the time, the Liberal opposition passionately opposed the Australia Card legislation, eloquently countering the argument -- the same argument used by John Howard's government today -- that a national card will stamp out welfare fraud. As one Liberal member put it at the time:
"On each and every occasion it is a question of balancing the public interest against the private right. But, unlike the Australian Labor Party, I start from the assumption that the private right is superior to the right of the state. That must always be the starting assumption. Anybody who seeks to erode the private right must carry the onus of proving that there is an overwhelming public benefit in that private right being eroded. It is just not good enough, as this proposal assumes, to say to a government, 'We have a problem. We cannot collect enough tax', or 'We cannot stop enough welfare cheating'. In other words ... we have a systems failure under the present system so we have to turn everybody into a card subject to deal with that systems failure."
The member in question was John Howard, speaking at the second reading of the Australia Card Bill in the House of Representatives in 1987. "The Australian Federal Police, who have the heavy burden of trying to do something about white collar crime in this country, are very sceptical about the benefits [of the card]," he added.
There was outrage in the '80s, but it's a different world today. Millions of Australians tune into a show that is actually named after Orwell's Big Brother from his masterpiece 1984, and the public's anxiety about a possible terrorist attack is palpable. So it's not surprising that the reaction to the government's proposed access card, thus far, has been somewhat muted by comparison to the outrage at Hawke's proposed scheme. "Twenty years ago when the Australia Card was knocked over, we didn't know of Osama bin Laden; we hadn't had the 11th September; and we didn't live in such a globalised world economy," Howard told ABC radio this year.
Despite Howard's comments, the government now insists that the proposed card, to be issued to every Australian who wants to claim a Centrelink benefit or Medicare rebate, is not a security measure. It's designed to stamp out Medicare and welfare fraud, the same objective Howard dismissed in 1987 as pointless and unjustifiable from a civil rights perspective.
While Government papers on the card describe it as an "access card",
and most definitely not an "identity card", it's clear the devices are
to be used to authenticate identity. A spokeswoman for Human Services
Minister Joe Hockey laughed and coyly explained the distinction when ZDNet Australia
asked for an interview about the proposed project. It's not an identity
card, she explained, it's an access card that's used to authenticate
identity.
Despite most welfare fraud being related to overpayment and over servicing -- not identity crime -- there are some clear benefits, she says. A card with a photo on it will ensure "you're not someone who's come from overseas and borrowed your cousin's Medicare card to go to the doctor".
Six hundred thousand people are turned away from Centrelink each year because they don't have the appropriate ID, she added, so the card will make life easier for people who deal with the government. While the spokeswoman said it will be illegal for private sector organisations to demand the new card be shown for identification purposes, citizens will be allowed to use the card to identify themselves to private organisations, like banks. This being the case, there's little doubt these biometrics-equipped cards will become the new de facto ID for Australians.
While the government denies the card is being introduced as a security measure, there are some who say such a measure will bolster national security. Take this from Oracle CEO Larry Ellison: "The single thing we could do to make life tougher for terrorists would be to ensure that all the information in myriad government databases was integrated into a single national file," he wrote in an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal four weeks after the 9/11 attacks. "Today, every federal intelligence and law enforcement agency and all manner of state and local bodies maintain their own separate databases on suspected criminals. All these separate databases make it difficult for one agency to know about and apprehend someone wanted by another agency."
Australia National University's Clive Williams, a terrorism expert, tells ZDNet Australia a similar story. "The reality is that ID cards will not prevent terrorism," he says. "What they should be able to do is make it more difficult for prospective terrorists to move around and adopt multiple identities."
As we discovered in Follow that face on Day One, the Australian Federal Police is working hard to bolster confidence in identity documents. A government-issued smartcard with a biometric capability would almost certainly be welcomed by enforcement agencies.
But civil libertarians are far from impressed. Irene Graham, the executive director of Electronic Frontiers Australia, an online rights advocacy group, is appalled. "It's been a while since we've been completely opposed to something ... there's no justification for this," she says. "It will be the equivalent of the Australia Card."
She's also sceptical about the government's claims of massive savings in fraud, and says a KPMG report commissioned by the government has done little to sell her on the plan. "It does not at all justify the claim that this money can be saved," she says. "The KPMG case, although it claims those figures, it's been censored, there's huge sections that have been ripped out."
Minister Hockey's spokeswoman said the KPMG report had to be censored so the tender process wouldn't be prejudiced in the future.
New-York based Ben Rothke, the director of information security with financial services firm AXA, has experience with Public Key Infrastructure, the cryptographic technology that underpins the smartcard system. While the technology is robust, it's not without its problems, he concedes. "One of the issues is that there's far too much expectation put on these cards," he says. "They can be forged, nothing's unbreakable."
Furthermore, managing large-scale PKI deployments is relatively new territory, he says. "These are the devils in the details. PKI takes a lot of management and we don't have a lot of experience rolling out tens of millions of cards and dealing with that," he says. "We don't have many mega-deployments, most of the successful deployments have been smaller, closed loop deployments."
There are a lot of "gotchas" when you take the technology out of the lab and into the real world he says, with cryptographic key revocation (in the case of a lost or stolen card) being a tricky technology problem.
Rothke is sceptical about the card's potential to eliminate terrorism, and says a strong business case needs to be put forward to justify such a massive roll-out.
"I've seen PKI work and I've seen it fail, and I think it's a great technology. It's powerful, but ... I would ask people when they were looking to deploy PKI, what is your problem, and how do you expect PKI to solve it. And a lot of people can't answer that question," he says.
