The Government is neither getting the basics of IT right nor keeping up with the pace of technological developments, a report has claimed.

According to the Institute for Government, the mismanagement of systems has led to billions being wasted in time and money.

These failures have come despite around 16 billion a year being spent on IT, the body said.

"Most attempts to solve the problems with Government IT have treated the symptoms rather than resolved the underlying system-wide problems," the report read.

"This has simply led to doing the wrong things better.'"

Despite some successes, the Government's IT reputation has been hit by repeated high profile failures, the report claimed.

It said the Government's approach to IT was "fundamentally flawed for our times" and the administration was "trapped in an outdated model," which has tried to "lock project requirements up-front and then [proceed] at a glacial pace."

A completely new approach is required to sort out the mess, according to the body, so the entire system is more flexible and adaptable.

The report called for a shared platform to simplify IT across Government departments.

"The platform must address the basics effectively in order to free up specialist time and resources to take advantage of new opportunities," the Institute for Government advised.

"Equally, as agile approaches are used to explore new opportunities, innovations are scaled up and better technologies and approaches are fed into the platform more rapidly."

The System Error report was based on 70 interviews with Whitehall insiders, suppliers and external experts.

A welcome report

New Government chief information officer (CIO) Joe Harley welcomed the report, saying the ideas were constructive.

"Government has a large and complex IT estate and the majority of it works efficiently and effectively," Harley said.

"However, we are always looking for ways to improve and this report has a number of very useful recommendations for us to consider as we formulate our ICT Strategy."

Andrew Adonis, director of the Institute for Government, said the report showed why radical IT reforms were needed.

"The billions spent on cancelled IT projects, such as ID cards and National Programme for IT, demonstrate precisely why we need a much more flexible approach to government IT," Adonis said.

"If a new approach to IT in government is not now put into practice, this will risk further haemorrhaging of public money."

Meanwhile, the Government has raised the limit for IT projects needing central approval from the 1 million mark introduced in May 2010 to 5 million.

The change forms part of wide-ranging adjustments to spending controls, which the Cabinet Office said should provide over 3 billion in savings by the end of the current financial year.

The Government has physically destroyed the database containing information on would-be ID card holders.

Around 500 hard disk drives and 100 backup tapes were crushed to pieces as the Coalition sought to bring an end to the much-maligned scheme.

The cards officially ceased to be valid legal documents on 22 January and now the National Identity Register has truly been put to bed.

Around 13,000 UK citizens had already acquired ID cards, which were first proposed by the Labour Government in 2005.

No refunds have been offered to those who signed up but the Government has claimed the 400,000 to scrap the scheme would save around 80 million, which would have been needed to keep the initiative going.

"Laying ID cards to rest demonstrates the Government's commitment to scale back the power of the state and restore civil liberties," said Home Office minister Damian Green.

"This is about people having trust in the government to know when it is necessary and appropriate for the state to hold and use personal data, and it is about the government placing their trust in the common-sense and responsible attitude of people."

Despite dismantling the scheme, the Government still came under fire for delaying publication of the National Identity Service Independent Assurance Panel's report into ID cards.

The report noted how the initiative was hampered by poor design and management.

The Big Brother Watch criticised the Government for the delay, claiming the administration "basically had other things to do and did not "consider it important enough" to release the report to the general public in a "timely manner."

See below for footage of the database demolition:

British ID cards can no longer be used as a form of identification when travelling across Europe.

The Coalition Government announced they would scrap the scheme soon after they were elected as part of the Identity Documents Act, but it has taken until this weekend for the cards to be retired.

Damian Green, the immigration minister, said: "Laying ID cards to rest demonstrates the Government's commitment to scale back the power of the state and restore civil liberties."

"It is about the people having trust in the Government to know when it is necessary and appropriate for the state to hold and use personal data, and it is about the Government placing their trust in the common-sense and responsible attitude of the people."

Around 13,000 UK citizens had already got their hands on the new form of ID, first proposed by the Labour Government back in 2005.

No refunds are being offered to those who signed up to the scheme but the Government has claimed the 400,000 to scrap the scheme would save around 80 million of costs to keep the scheme going over the next four years.

All those using ID cards have been sent letters from the Identity and Passport Service. For more information on the end of the scheme, click here.

The issue of privacy and personal data security has become increasingly pertinent in recent months.

With the Google Wi-Fi scandal and Facebook privacy concerns making their way into mainstream news headlines, the issues are perhaps now being considered by the general public as serious as they should be.

NO2ID, an independent campaigning body established in 2004, recently had some good news in the form of the eradication of the ID card scheme, but it is still fighting to bring an end to the "database state".

We spoke to Phil Booth, NO2ID's national coordinator, about the current concerns being taken up by the group and more general privacy and data problems affecting us all.

Now the government has scrapped ID cards, what areas is NO2ID working on?

We [work] across a very broad range for a single issue group. [We cover] so many different areas, we can be popping up anywhere. We've got stuff coming up on smart meters, for example.

What are your problems with government systems, such as data entering on websites?

I'm simply frustrated by the system and I'm a smart guy. Think about the poor, barely literate folk coming out of school, struggling to get a job there is the criteria on the systems and the forms and stuff they have to confront, is it any wonder that people start bailing out?

[Some] play the system rather than engage with the system. It is probably just about as much effort to work with it as work against it not that I'm condoning it.

...Awareness has grown because of the disgraceful amount of data breaches and transgressions that are going on...

It is not about giving them [the ICO] a bigger stick, it's not about giving them more resources.

There are certainly people at the ICO who are fantastic, genuine, ardent, passionate, methodical, proper data protection people. There are others who are frankly appalling.

Do you believe the ICO can operate as an effective independent body in at least some capacity?

I'm sure it can operate as an independent body. I don't see any reason why it couldn't. I certainly think you need the right characters in place and I think you need people who eat, sleep breathe data protection and freedom of information and environmental information at the heart of it, and there are some people like that even in the upper ranks.

But it seems to me the institution has become so caught up in we are the poor cousin, we don't have enough money, we can't do this, we can't do that'.

Chris Graham looks to me look like a very competent chief executive a manager, someone who can get the people in and sort out the backlog that's the one level he has improved on. Hats off to him, but you need leadership, in the situation we are in now you need leadership, you need someone who is ready to step up to the plate, a regulator not just independent of government but who is willing to pick the fights that need to be had.

One may argue that is not the place of a regulator to do, but I'm sorry, if you are about regulating what is done with people's personal data in a territory, then sometimes your only [option] is to illustrate the point by picking a fight. In 2004, we picked a fight in order to illustrate a point - a much broader point.

It isn't that hard to get [people] to understand [a point] so long as you put in front of them things that they can understand in their terms, in their lights.

People are not dumb. I find it very arrogant of government sometimes to think that people are either too stupid or foolish or just too busy to bother with this stuff. I think that may be true of a small minority of people there are always going to be some people who don't get it - but the vast majority of people presented things in straightforward terms will understand.

So what can people and NO2ID do to improve what they consider to be flaws in the system?

There are many things we can do to improve the situation. I am big fan of the Karl Popper's notion, of the whole open society, that society is imperfect but infinitely perfectible. And systems like fascism, which is where Popper came up with the concept from the Nazi regime, systems that impose a Utopian or dystopian fixed vision on the way the world should be, are getting it badly wrong.

You have to embrace the fact that people always [make mistakes] those are the things that drive you to improve things.

Gordon Brown has claimed Labour's plans for ID cards and biometric passports are the key to dealing with immigration in the UK.

During the second leaders' debate held on Sky last night, Brown claimed the measures would keep control on the levels of immigrants coming into the country.

"Next year everybody coming into the country... will have to have an ID card," he said.

"Biometric passports mean we can stop [them] at airports... and we are tightening up on that."

However, during the section of the debate regarding immigration, Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg defended his party's policy to scrap the ID card scheme, after reiterating his stance in the last debate.

"[Immigration] has been run chaotically by both parties for a long time," he said.

Conservative leader David Cameron was mostly sidelined from the discussion while Brown and Clegg continued a more heated exchange.

Brown added: "It would be more helpful if you supported identity cards than [dismissed] them Nick... Immigration is falling."

There is one more debate, set to focus on the economy, left in the series before the election on 6 May.

The leader of the Liberal Democrats has reiterated calls for ID cards to be scrapped in the UK's first televised political debate.

In the long-awaited and ground breaking election move, the Tory leader may have taken centre stage but, instead Nick Clegg brought a focus onto technological policies during the debate surrounding domestic issues.

"This Government wants to waste lots of money on ID cards.... we could put 3,000 more police officers on the streets for this [amount]." said Clegg early on in the ITV debate, the first of three to take place in the lead up to the general election.

However, both the current Prime minister, Gordon Brown, and number 10 hopeful David Cameron, neglected the technology industry throughout the discussion, even with controversies that have been growing over the likes of the Digital Economy Bill, public sector IT schemes and biometric passports.

Referring to the opposition leaders as "these two," Clegg discussed the problems in education, discussing the "4,000 emails received by headteachers" regarding the national curriculum as well as claiming: "It is an easy thing to say is how much we... love the NHS... but we have a computer system which doesn't work, yet in Burnley they have closed the A&E and you now need to travel to Blackburn."

But again both the leader of Labour and the head of the Tories did not come back with a response on the technological influence on the public sector.

There are two more debates set up over the next two weeks before the general election due on 6 May one on Sky and the following on the BBC.

The government needs to get business "buy-in" on ID cards, according to identity minister Meg Hillier.

Speaking to journalists and industry representatives in Westminster yesterday, Hillier said of the private sector: "They need to take on a roll of provisioning a broader variety of services."

She compared ID cards to the Apple iPhone. "The iPhone is just the infrastructure, it's the apps that make it interesting," she said.

While government is "best placed" to develop that infrastructure, it's up to the public and private sector to come up with good ways to use the cards and supporting database.

For example, the cards could speed up criminal record background checks. "Having a simple card, possibly with a simple reader machine, will speed up those checks," she said.

Hillier also suggested banks will see a use for the cards, as checking identity to set up an account costs them as much as 85 for the most difficult cases, such as the fifth of people in the UK without a valid passport - which includes young people, the elderly, and the poor.

While the system is currently in card form, Hillier noted: "In the future, it's the chip that's the important bit." She suggested chips could be integrated into mobile phones, get Chip and PIN for security, and also be used to prove identity online.

Asking for feedback, she said: "There's lots of potential, but we don't have all the answers." She added that the Identity and Passport Service is "keen to talk to more businesses all the time... [it's] not about adding burdens for business."

Other details

So far there are three databases backing up the cards, one for fingerprints and photographs, another holding passport data, and a third linking the two, she said.

Only 100 "highly vetted" people have access to the data, Hillier claimed, although policing agencies can ask for it in the case of serious terror incidents and local councils can ask for anonymised data for census forecasts.

She also said there would be high street enrollment facilities in the future, which would take fingerprints.

Hillier said 13,000 people have enrolled in the programme, with about half receiving cards so far. The cards have already been rolled out to some airports, young people in London and the Northwest. The scheme will later this year roll out to the Northeast and the Midlands.

Read on for our interview with ID card commissioner Sir John Pilling.

The identity card scheme has been controversial since the idea was first mooted, called intrusive, unnecessary, expensive and another addition to the UK's Big Brother state.

To help calm fears - and make sure the programme runs as it should - the Government last year named long-time civil servant Sir Joseph Pilling as ID card commissioner, leaving many questioning how independent a long-term Government employee would be.

After a few months in the job, Sir Pilling has filed his first report. We spoke to him about the job so far and what he thinks of all the criticism.

You spend a lot of time in the report talking about what your role is and what it should be, and what it isn't. You say your job isn't to judge the value of the programme to taxpayers - that such a job falls to the National Audit Office - so what do you think your role should be?

I'm wondering about that actually. I think that we're not a bunch of accountants here, and we'd have to employ a bunch of accountants to do a really sophisticated job on the money.

The National Audit Office exists to scrutinise that. It will scrutinise it whether I scrutinise it or not, so there is just the case of whether it's justifiable to use our limited resources to go over ground that others are inevitably going to go over.

But I don't intend to interpret that self-denying ordinance in an overly scrupulous way. And if I've got some observations to make about money, or that touch on money, I shan't feel inhibited doing it. But I haven't yet stubbed my toe on anything that makes me really wince.

I suppose what's making me think about all of this is that they're charging 30 for an ID card at the moment. I'm just wondering whether that is going to be possible to sustain indefinitely, because the process seems to me to be quite an expensive process, in the sense that the better the quality the card, in terms of its security, the more reliable it is the less easy to use fraudulently, the more it costs to produce it by definition.

I mean, you could create me an ID card on your computer that could be done quite cheaply that wouldn't actually be very much good. I guess what interests me is the balance between the costs and the security of the card, because you could overdo it. You could make it prohibitively expensive.

I'm not at all thinking that they are doing [that], I'm just describing a process of thought I've been going through that makes me wonder if I haven't been too dogmatic about money in what you've just read back to me.

You admit yourself in the report that you didn't know that much about the subject when you were picked for the job. Why do you think they picked you?

I think it's by definition. It can not have been an easy job to fill. Because the opposition have a set of policies on the subject which are rather different to the Government's.

The election has to happen rather soon, whatever the Prime Minister thinks. He can make it happen a little bit sooner, he could announce it today if he wanted, but whether he announces it early or not, it's got to be quite soon.

And I suppose realistically the likelihood is that this job will disappear if the current opposition become the Government. I mean, they haven't addressed anything as detailed as the future of the ID commissioner, but it certainly would be a colloray of the certain types of things they are discussing.

So who wants to drop what they're doing to take on a role that is only going to last for a matter of months? They were forced to have somebody as the ID commissioner, because by law they couldn't issue a card until they had a commissioner.

They solved the problem by coming to somebody like me, who wasn't actually looking for a job and didn't mind if the job actually continued or not. I'm so old and so past it that I didn't apply for the job and wouldn't have been willing to do it on a full-time basis, because I've got other things that I am committed to. They said they'd be willing for me to do it on a part-time basis if I were willing to do it on a part-time basis.

And I thought it sounded interesting. It raises tricky issues about identity and what we mean by it, and about why it is that there are growing problems of identity fraud, and growing internationalism. I'm trying to avoid [saying] globalisation, but I think it's a bit difficult to avoid it all together. Globalisation and technology, the use of card technology, various features have lead to more and more emphasis being put on identity. People's anxiety about borders and illegal immigration and so on and so forth.

I have relatively little background in that. I think one of the great joys of retirement is you have time to spend poking around in things you didn't have time for when you were working. I've done a number of new things since I stopped work four and a bit years ago, and this was another different thing.

It's not the summit of my career to do this. I's something I've taken on to be helpful.

I am perfectly willing to criticism them. What I usually say about this and I'll say it again to you because it's terribly important is that I'm not only independent of the Government and the IPS, but I'm also independent to the opposition.

I'm independent of the small 'o' opposition to identity cards, which means in effect that because opinion is so polarised on the subject, I'm pretty well bound to be regarded by somebody as a kind of toady stool pigeon, whether to the opposition capital 'o' and small 'o' or to ministers and IPS.

If I'm lucky, I'll find things to say that irritate both sides, and that will make it quite difficult to pigeon hole me as wholly lacking independence and having already made up my mind and being on one side.

Why am I independent? Of course, you can't convince people you're independent by saying you're independent, you can only do it by showing them. But, I'm perfectly confident myself about my independent approach to the role, and it's founded by the fact that when I worked I was always perfectly willing to say uncomfortable things to Government ministers that they didn't wish me to say.

It's not absolutely every civil servant who has the courage to say things to ministers that they don't want to hear. Secondly I'm not trying to make a career out of this. If I have to stop doing this job tomorrow, my wife would be delighted and I wouldn't mind.

Therefore, I've got nothing to gain by refusing to tell the truth as I see it and nothing to lose personally by telling the truth as I see it.

So I'm interested in telling the truth, which I think is what this job is about. Actually, it's first and foremost about finding the truth, and that's quite hard work. It's all pretty detailed stuff, it's not capable of being done in three or four months, which is what we've had to do it in so far.

You come from a completely cold start, and first of all have to understand what the IPS is like, its own structures, and then there's the use to which the cards might be put, and there's the security systems built into the IT. There's the way members of the public are dealt with when they come into an interview regarding the cards, there's the way the cards are manufactured, and the way they're dispatched to people it goes on and on and on, many of which we're miles away from having got to the bottom of.

I wondered whether to just duck expressing any opinion at all in this report. In many ways it would have just been more comfortable for me to say it's too soon to say anything at all, but I decided that was cowardly.They have impressed me as a serious managed organisation trying very hard, well motivated with quite high morale in the staff. I thought I better say that, as that's what I found, and it's truthful and honest.

I also wanted to make it clear that the fact that was my judgement after three months...didn't mean that I thought there was no job to do and I was now going to give up and put my feet on the desk and say everything was for the best in all possible worlds.

I'm continuing to try to make their lives miserable by asking a lot of questions and having a lot of meetings with them. I think it will be a lot of months yet before I feel I've got to the bottom of the present arrangements, and of course there may be further arrangements made which I may have to look into.

You said it's been a "pretty good job" so far. What were the things that seemed to be working quite well and things that already need to be improved?

I haven't found things that aren't working. I've found one or two things I'd quite like to see them do more work [on], and they are doing some.

One issue which doesn't yet arise because the database isn't yet big enough to warrant it, is what procedures would surround the conscious and deliberate sharing of data from the database with other public safety organisations who believe they have a fair and lawful reason to ask for such information based on the provisions of the 2006 act.

Given they've got about 5,000 people's data, it would be rather surprising that anyone were beating their door down asking for access to that information at the moment. But they aspire to have a database that will one day have millions and millions of records on it. It will be a very attractive source for law enforcement agencies and the legislation does recognise that.

I want to see how they decide to handle those sorts of requests, who will handle them, what sort of training, what sort of guidance they'll be operating in. I want to be sure that where information should be shared, it is being shared, and where it shouldn't be shared, it isn't being shared.

That's one instance where I can't say they're doing anything wrong because they're not doing anything at all in terms of sharing information...but what sorts of work are they going to do, and are they doing the right sorts of things now to have themselves in the right place when the time comes?

I think they were prudent to begin slowly. I think they were prudent to being with just civil servants, because then anything that did go wrong, would go wrong with people who weren't going to run to the newspapers to scream about it.

They seem to me to have taken security pretty seriously, to have developed systems that will make it relatively difficult to forge a document or obtain one fraudulently.

I've met quite a few junior people away from their managers and I've done this in other organisations so I'm not wet behind the ears when it comes to assessing people...

My instinct is that their staff are quite sensitive to looking after people's data, that they're more consumer or customer orientated than most parts of the public sector that I've come across...They feel almost surprisingly proud to be part of IPS... The trouble with that sort of analysis is that it only takes you so far.

IPS could be appallingly let down by two people out of their few thousand that work for them. The fact that 98 per cent of people are professional and courteous and security conscious will not stop them from being completely ruined if a couple of people seriously misbehave with information from their database.

I don't want you to think that because of these nice things I've said that I don't think something could go wrong it could be going wrong even as we sit here today, and those bits you read out from my report and what I've said today will make me seem like a complete prat.

The Government has suffered quite a few data breaches, and they often do come down to one or two people not following procedures or not doing what they're supposed to. Do you think that the technical side of security is in place? Is it good enough? Or will it be forever dependent on the people side of things?

I don't think you can eliminate the people side of things altogether, but by the processes you develop you can make it less likely to happen. You can make it very difficult for a single individual to do something without detection.

And, I think they are doing pretty well. The sorts of things you need to do to minimise the risks. I think the leaders of the organisation are as aware as you and I are that that risk can't be eliminated altogether, so that means they're working at it to keep it as small as possible.

I think they know how appalling it would be for them if they did go the route of a number of public and private sector bodies who've been found to be careless or corrupt with other people's personal information.

I've met Justice and... Liberty and I've met Damien Green who isn't part of the Government, he's opposition front bench spokesman. I think they would be the main external, non-governmental groups I've met with.

We spoke to NO2ID, and this was their response: The Commissioner's role is to arbitrate on complaints brought by those using the scheme, ie. citizens who have in some way been inconvenienced, had their time wasted, opportunities lost, been wrongly defamed by incorrect information held on the register, or any of the many other ways the scheme might become a bureaucratic hurdle to a straightforward life.

He is, therefore, of no particular interest to NO2ID which is working hard not to make the scheme work better through resolving complains, but to stop it ever coming about at all.

What did you talk about with them? Where they just completely against ID cards?

I was talking with them about what they wanted to talk to me about, first and foremost. I wasn't there to set the agenda. I wanted to know what their concerns are and although there does appear to be a very big difference between being out and out opposed to ID cards on one hand and being concerned with making them work as well as possible on the other, there is a link between the two.

Because I have to think about what it is I should pay attention to, I don't want a rather fuzzy sort of approach to everything, I want to focus to the issues that really matter.

So if I listen to people who are against the whole thing and get them to tell me why they are against the whole thing, that helps me to decide where to put my effort to scrutinise the system.

Bearing in mind, they might not be representative, of course, but they certainly are people who have thought about it more than most people who have been noisy about. Therefore one wants to hear for oneself what they have to say because it helps to decide what your priorities should be when you scrutinise the whole scheme.

I would encourage anybody who's against the ID cards to give a bit of attention to expressing views on how the scheme is operating, because it is operating.

It deserves to be scrutinised not just by me but by people completely outside the system altogether.

Of course, at the moment, they're all hoping the election will see an end to all this, so that pious message from me is not likely to make very much difference.

But if it became clear to everyone's astonishment that a Conservative government were not going to abolish ID cards, or if the Labour party won the election and we had another parliament of developing ID cards possibly to the point where they couldn't in practice be abolished by anybody then external critics who concentrated only on the abolition of ID cards would be rather wasting their time.

It would be much more fruitfully employed to ensure the cards were run in a way that was [least] damaging as could possibly be managed.

And there are options, choices available, as to how things should be done. It's more detail work, so it's harder to develop rhetoric around it. But it doesn't make it less worthwhile.

Apple's iPad revealed

The dominating story of the week has to go to Steve Jobs as after months of rumours and speculation, Apple finally revealed its tablet device on Wednesday. It's been interestingly named the iPad.

Yet all the excitement may have to be put on hold as Fujitsu confirmed to IT PRO today it was looking into taking the fruity company to court over the name, which it has been using since 2002 for one of its own products.

Either way UK users won't be able to get their hands on the device until March and only US prices have been released so far so expect to be hearing more on this device over the coming months.

Oracle basking in the Sun

It may have been one of the longest acquisition processes of all time and been slightly overshadowed by Apple, but Wednesday finally saw Oracle becoming the official owners of Sun Microsystems.

It has been a long process with the EU taking its time to decide the deal would be fair on competition and a strong campaign to try and stop it going through but Larry Ellison won out in the end and is now planning the company's future.

The results are in

It's been a busy week of results from across the tech industry as that time of year for reporting the highs and lows of the last quarter has come round again.

Microsoft saw its revenues rise to a hefty $19.02 billion thanks to the release of Windows 7 in October last year. The company claimed to have sold over 60 million licences for the new operating system which helped income rise by a massive 60 per cent.

However, whilst Microsoft saw the highs, Motorola predicted the lows, blaming heavy spending in an attempt to bring out more smartphones for its upcoming losses.

Nokia bolstered the mobile industry though, reporting really strong results for the fourth quarter of 2009. The company broke all its expectations with a profit rise of 64 per cent, hitting 948 million (822 million).

The best of the rest

ID cards are set to hit the streets of London with a special push towards the youth of the nation's capital.

BSkyB won its five-year long court case against EDS, now owned by HP, for misleading them in a contract process for one of its customer help centres,

And sticking with Sky, the TV company is set to broadcast a football match in 3D across a selection of nine lucky UK pubs this weekend.

The controversial National Identity Scheme is set to arrive in London next month, as the Home Office starts offering ID cards to students in the capital from 8 February.

A version of the cards has been doled out to so-called foreign nationals since 2008, with a British edition made available in the northwest last year.

Now, the Home Office is marketing the 30 ID cards to anyone aged 18-14 living in London as a way to identify yourself to buy alcohol or travel in Europe.

"The national identity card will prove an extremely useful tool for young people in London, whether they are opening a bank account, buying age-restricted goods such as computer games or DVDs, entering a nightclub or travelling to Europe," Home Office minister Meg Hiller said in a statement:

The Home Office claimed that 10 per cent of passports lost by the under-30 crowd go missing in nightclubs, saying "as an identity card fits snugly into a wallet, it should help avoid the card becoming lost."

Anti-ID card lobby group NO2ID disagreed with the Home Office's marketing, however. "If it were not for the sinister consequences for anyone foolish enough to be a guinea pig, this would be ludicrous as well as wasteful," national coordinator Phil Booth argued in a statement.

"You can spend 10 on a proof-of-age card from an independent charity with no other commitment; or you can pay 30 now, be fingerprinted, and agree to account for your personal details to the Home Office for the rest of your life," he explained.

Click here for more on the ID card programme.

This year saw the last full year of Gordon Brown's Labour Government before the next general election and technology played a key role in some of the biggest stories.

We take a look back at what happened with technology in the public sector throughout 2009.

The path towards a Digital Britain

The biggest technology story to have taken over the public sector this year is how to bring Britain up to date in the technological world we now live in.

The first part of the year was spent waiting for Lord Carter's Digital Britain report to be released. Although we knew most of what was to come, the report being made public also created quite a stir.

One of the major recommendations was to ensure everyone in Britain had access to a minimum of 2Mbps broadband by 2012.

During a year when big companies like Virgin Media and BT were trialling superfast broadband of up to 100Mbps and more, it sounded feasible but with ongoing problems in the UK's infrastructure, especially to serve rural areas, it is a waiting game to see if this will be achieved.

Another recommendation came out as a more controversial topic. To pay for improvements to the infrastructure Lord Carter suggested a 50 pence monthly tax to be placed on landlines. Although the amount was relatively small, a number of critics came out against it including a very outspoken ISP, TalkTalk.

The Digital Economy Bill, born out of the Digital Britain report, is now going through the legislative process and has controversies of its own. The main is focused on Business Secretary Peter Mandelson's proposals to cut off illegal filesharers from the internet.

Both ISPs, MPs and consumers are lobbying against the move and thanks to Europe, users will not be able to be cut off without a full court procedure, which Mandelson's plans saw fit to leave out of the process.

The bill has only just had its second reading in the House of Lords so we will have to wait until 2010 to see the outcome.

Keeping an eye on ID cards

Many may have thought that ID cards had their year back in 2008 but 2009 has seen even more discussion, controversy and even some implementation on these contentious little bits of plastic.

The cards have already been implemented for Foreign Nationals but the looming thought of compulsory ID cards for all, storing more information on citizens in government databases made many increasingly feel at ease.

Summer saw the start of the pre-election warm up with the Conservatives claiming they would scrap the scheme if they were in power as more public bodies got on Labour's case.

So when party conference season came about Prime Minister Gordon Brown conceded and told the public ID cards would not become compulsory for UK citizens and the information needed for them would be reduced to that which was already on a passport.

A trial of ID cards began in Manchester late last month making them available to the public for the first time at a cost of 30 and the cards are due to roll out across the North West in January.

But the controversy has yet to die down, with Liverpool Council voting to ban the promotion of them within its own offices.

Seems like Brown and his cabinet have some way to go in convincing us these cards are the way forward.

Once more into the data breach

It doesn't seem that long ago that HM Revenues and Customs lost two disks in the internal post containing data of over 25 million people does it?

This was back in 2007 and since then a plethora of data loss stories have come into the limelight.

This year the local council seemed to become the biggest culprit. The month of May saw the turn of Leicester City Council, which lost an unencrypted USB stick containing personal information on 80 children from a council-run nursery.

Yet the council only got a slight tap on the wrist and was told by the Information Commissioner's Office to better train its staff.

Barely a month had gone by when in June Manchester City Council also lost valuable personal data in the form of two council-owned laptops from its Town Hall.

One of the laptops contained personal details relating to 1,754 employees at local schools and neither were encrypted.

Here the ICO went a bit further than training and insisted that Sir Howard Bernstein, Manchester City Council's chief executive, signed an agreement to ensure all laptops and other removable devices were encrypted from then on.

As the Summer ended, the Autumn scandals arose and this time north of the border in Scotland. In September, NHS Education for Scotland admitted to losing an unencrypted laptop which contained information on 6,000 medical trainee applicants.

The continuing loss of data and lack of security by public bodies has led to calls for Data Encryption laws similar to those in the US and Germany, forcing public bodies and companies to take the risks more seriously.

But we will have to wait and see what 2010 brings and whether government will listen to its critics.

The year has been a mixed one for the IT industry. Falling sales, especially of PCs and servers, have hit vendors hard as businesses have scaled back spending.

Even so, consumers have continued to buy technology, with smartphone and netbook sales holding up well.

Interest also continued to grow in services, especially social networking and anything delivered over the cloud.

But as our round up of the year's top technology disasters shows, privacy, service reliability and perhaps predictably, government IT spending continue to put potholes on the superhighway.

Windows Vista

Windows Vista has struggled from its initial release, but 2009 was the end of the line for all practical purposes, as Microsoft released Windows 7.

Windows 7 launched to critical acclaim - or at least was more warmly received than its predecessor. Windows XP seems set to live on, on low-costs netbooks, for a while yet.

But the ranks of discounted Vista PCs in high street stores suggests that for all practical purposes, unloved Vista will quietly be left to die.

Google Mail and Google Apps

Gmail is a great technology, when it works. But businesses that had switched from local email systems to the search giant's cloud-based offerings will have had reason to question that choice. This year, Google Apps and Gmail have suffered several outages, leaving customers unable to send or receive messages, or use Google's collaboration tools, for several hours at a time.

Of course, no IT service, and certainly no cloud-based service, can ever be 100 per cent reliable. But organisations planning to replace in-house infrastructure with cloud services will need to consider the impact of what Jon Collins, of analysts Freeform Dynamics, calls "Gfail": have a backup plan.

London Stock Exchange

To lose a key operational IT system once is unfortunate. When it happens twice, it looks careless.

This, though, is what happened to the London Stock Exchange, which suffered two systems outages in November. The first failure affected a 12th of the exchanges's financial instruments, and was traced to a single server. The second failure, in late November, halted all trading. In 2010, the LSE will switch to a new trading platform.

If we had a separate category for social media failures, Habitat's June campaign would be duking it out with Facebook's privacy controversy (see below) for the top spot. In June this year, the furniture retailer used Twitter "hashtags" to drive traffic to a website promoting its spring sale.

Fair enough, except that the company used unrelated tags, including "iPhone" and most controversially of all, the Iranian election.

Predictably, the campaign promoted a backlash among Twitter users. At Habitat, someone the company described as an "overenthusiastic intern" paid with his job.

Facebook privacy failures

Social networking site Facebook made the headlines several times during the year because of privacy issues. The most serious came towards the end of the year, when the site updated its settings, claiming to make them easier to use.

But the update changed users' own privacy settings to Facebook's pre-programmed "recommended" defaults, leaving millions of users' private information accessible to the public. Savvy users quickly changed their settings back, but not before Facebook had made it on to television news, for all the wrong reasons.

Digital Britain and the broadband tax

In January this year, Lord Stephen Carter held out the promise of broadband for all by 2012. Subsequent clarifications revealed that the universal target was a relatively pedestrian 2Mbps, to be provided in part over cellular networks.

Other countries, meanwhile, left the UK in their wake: Sweden covers 10 per cent of its population with fibre broadband, and is testing speeds of 150mbps. Meanwhile, Chancellor Alistair Darling confirmed, in his pre-Budget report, that a 50p a month levy on phone lines will be used to fund the roll out.

Sony Ericsson's touchscreen, 12 megapixel camera handset should have been the manufacturer's weapon for taking the fight to Apple, Android and BlackBerry. Instead the phone suffered unusually high rates of failure, caused by software glitches.

The Times described the Satio as "the worst Sony Ericsson ever" and both Carphone Warehouse and Phones4U withdrew the phone from sale. Meanwhile, Sony Ericsson is pinning its hopes on the Android-based X2, due for launch next year.

The National Prison Service's C-NOMIS system

Government IT projects have come in for their share of criticism over the year, but few have performed as badly as C-NOMIS.

The project an attempt to create a single database for the prison and probation services started in 2004. It is not now expected to be finished until 2011, at three times the original cost.

Last month, the MPs called the project a shambles, with Public Accounts Committee chairman Edward Leigh saying: "This Committee has become inured to the dismal procession of government IT failures which have passed before us; but even we were surprised by the extent of the failure of C-NOMIS".

The ID card and government data breaches

As of last month, the National ID card database held just 538 names. A year after foreign students were issued with ID cards and after considerable expense it seems that just one foreigner, an EU citizen, is listed on the system.

It might not matter, of course, if there is a change of government next year. The Conservative leader David Cameron pledged to scrap the scheme, which he has called a "vast white elephant".

Meanwhile a continuing stream of data leaks and breaches at government departments and agencies provided ammunition to those who believe a single database holding all citizens' details is A Bad Thing see our story Government accused of lacking basic data policies.

The NHS National Programme for IT

It's not a failure yet but towards the end of the year rumours grew that the 12.6bn programme to overhaul the NHS' IT systems could be cut back. In December Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling described the project as "not essential to the front line".

The project is already four years late, and has led to the resignation of contractors including Accenture and Fujitsu. Given its scale, if the NPfIT is cut or trimmed back, it will surely represent one of the largest ever IT failures.

The controversial identity card scheme is to continue its march across the UK next year, rolling out across the North West from January.

While the cards have been doled out to so-called foreign nationals since the end of last year, they only started being given out to British nationals living and working in Manchester from last month.

From 4 January, the cards will be given out to those living in working in Cheshire, Merseyside, Lancashire and Cumbria, who request them instead of or alongside a passport.

Meg Hillier, the Home Office minister in charge of the identity cards rollout, said in a statement: "We have always said that after the initial rollout to residents of Greater Manchester, we would seek to expand the scheme across the North West as soon as possible."

"Today's exciting announcement is the next stage in offering voluntary identity cards to everyone living in the UK," she added.

The news follows a motion passed by Liverpool council registering their protest against the card scheme, and saying no promotional materials would be allowed in their offices.

Copenhagen cops are Apple fan boys

Important things were happening in Copenhagen this week, with the UN climate change conference kicking off. But the news wasn't all about green IT.

It seems the Danish police force have opted to use a bespoke Apple system to run its operations centre, rather than rely on Windows-based, out-of-the-box systems.

Not only has it let the force run things more quickly, but it hasn't cost any more, either.

Intel ditches Larrabee

Intel made a surprise move this week, announcing it would ditch its new graphics system Larrabee, which it demoed at IDF earlier this year.

An Intel spokesman said the system's performance was trailing behind competitors, but the work will be rolled into a software development platform.

Government unveils pre-budget report

The government has released its pre-budget report, which includes cuts to the NHS IT upgrade programme.

It will also ask for the introduction of a 50 pence broadband tax, to help fund the Digital Britain goal of 2Mbps connections across the country.

Best of the rest

Amazon stressed it wouldn't be setting up high street shops, as Nokia has been forced to shut a few down.

HTC's smartphone lineup for 2010 was leaked, Google unveiled Chrome for Macs and Linux, while Microsoft started work on Office 15. The iPhone will arrive at Tesco from next week.

And Liverpool City Council picked a fight with the Home Office, voting in favour of a motion against ID cards and pledging to do nothing to promote the identity scheme.

Liverpool City Council has voted in favour of a motion against ID cards - and banned them from being promoted in their own offices.

In a motion passed yesterday - and backed by Labour members - the council noted its disapproval of the scheme, which is currently being rolled out in Manchester and could head to Liverpool next year.

"Council notes that the Government is pressing ahead with plans to introduce identification (ID) cards. It is doing this through pilot schemes in the North West, including the planned launch of a scheme in Liverpool in January 2010," the motion from Councillors Steve Radford and Paula Keaveney said.

"Council notes that the existing policy of the City Council is that it is opposed to the introduction of ID cards and the associated database," it said.

The motion stressed that the council did not believe the government's claims that ID cards and the related database would "prevent crime, terrorism or illegal immigration," but would instead "fundamentally change the relationship between the citizen and the State."

The motion also called out Prime Minister Gordon Brown, saying his speech at the Labour party conference "sought to give the impression that ID cards would not be introduced, at the same time as his Government was clearly preparing for these pilot schemes."

Because of this opinion, the council said it would "refuse to co-operate with any plans to promote the card scheme" and would not let council offices or its "communications channels" be used for promotional events - unless forced to by law.

The council also pledged to work with anti-ID card lobbyists - including NO2ID - to raise awareness of the "dangers of the ID card and database scheme" among the people of Liverpool.

NO2ID naturally welcomed the support. "Neither the people of Liverpool nor their elected representatives have been conned," said national coordinator Phil Booth in a statement.

"We particularly congratulate Labour councillors for taking their constituents' sides against the Home Office's favorite surveillance scheme, even if a Labour Home Secretary complacently lets the bureaucrats steam on, spending uncounted millions in the biggest ID theft of all," he added.

Home Office not concerned

A Home Office spokesperson told IT PRO that people need not feel forced into the scheme.

Regarding the accusation the cards would change the relationship between citizens and the state, he said it's "effectively like a passport, you either choose one or you don't - I wonder how that argument stands up."

He also noted that Brown's recent party speech had no bearing on the cards, as they were introduced as early as 2005.

The spokesman said the Home Office would not be concerned by the council's pledge not to promote the scheme. "At the end of the day, we would promote - as far as I'm aware... the IPS [Identity and Passport Service] would be the ones promoting. If Liverpool City Council chooses not to have promotional materials in their premises, that would have to be something to look at later."

Asked if the council would have any affect on a Liverpool-wide rollout of the cards, the spokesman responded: "It wouldn't."

"A council doesn't have any ability to stop people getting them," he said, adding "lots of people will try to sway public opinion" against the cards, but it was up to people to decide for themselves in the end.

The spokesman added that 1,000 cards had been given out in Manchester since the rollout there last month.

Click here for everything you need to know about ID cards.

The database that backs up the national ID cards has officially been unveiled, and so far it holds just 538 names.

Of those, all are British citizens and just one is a foreign nationals, despite people such as overseas students being given the cards since last November. The one foreigner is from the EU.

We asked the Home Office press department if there were two separate databases for foreigners and British citizens, and where data on foreigners was currently being held, but they have as of yet been unable to provide an answer.

ID commissioner not 'safe hands'

Speaking to the home affairs committee, the new identity commissioner Sir Joseph Pilling said he would earn 44,000 for each six months in the role, and would report to the Home Secretary Alan Johnson, not to parliament, the BBC reported.

While he told the committee that he didn't believe it was his job to judge whether the cards were good or bad, he stressed he was still independent.

"If it was a safe pair of hands they were looking for I am probably the wrong person," he was quoted as saying.

Click here for everything you need to know about ID cards.

Mancunians will be able to apply for an ID card by the end of the month.

According to the Home Office, anyone with a work or home address in the Greater Manchester area can now book in to register for one of the controversial cards. The 30 cards will be available from the end of the month.

It's the first time the cards have been made available to the general public. They have been handed out to so-called foreign nationals - such as overseas students and foreigners married to Brits - since last year.

Phil Woolas, Home Office Minister and Minister for the North West of England, said enrolling would only take 15 minutes. "Having been through the enrolment process this morning, I can vouch for the fact it is simple, secure and only takes around 15 minutes," he said.

However, it's not enrolment times that are the major concerns of critics, with most lobbyists taking aim at the database behind the ID card system.

Click here for all you need to know about ID cards.

Thousands of UK citizens are looking into getting an ID card, according to figures released by the government this week.

The Home Office confirmed to IT PRO that 10,000 people in the UK have expressed interest through the DirectGov website.

However, the chief executive of the Identity and Passport Service, James Hall, said the numbers were a positive sign. "The level of interest in identity cards shows there is a real demand for a safe and convenient way for people to prove their identity," he said in a statement.

"The launch of identity cards in Greater Manchester and the consumer awareness campaign that will be launched with it will raise the profile of the scheme further."

The scheme Hall mentions in Manchester has only managed to find 2,000 volunteers in a city of almost half a million, according to figures from the Manchester Evening News.

The ID card scheme has been surrounded by controversy since its inception. So far only foreign nationals have had to have the cards and Gordon Brown recently backed down in his conference speech saying the cards would not become mandatory.

Other political parties have gone further, saying if they won power in the next general election, they would scrap the scheme entirely.

Click here for all you need to know about ID cards.

Skilled migrants coming to the UK with a job offer will be issued with an ID cards from the start of next year, according to Home Secretary Alan Johnson.

Workers who fall under Tier 2 (skilled workers with a UK Sponsor and a UK job offer) of the points-based system will get the ID cards three months ahead of the expected schedule, Johnson said today. This is expected to number around 30,000 people and bring the total tally of issued cards up to about 120,000.

"Identity cards have been issued to 90,000 foreign nationals, exceeding our target by 15,000, a month ahead of schedule," Johnson said in a statement. "By speeding up the roll out of the cards more people will benefit from a secure and simple way to prove they are entitled to live, work or study here and it will prevent those here illegally from benefiting from the privileges of Britain."

The ID card efforts are being supported by a new trial set to take place in 17 Crown Post Offices. Here, the UK Border Agency will let workers 'enrol' their fingerprints and biometric information locally. Trials of this will start next month.

"Our partnership with the Post Office will provide vital extra capacity enabling the UK Border Agency to further speed up the enrolment process and give extra work to help safeguard the Post Office network," Johnson added.

" It will also give more choice and convenience to migrants about where they can enrol."

This option is designed to be more convenient for skilled workers but does come with a admin charge of 8. Alternatively, workers can still visit UK Border Agency or Identity and Passport Service offices, where the service remains free.

"The Post Office is very pleased to be supporting this trial as our reputation for trust and the unparalleled reach of our network means we can offer secure and efficient transfer of personal data while the potential for earning additional income would help support and sustain the nationwide branch network," said Alan Cook, managing director of the Post Office, in a statement.

Click here for more on government ID card plans.

Vince Cable has called for the ID card scheme and other government database projects to be scrapped.

In a speech today at the Liberal Democrat's conference in Bournemouth, the shadow chancellor continued the political debate on cuts, saying money could be better saved by getting rid of the schemes.

He said: "There is no need for vast government databases such as theID card scheme, the so-called super database and the NHS IT scheme."

Earlier this year, public sector analysts Kable said scrapping the controversial ID card scheme would save the government 3 billion alone. The NHS IT scheme has also come under a lot of criticisms due to its 12.7 billion price tag.

Cable concluded his speech by turning it round from cuts to investment. He disagreed with the continued investment into banks and instead suggested "a green future could be realised through real investment" which included green technologies and communications as areas worth looking into.

The Conservative party has said it's time to roll back the surveillance state in a new policy outline ahead of a looming national election.

The party has long been promising to cut ID cards if elected, but the new 11-point plan unveiled by Shadow Justice Secretary Dominic Grieve shows just how far the Tories want to take such cuts.

In addition to scrapping ID cards and the controversial ContactPoint database, the Tories would remove innocent people's records from the DNA database, tighten data sharing laws and boost the Information Commissioner's powers.

"No-one is suggesting we should not harness IT or surveillance technology to strengthen public protection. I am not amongst those who nostalgically yearn for some luddite return to a pre-technological age," Grieve said today in a speech.

"But, the government's approach to databases and surveillance powers is the worst of all worlds. Intrusive. Ineffective. And enormously expensive," he said, noting that databases keep going over-budget and that doesn't include the costs following data breaches.

He added that the UK has the most CCTV cameras in the world, but just one crime is solved for each 1,000 cameras, and that the DNA database holds details on innocent people, but not all convicted criminals.

"We have a series of IT systems that hoard personal data on us, but the butter fingers of the database state lost the entire nation's child benefit records in the post," he continued. "And we have intrusive surveillance powers now used to monitor children walking home from school, check the permits of paper boys, and even follow dog-walkers to check where their canines poop."

In his speech, Grieve called for fewer massive databases, and said they should hold the least amount of data possible. Individuals should be given control over their own data and which government agencies can access it, he claimed. The party also called for "stronger duties" on the government to protect data.

"Over-reliance on the database state has proved a woefully poor substitute for human judgment and care on the frontline of public service delivery," he added. "The state has encroached on the privacy of the innocent citizen, but delivered precious little in return." In practice, this would lead the party if elected to take 11 steps.

Database state

The first few pertain to databases. The Tories would scrap the National Identity Register and the ContactPoint database. The former is the database backing up the controversial ID card scheme, while the latter contains records of all children in the UK. Both databases have been declared illegal in a report by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust.

The Tories would also set out how long DNA should be retained on the National DNA Database, and no longer permanently hold innocent people's details.

It would also restrict local councils from accessing communications data, which some have done under RIPA for offences including benefit fraud and lying about which school your child should attend.

Regulation and legislation

The Tories would also add protection of personal privacy to the British Bill of Rights, and require Privacy Impact Assessments for new laws.

They would force the Home Office to submit its communications data plans to the Information commissioner for his approval. New data sharing powers would have to come into law through legislation, not order, and each government ministry would need to appoint someone to be in charge of data security.

The Information Commissioner would finally see a power boost, and the Tories would see him publish advice on data security in the public sector, consult with the private sector, and look into creating a data best practice kite mark system.

Costs

The Conservative plans come on the same day Labour's business secretary Peter Mandelson suggested big projects like ID cards and Trident could be shelved to save cash.

In response to a question on BBC Radio 4, asking if such projects would be put on the back burner, he said: "They have not been collectively discussed by ministers, but if you are saying to me that we are going to rule things out in advance of our consideration of these matters, I would say it would be foolish to rule out anything."

The government has appointed Sir Joseph Pilling as the first ever Identity Commissioner, keeping watch over the controversial ID card scheme and national registry.

The Identity Commissioner role, which was announced last year to help soothe fears over the ID card plans, is modelled on the Information Commissioner position an independent watchdog which has yet to be given much in the way of enforcement powers.

Sir Pilling, who previously worked for the Home Office and held posts as the Director General of HM Prison Service and as the Permanent Under Secretary to the Northern Ireland Office, will start work in the role on 1 October.

In his new role, he'll keep watch on the accuracy and security of the National Identity Register, and make sure the far-reaching database isn't abused by either the public or private sector. He will report annually to the Home Office and to Parliament.

Stressing that Sir Pilling will be independent of the government, Home Secretary Alan Johnson said: "The Identity Commissioner will champion their interests, providing a strong and independent voice, holding the Identity and Passport Service to account and ensuring information collected under the Service is kept securely."

"He will also deliver independent scrutiny of the uses to which identity cards are put by public authorities and private organisations," he added in a statement.

Sir Pilling echoed that theme. "I am delighted to accept this post, and plan to be an independent voice in my work towards safeguarding the public's privacy and identity rights, as Parliament intended," he said in a statement.

The statements didn't convince Phil Booth, national coordinator of anti-ID card lobby group NO2ID. "The ID Scheme Commissioner is just window-dressing. The role is designed to be toothless and irrelevant. And to appoint a time-served securocrat to the post virtually guarantees that the one power he has - to comment on the Scheme - will never embarrass his former masters."

"How can a man who has spent his entire career being the soul of discretion in various Departments of State be expected to act as a whistleblower?"

Click here for everything you need to know about ID cards.

This week in the number-friendly world of IT, Yahoo csmes up with a noble way to tackle spam, Microsoft sold off its digital marketing agency, and a report suggested there are savings to be had by scrapping ID cards.

One cent - Almost 90 per cent of all email is spam - so what's the solution? Well, researchers at Yahoo have developed a system that places a one cent charge on emails, with all the proceeds going to charity. CentMail is currently in private beta, and sells 500 email stamps for five dollars.

Three - Opera, whose users now total in the tens of millions, unleashed the third beta for its Opera 10 browser this week, which the firm claims improves performance and stability.

Nine - Microsoft released nine patches to fix 19 flaws in its products this week, five of which were rated "critical".

24 - According to new research by Panda Security, over half of new security threats such as viruses, worms and trojans only last for 24 hours.

$530 million - Microsoft announced this week that it will be selling of its digital marketing agency Razorfish for a reported $530 million following its deal with Yahoo, which will see the web firm take the lion's share of the search adverting sales.

3 billion - According to a new report, if the government scrapped its proposed ID card system it would save them more than 3 billion. The proposed National Identity Scheme will apparently cost around 4.95 billion for the next ten years - unless the Tories get their way and scrap it, that is.

Scrapping the controversial ID card scheme would save the government more than 3 billion, according to public sector analysts Kable.

Rolling out the National Identity Scheme will cost around 4.95 billion for the next 10 years. That includes identity cards, biometric passports and the database to back them up.

If elected, the Conservative Party has promised to ditch the controversial ID card scheme. The card for British citizens was unveiled last month, while foreign nationals are already being handed the cards.

If the ID cards, National Identity Register and fingerprints on passports were all dropped, the government would save 3.08 billion. Ditching the cards and the database, but keeping the fingerprinting system, would save 2.2 billion - suggesting such biometrics will cost just under a billion.

Fingerprinting is so expensive because it means those needing a new passport must apply in person, rather than through the post. According to Kable, the government will be recording all 10 fingerprints, but only embed two on the microchips of passports and ID cards.

"The cancellation would impact almost every aspect of the National Identity Scheme," said Philippe Martin, senior analyst at Kable and the report's author, said in a statement.

"Not only will it avoid the cost of producing the cards, but it will also reduce the large distribution costs associated with sending new or renewed cards for those which have been lost or stolen," he added. "It would also reduce the cost of application, enrolment and call centre processing."

Click here for everything you need to know about ID cards.

This week in the world of IT, the government's "unforgeable" ID card comes under scrutiny, Southampton University investments in a supercomputer, and the world's largest internet payment service shuts down globally for an hour.

4.89 - Orange this week unveiled its new credit crunch-busting mobile web offer. Priced at 4.89, and available to existing pay monthly and pay as you go customers, the offer will allow users 50Mb monthly allowance at 3.6Mbps, and is available on 18 month contract.

12 - The claimed number of minutes it took security researcher Adam Laurie to hack the government's supposedly "unforgeable" UK ID card.

25 per cent - A report claimed 25 per cent of all tweets on Twitter are generated by bots - and Jonathan Ross makes an average 37.08 tweets a day.

40 - TalkTalk began testing its 40Mbps fibre broadband in London and Wales this week.

60 - PayPal, the world's largest internet-based payment system, shut down globally this week for one hour. The 60 minute shut down, according to a spokesperson, was caused by "internal problems" - normal service was resumed by 3:30 the same day.

74 trillion - The University of Southampton invested 3 million into a supercomputer that is capable of doing 74 trillion computations a second this week.

The government's "unforgeable" ID card was hacked in 12 minutes by security researcher Adam Laurie this week, according to a Daily Mail report.

Laurie was able to make a complete clone of the card using a mobile phone with chip reading capabilities and a basic laptop PC in 12 minutes, said the Daily Mail report.

Once the chip had been breached, Laurie was able to alter the person's name, physical data, and finger prints, as well as switch the "not entitled to benefits" section to "entitled to benefits", reported the Mail.

The Mail also reported that Laurie was able to add a security note into the card that said: "I am a terrorist, shoot on sight."

A spokesperson from the Home Office said: "This story is rubbish. We are satisfied the personal data on the chip cannot be changed or modified and there is no evidence this has happened."

The ID cards use a radio frequency identification (RFID) chip for data storage.

The government claimed that this technology could never be cloned or faked, despite widespread reports concerning potential vulnerabilities with the technology.

"If the Government is serious about preventing identity theft, then it really has to do better than this," said Laurie in the Daily Mail report.

"The identity card includes a number of design and security features that are extremely difficult to replicate. Furthermore, the card readers we will deploy will undertake chip authentication checks that the card produced will not pass," said a Home Office statement.

NO2ID today condemned the Home Office for knowingly making 'ID theft' easier, ignoring dangerous vulnerabilities in the ID card system.

"This shows up the big con. The Home Office doesn't really care about 'ID theft', or it wouldn't be pushing technology that any competent crook can subvert," said Phil Booth, national coordinator of NO2ID.

The government is continuing its push to create an ID card system in the UK, today unveiling the official card for British citizens.

Identity cards have already been issued to so-called foreign nationals students and spouses of Brits.

Similar to that card, the British version features the usual photo, name, date of birth and signature. It also has a chip that will hold fingerprints and data found on passports. Click here or on Gallery above for pictures of the card.

Home Secretary Alan Johnson confirmed the card can be used as a passport across Europe, and suggested it will be useful to prove identity and age.

Acknowledging public data security concerns, the Home Office stressed it would be creating an Identity Commissioner to watch over the scheme before it goes live.

People in the Northwest will be able to apply for the cards early next year, with the full system including the massive identity database going live from 2012. So far, just foreign nationals have the cards, but there are as yet no readers for them.

Click here for more on government ID card plans.

The government will no longer require airside workers in Manchester and at London's City airport to have identity cards.

The two airports signed up to trial the controversial ID card scheme, which would have seen all airside workers including pilots forced to have a card - a move which riled some unions.

Instead, the new Home Secretary Alan Johnson has said such workers will trial the cards on a voluntary basis.

Now, the only people in the country for which an ID card is compulsory are so-called foreign nationals, such as overseas students or foreigners who have married British citizens. So far, 50,000 such people have received the cards.

Once the card is fully rolled out, it will not be compulsory to buy one, the government has said, but citizens will need a biometric passport or an ID card in order to leave the country.

The government denied that the airport move meant it was stepping back from the cards and connected database, both of which have been heavily criticised - especially by the Conservative Party, which has promised to scrap the scheme if elected.

Instead, the government said it was looking to speed up the roll-out.

Home Secretary Alan Johnson said in a statement that the cards were key to "asserting identity in everyday life," which was why the Home Office was looking to "see their introduction speeded up."

Phil Booth, the national coordinator of lobby group NO2ID, said the move was indeed a climbdown, but wasn't the end of the National Identity Register.

"This humiliating climbdown still doesn't mark the death of the ID scheme, but is rather part of the ongoing attempt by the senior officials in the Identity and Passport Service to fortify the scheme against cancellation, and to bind the hands of a future government," he said in a statement.

Click here to read all you need to know about the ID card plans.

A Conservative MP is warning companies involved with the ID card scheme to avoid any further contracts, as the plans will be scrapped if the Conservatives win the next general election.

Chris Grayling, shadow home secretary, has written to all five suppliers who were bidding for the contracts to provide ID cards telling them a Tory government would immediately end the project.

He has also accused the Government of attempting to put in "poison pill provisions" to avoid a successive Government cancelling the plans.

Grayling said in a statement on the Conservative website: "We intend to scrap the ID card project as one of our first acts if we are successful at the election."

"I am increasingly concerned that the Government is putting in place contractual arrangements that are designed to tie the hands of a future Government, and I want to make the contractors absolutely aware that we do not intend to complete this work."

A Home Office spokesperson told IT PRO: "It is normal and fully within government guidelines to include break clauses in contracts of this kind. It is a decision for the government of the day to determine whether to invoke such clauses but equally it would be wholly inappropriate to do so on the basis of opposition policy."

"The home secretary has made clear the government remains fully committed to bringing forward measures to protect people's identity that have widespread public support".

Jim Killock, member of the Open Rights Group, strongly opposed to ID cards, said: "Obviously contractors will expect some certainty that they won't be left to foot the bill if their contracts are terminated early. But there's a difference between commercial needs and trying to subvert the ability of a future government to make it own decisions."

"There's no secret in the Conservative and Liberal Democrat's opposition to ID Cards, nor that they would seek to end the scheme; commercial contractors will no doubt have considered the possibility of the scheme being scrapped and built that into the arrangements they have made."

"Contracts shouldn't come before the democratic will of the people, and if Labour force the country to pay an unnecessary bill for scrapping the scheme, that's likely to leave a bitter taste for years to come."

The Home Office has released its latest report into the cost of ID cards and, according to its findings, the cost of rolling out a National Identity Scheme has actually gone down from previous estimates.

Over the next decade, the cost of providing cards to UK and British citizens, residing in the UK, is expected to climb from a predicted 4770 million to 4995 million. However, set-up cost estimates have fallen, from 280 million to 245 million, but the ongoing cost of issuing the cards is likely to be more than expected, the Home Office explained.

Costs are broken down into a number of areas. For example, the Home Office expects that the cost of the technology infrastructure will account for less than a fifth of the total budget, while 'customer facing' elements, including call centres, will take a nine per cent cut of the pie. The Home Office acknowledges that these estimates are likely to change, however. "In particular, it should be noted that costs reflect the estimated outcome of a number of competitive tendering processes which are currently underway," it explained.

Another report, released to coincide with the costs one, offers a status update into the scheme itself. The Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, launched the paper today, explaining the importance of the scheme and its progress so far, "The National Identity Service will [give] all of us a secure and convenient way to prove our own identity to a high level of confidence, and [help] us to protect ourselves from those who might wish to encroach on our individual liberties," she wrote.

Smith said that roughly 75,000 cards would be in the hands of foreign nationals residing in the UK by the end of November this year, while adding that it was only months until British citizens would start to receive their own cards. Greater Manchester is inked to be the first place in the UK where residents will be able to apply for their biometric ID card, Smith explained.

Manchester, the report claims, was chosen for a number of reasons, including the fact that the city has a high proportion of young people - section of the population not unused to suggestions that they validate their age.

Those that do volunteer for a card will be expected to pay 30, the Home Office said.

The reports have not been met with glee by those previously opposed to the idea of ID cards.

Phil Booth, National Coordinator of NO2ID said in a statement: "Five years in, the admitted Home Office costs are over 5 billion and they're suspiciously silent on fees. Anyone who registers now has been conned into signing away their privacy for life AND giving the government a blank cheque."

Booth's feelings were echoed by Guy Herbert, the organisation's general secretary, who added: "Calling ID cards a 'service' is shameless propaganda. There's no other way to try to suggest the ID scheme is either useful or wanted. No one outside Whitehall and its favourite IT firms is going to benefit. But they want us to love Big Brother."

Late-breaking news that Conficker could have finally woken up is at the top of this Week in Review.

After the Great April Fools Conficker Scare', many observers would have assumed the threat had gone, but as researchers talking to IT PRO have warned, this was always likely to happen.

Like a good horror movie scare, it appears that the people behind Conficker have possibly revealed its present' a week later, for the holiday weekend.

By the time of writing, we don't know what it is Conficker has actually downloaded from particular servers.

However, even if this is another joke being played, we've seen this week that other computer worms have already copied its functionality, not to mention the new mobile phone and social network worm threats.

Also this week, an EU directive officially came into force in the UK, which means ISPs must keep data on customers for one year.

With a cost of 48 million, the government said that this legislation is necessary to protect both public and national safety, but it has some fierce critics.

Funny what cutting a cable can do. Tens of thousands of people in East London were left without broadband after a contractor damaged BT cables.

It was also all stations go for the National ID card scheme, with CSC and IBM handed contracts to roll out biometric and passport systems worth more than half a billion pounds.

The contracts will bring biometric technology to the masses a step closer. As well as ID cards we'll be expecting passports featuring a chip with fingerprints and digital photographs from 2011.

This week, we also collected opinions from journalists across Dennis Publishing titles to create a list of the technology companies that we like and admire.

As well as the usual suspects like Google, Apple and Twitter, there are a couple of surprises like GoodOldGames and Red Hat that could interest you.

Thanks for reading, and Happy Easter from IT PRO!

Identity cards could use chip and PIN technology and be used in cash machines, according to the head of the Identity and Passport Service (IPS).

James Hall, the IPS' chief executive, said there were no "technical reasons" not to use the controversial ID cards in Automatic Teller Machine (ATM) networks.

"One of the reasons for the format of the card is we have the opportunity to put it in to card readers and potentially use it in existing networks such as the ATM network," he told the BBC. "We are in discussions with the financial services industry and, if they come forward with a compelling view of the rationale for chip and pin for them, that's definitely something we'll take extremely seriously."

"If we conclude that chip and pin is a key part of making it useful, there's no technical reason why we couldn't do it," he added.

Hall also said that just 22,500 of the cards had been given out so far, despite plans for as many as 50,000 to be given out to so-called foreign nationals overseas students and foreign-born spouses by last month.

The news comes after the IPS announced that IBM and CSC had won two major contracts to supply the databases holding digital photos and fingerprints of cardholders.

Phil Booth, national coordinator of anti-ID card group NO2ID, criticised the contracts. "Despite knowing that the ID scheme will be scrapped under any change of government, the Home Office is ploughing ahead with its gold-plated white elephant," he said.

Click here to read what you need to know about ID cards.

The Identity and Passport Service (IPS) has awarded two major contracts for e-passports in addition to the controversial identity card system to CSC and IBM, bringing ID cards "a step closer".

The deals replace existing passport application processing contracts, which expire this year and next, and will see the creation of the database of photographs and fingerprints for ID cards. The overall cost for upgrading passports and rolling out ID cards over the next decade will top 3.5 billion, with 1.2 billion of that for identity cards alone.

CSC was awarded a 385 million contract for the application and enrolment system, which will process passport and ID card applications, and allow "customers" to apply or update their personal data online. Under the ID card system, people will be required to keep their data up-to-date or face fines.

The CSC contract also includes new IT infrastructure and phone systems for the IPS.

IBM will be paid 265 million to build and run the database that will hold photographs and fingerprints for passports and ID cards, which a report earlier this year said could be an illegal database. IBM will also build a replacement for the UK Border Agency's fingerprinting system.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith claimed in a statement: "These contracts bring ID cards and more secure British passports a step closer, taking advantage of the best technology available to bring real benefits."

IBM and CSC are part of a framework contract, which means they are preferred bidders for IPS contracts, alongside EDS, Fujitsu and Thales, which won the first contract last year.

The new passports featuring a chip with fingerprints and digital photographs will be issued starting from 2011, when ID cards will also be available.

The cards have been issued to so-called foreign nationals overseas students and foreign-born spouses since last year, while airside staff at Manchester and London City airports will trial the cards this autumn.

Click here to read what you need to know about ID cards.

Staff in over 30 local authorities have been the subject of serious ID card database security breaches over the last two and a half years, it has emerged.

The incidents were revealed in January, when the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) issued an information bulletin to the authorities restating its access policy and penalties in light of the breaches.

Yesterday, the DWP confirmed it had sent the bulletin and that it was related to how it had detected staff accessing its Customer Information System (CIS) with "view-only" rights to its data on all UK citizens with a national insurance number.

These instances had no business justification and were detected from August 2006 onwards, in councils across the UK, including three at Sefton Council and two at Glasgow City Council.

The DWP press office issued a statement that said the fact the breaches were detected proved that CIS security measures were working.

"The bulletin included a reminder for local authority staff of the penalties for inappropriate accessing of customer information," it stated. "This is an indication of how seriously the department and local authorities take data security."

The penalties for unauthorised CIS access, such as viewing personal records or those of others they may know, include possible disciplinary action or prosecution.

Mark Evans, marketing and communications director at IT security specialist Imerja, said the incidents proved there is a real need for staff in every organisation to be better educated about IT security policies.

"The problem remains that, even with restricted access, there are still people who struggle to understand the importance of IT security and will write their login details on Post-It' notes for anyone to see," he said.

"What we don't know in this case is whether any of the detected breaches were malicious or if they were simply people misusing the database by taking shortcuts or even using it as a contacts directory. People don't realise how easy it is to breach IT security protocol."

The Office of Government Commerce (OGC) has once again been told to publish two Gateway Reviews' into the identity (ID) card scheme.

The Information Tribunal today published its latest ruling, dismissing the OGC's long-running appeal to block the disclosure of the reviews, which the government procurement body has said would threaten national security.

The reviews, which are used to track major government projects at various stages in their lifecycle, were carried out by the OGC on behalf of the Home Office in 2003 and 2004.

In 2006, Information Commissioner Richard Thomas ordered the OGC to make the reviews public, following a Freedom of Information (FOI) request.

But the OGC appealed the decision in the High Court, which referred the decision back to the tribunal.

Today's ruling said: "The Tribunal upholds the Decision of the Information Commissioner in his Decision Notice dated 31 July 2006 and orders the disclosure of the two Gateway Reports within 28 days."

The ruling paves the way for some detail of the review to be published, including the results of a 'traffic-light' rating system used to assess the progress of the 4.7-billion project.

Steve Wood, assistant Information Commissioner, welcomed the ruling, saying that Thomas was aware of the importance the government attaches to the Gateway Review process at the time he issued his original FOI decision.

"Disclosure will enhance public debate and understanding on issues regarding the programme's feasibility, management and progress," he added.

Wood also pointed out that the ruling did not set a precedent and that FOI requests were handled by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) on a case-by-case basis.

The OGC was limited in its response. It said in a statement: "The Information Tribunal has concluded that neither they nor the Information Commissioner believe all Gateway Reviews should be disclosed. It has made clear that its decision refers only to this specific request and does not set any precedent."

The appellant added that it was currently assessing the detail of the Information Tribunal's decision and would respond in full in due course.

The government has started its search for a National Identity Scheme Commissioner.

Advertised in national newspapers, the newly-created role will act as a watchdog to keep data held on the National Identity Register secure, managing access to that database for private and public bodies, and helping to roll-out the cards to the rest of the country.

"This is an exciting opportunity for a strategic thinker to shape the role of the commissioner in a complex, multi-stakeholder environment," the advert reads.

ID cards are currently being given to foreign nationals studying in the UK or married to UK citizens. The scheme will be rolled out to UK citizens starting this year.

The National Identity Scheme Commissioner role was modeled on the Information Commissioner's job, and though it may sound like a rather thankless task, will offer a six-figure salary for a three-year term.

Click here to read everything you need to know about ID cards.

The Conservative Party has criticised plans to include compensation clauses in the event of cancellation of ID card outsourcing contracts.

The ongoing negotiations between a number of outsourcing providers and the Home Office regarding the government's ID card and National Identity Register (NIR) schemes have angered the opposition, which has pledged to scrap both.

In the event that the Conservatives are elected to power and fulfil their pledge to abandon the plans, they could be held liable for compensation worth tens of millions of taxpayers' pounds.

The shadow home secretary, Dominic Grieve, said: "We put the government and industry on notice two years ago that we would abandon this project."

And he called for the government to "disclose what steps it has taken to protect the taxpayer from liability".

The Home Office responded in a statement by saying it would be inappropriate to release any negotiation details, but that it would "agree contracts that appropriately protect the public purse".

"It is normal and fully within government guidelines to include break clauses in contracts of this kind, but such contracts are always commercially confidential," said the statement.

"Regardless of the government of the day it would be inappropriate to operate based on opposition policy because it would unreasonably constrain our work," it added.

Although the actual figures under negotiation were unknown, the ID cards scheme is expected to be worth some 2 billion. Thales SA is the only firm so far to have been awarded an 18-million contract for a trial involving airport workers.

But the government did confirm compensation would be paid for scrapped contracts, allowing the firms to claim costs, in addition to lost profits, if they receive less than a year's notice.

The Liberal Democrats home affairs spokesman, Chris Huhne, commented: "If these contracts are signed and then cancelled it would represent a spectacular waste of taxpayer's money on literally nothing at all."

Dominic Trott, consultant at specialist outsourcing researcher, Pierre Audoin Consultants (PAC) told IT PRO that the addition of break clauses to IT outsourcing contracts was common practice for public sector organisations.

He added: "Although these cancellations are uncommon, it is not unreasonable for the supplier to expect compensation. It is important to note that, especially for large frameworks such as the National Identity Scheme, there are considerable costs involved simply to bid for the contract. Also, with much of the early costs of such projects being borne by the supplier, they are unlikely to start making a profit from them for the first couple of years."

Five firms, including CSC, EDS, Fujitsu, IBM and Thales, won the framework contract to supply the scheme in May last year.

The identity card scheme has caught its first illegal immigrant, the Home Office has said.

Foreign nationals those people from other countries looking to stay in the UK started being interviewed to receive biometric identity cards last month.

Indian-born Ranjit Singh applied to stay in the country on the basis of a common law relationship with a Briton, meaning that under the new rules he was forced to give his fingerprints to the UK Border Agency at an ID centre in Sohlihull on Monday - the first day such fingerprinting took place.

After his fingerprints matched that of a failed asylum seeker of the same name, Singh admitted to immigration officers he'd previously made a "bogus asylum application," the Home Office said.

Singh has been charged with "seeking leave to remain in the UK by deception" to which he pleaded guilty yesterday. He will be sentenced in January.

Gail Adams, the UK Border Agency's regional director, said the case showed that the controversial system makes it easier to catch illegal immigrants. "This instant result shows how effective identity cards will be in preventing immigration abuse. Individuals will be locked down to one identity through their facial image and fingerprints."

But Guy Herbert, general secretary of anti-ID card group NO2ID, asked: "What proportion of false matches are they turning

up? And how good is the technology alone as evidence - that is real

evidence - against someone who doesn't admit a match that is found?"

Click here for everything you need to know about ID cards.

ID cards have come to the UK. So far, it's just for so-called foreign nationals, but if the government continues to have its way, by 2012 British citizens will be lining up to be fingerprinted.

The results of most polls on the subject seem to reflect the opinion of whoever commissioned the survey, suggesting more about modern polling standards than what we all really think about ID cards.

Still, there hasn't been a huge uproar or walk-outs or demonstrations. Are British people okay with identity cards and the connected massive database? Or are they simply unaware of what it all means?

One of the government's loudest critics has been lobby group NO2ID and it believes the latter. "What's happening will come as a huge shock to a lot of people," said general secretary Guy Herbert to IT PRO.

"It's very, very clear that the more people know, in our common experience, the more against it they tend to be," he said. "As public consciousness of the scheme has grown then the figures in favour have fallen."

He compared the issue to the poll tax, saying that once the letters hit peoples' doorsteps, the scheme became "hugely unpopular."

With that in mind, here's what we know about the ID card and registry scheme so far, based on Home Office press releases, briefing sessions, and websites and the same from their most vocal critic, NO2ID.

One thing to note, however all of the legislation regarding the British ID card is not yet passed through parliament, so some of this is subject to change. In fact, the Home Office is holding a 12-week consultation on the draft legislation; if you want to push for change, details are available here.

Foreign nationals first, pleaseThe rollout is in several stages, and there are indeed two separate cards planned. The first is being released by the Borders Agency to foreign nationals; the second is being developed for British citizens by the Identity and Passport Services. Both bodies are part of the Home Office, and the cards will be essentially interoperable.

But what's a foreign national? That lovely term is what the government uses to describe anyone living in the UK under a visa so those people who come here to study, work or marry.

Jacqui Smith said earlier this month: "As identity cards begin rolling out, starting later this month with foreign nationals, we will quickly see that a single, convenient and secure way of proving who someone is will bring real benefits to this country."

The idea is that any foreigner wishing to work will have to show one of these cards although it is already a requirement to show a work permit or visa to be able to work at the moment.

At the time, Phil Booth, NO2ID's national coordinator made a fairly good point. "To suggest ID cards are somehow connected to immigration policy Jacqui Smith is deliberately engaging in populist bullying of the soft targets anonymous individuals seeking marriage visas or education those who have no choice but to keep quiet and comply. All resident foreigners is a different matter. When it comes round to fingerprinting Madonna and her family, say, such tactics will backfire."

And then everyone elseBut the cards aren't just for foreign nationals and pop stars.

The Home Office has stressed again and again that having an ID card is not compulsory for any British citizen. The cards will, however, be designated as necessary to apply for anyone wanting a passport so if you want to leave the country, you'll need to be on the registry.

At the moment, the cards will also be necessary for anyone requiring a criminal background check to work airside at Manchester and London City airports. The Home Office told IT PRO this will likely expand to anyone needing such a background check such as teachers and could possibly expand to anyone applying for a driver's licence.

Those airside workers will receive their cards by the end of 2009. Following that, for the next two years, signing up for the cards will be strictly voluntary and targeted at young people. The cards will initially cost 30, but could go up in cost by 2012, and airside workers and others may receive them free as an added incentive to sign up to the registry. Another incentive to sign up will be their potential use for European travel why get a passport for 72 when you can get an ID card for free?

From 2012, anyone applying for a passport will be required to register. The Home Office estimates this will be between five and six million people annually. It is on a voluntary basis only if you consider the ability to leave the country ever in your life unnecessary.

The cardThe card itself is fairly innocuous. It will cost 30 to get one of the devices, which will be same size as a standard credit card.

Click here for a picture of the card.

In many ways, it will be similar to a passport. It will expire after ten years, and will hold the same details found on the data page of a standard UK passport. On the front of the card will be a photograph alongside the person's name, date of birth, nationality and immigration status. The embedded chip will hold biometrics, which at the moment include a digital image and fingerprints.

There will be no requirement to carry the card this isn't Nazi Germany but immigrants will be asked to show it to would-be employers to prove their working status.

The card can also be used as a basic photo ID, to buy alcohol and cigarettes, for example, as it will carry a photograph and date of birth on the front. It could also be used in place of a passport to travel to countries in Europe, and eventually even to former Commonwealth states which don't require British citizens to have a visa. (Any country requiring a visa will still require a passport, as the card obviously has no pages to glue such documents into.)

In more advanced transactions, it can be used to prove identity by checking details on the registry. If you're looking to move a big sum of money at a bank, they could ask for proof of identity and then check your card is still valid using an online system, for example.

The registryIt's hard to see what the problem is with a piece of photo identification. Any drinker has one to get into bars, any smoker has one to buy cigarettes, and any traveller has one to get on a plane. What's the big deal?

When you apply for a card, your details are added to the national registry which so far is just a spark in the Home Office's eye, as it doesn't exist yet. When it does, it will be a repository of information on everyone with a card, containing their name, address, photo and fingerprint, among other details.

The Home Office has said that no private or public organisation will have access to this data base except for police, immigration and security forces, of course. "Police and a number of specified crime prevention organisations may be able to use information on the register for the purposes of detecting or preventing crime," Home Office spokesman San Matthews told IT PRO.

"The Identity Cards Act 2006 provides for a small number of organisations that may request information from your record for a specific purpose," he added. "These are the security services, the police, HM Revenue and Customs. In each cast they will be required to justify why they need the information."

In order for the database to be useful, it must be correct. To ensure this, part of the draft legislation for the British ID card regards fines for not updating the registry regarding change of address, name or gender. The Home Office has promised to warn first, fine after if you fail to notify the registry of a new address. Should you miss that first warning, the first fine will cost 125. Continue to fail to update the database, and the ultimate fine will hit 1,000 a charging scheme on par with the driver's licence fines at the moment.

Those are just civil charges, however. The criminal charges of up to two years in prison come in if you are deemed to be "deliberately or recklessly" supplying incorrect data.

This might be a good point to note that plans to place criminal charges against those who have "deliberately or recklessly" lost public data have yet to come through despite being promised a year ago. The information commissioner the UK data watchdog is only just about to possibly receive the ability to fine such reckless organisations.

SecurityThe card has been marketed by the government as a way to protect average people from identity fraud. Given the many times this past year the government has lost people's identifying data, some added security would be a good thing. But it's those very data losses which have left many calling for the card and registry scheme to be abandoned.

NO2ID obviously disagree but here's why. At the moment, identity is an "ill-defined mushy thing" made up of your name, account details, and various other data which is floating around about you, explained Herbert. When people talk about ID fraud, they mean someone has been pretending to be them, using their name or a credit card, for example.

But now, with a consolidated, official identity, it really will be possible to steal it, as it will be a tangible thing. "It's vastly more dangerous," he said.

Pair that with "joined up government" and departmental data sharing, and it's even worse, he claimed. "The whole concept of data sharing is doing precisely the reverse of increasing security."

Weirdly, NO2ID's Herbert is not the only person who claims databases are inherently insecure. Prime Minister Gordon Brown agrees: "It is important to recognise that we cannot promise that every single item of information will always be safe because mistakes are made by human beings. Mistakes are made in the transportation, if you like the communication of information."

Well, okay then.

The most recent report has shown that the charge for the ten year development and day-to-day running of the system will be 4.785 billion, while the cost for foreign nationals will be 326 million.

The card itself will initially cost applications 30, but the Home Office has stated that cost could rise from 2012 the year the programme really kicks off for most citizens.

At the moment, foreign nationals will also be expected to cover the cost of travelling to one of just seven enrolment centres. At the moment, just Croydon is open for business, but is set to be followed by Cardiff, Glasgow, Northern Ireland, Sheffield, Solihull and Liverpool. By the time the 2012 rollout kicks off, the government is hoping citizens won't have to make such journeys, as they'll be able to go to their local post office or photo shop, for example, to have their biometric data taken.

The system has been compared to the passport photo market you need a photo to apply, but you don't need to go to a government office to have it taken, as many shops are authorised to take them. Jacqui Smith said such a system could work for collecting biometrics such as fingerprints, and said such a 'biometric enrolment market' could be worth 200 million by 2012.

"We want these services to be provided by the market, giving people a competitive choice that ensures convenience and cost-effectiveness," she said earlier this month.What that means for ID card applicants is that the 30-and-likely-rising cost does not include the cost of a photograph or your fingerprints.

As noted previously, the card must also be replaced every ten years, at your own cost. While cards do not need to be replaced for each and every address change, they must be replaced following name changes such as after marriage or gender changes. A planned information economy

Cost and privacy aren't the biggest complaints, according to NO2ID's Guy Herbert. "The most fundamental one is that it profoundly alters the relationship between citizen and the state," he told IT PRO. "The Home Office's new model is to put itself as man in the middle for every interaction you have."

"Nobody is allowed to trust anyone else, but are required to trust the Home Office absolutely."

Indeed, in order to access the registry to check the validity of an ID card, both private and public sector organisations must be accredited to ensure they're using the information in a responsible way and have the technology to keep the data safe.

The Home Office, obviously, can't accredit itself, so we're left in the position where we simply have to trust that the data is being held in a safe way or hope the information commissioner's new powers to spot-check can be used on the Home Office itself and the new national identity commissioner gets even stronger powers.

Herbert said this is driven by the government's believe that if it can only collect enough information, it can become more efficient. "Big government's a bit like a planned economy," he suggested. "If only you can get enough information, everything can be made better."

monitor immigration and prevent terrorism

The IT firms supplying the cards likely haven't much complaint, as they're earning millions from the project. Of course, two have already stepped away from the potentially lucrative contracts.

Nor will the post offices and other shops which could benefit from Smith's plans to take fingerprinting to the private sector especially if Smith's prediction that the market could be worth 200 million holds true.

And based on all those public opinion polls, anywhere from a third to three-quarters of surveyed people are fine with the scheme.

But NO2ID - and all the other major political parties - aren't the only ones protesting the plan. Scottish parliament recently slammed the registry, on the back of a poll suggesting Scots aren't very much in favour of it.

As they're likely to be the first Britons to receive the cards, air transport unions have slammed the plans. The British Airline Pilots Association has threatened to strike over being used as "guinea pigs".

Cambridge academics have today sent a letter to newspapers, worried about the affects the card and registry will have on overseas students and researchers. Ross Anderson, Cambridge University's Professor of Security Engineering, said to the Cambridge News: "This will place yet another burden on non-EU students and spouses in Cambridge, on top of the recent huge increases in visa fees People will have to trek to Croydon to get fingerprinted and interviewed. In fact one of my own foreign students is hurrying to write up and leave the country before his current visa ends in January precisely to avoid this."

And, as noted above, celebrities aren't exactly happy to be fingerprinted. In a letter to the Telegraph newspaper, celebs such as author Peter Pullman, musicians Neil Tennant and Brian Eno, and comedians Mark Thomas and Lucy Porter wrote: "If this scheme is continued... fewer of the world's leading performers in every field will choose to make their homes here than do now."

For more informationBetween the government's own claims, letters to the newspapers, and lobbyists like NO2ID, it's really quite hard to figure out what exactly is going on and that's with any issue, let alone something as complicated as the national registry.

All of this information has been made public, however. So if you find yourself confused and with a lot of time on your hands sift through it for yourself.

Here are a few places to start. The Identity and Passport Service has a dedicated website regarding the cards and database, while those from overseas can find out more from the Border Agency here.

The original ID card legislation is here, while the more recent secondary legislation which is not yet passed is here (pdf). The difference between the two is that the first round of legislation made it legal to create such a card, and the second outlines the detail of when they will be rolled out, what form they will take, and how the database will work.

If you'd like to know what the Home Office and other government officials have said about the cards, click here, while NO2ID's news blog is here.

And for IT PRO's coverage of the issue, click here for our most recent timeline, and here for more stories.

The first round of biometric identity cards at to be rolled out today, for foreigners living in the UK.

The cards will be given out to foreigners with visas such as for studying, working or marriage living in the country.

The Home Office said it expects as many as 60,000 of the controversial cards to be rolled out by the Borders Agency by March, mostly to students. It expects the majority of so-called foreign nationals to have the cards by 2015.

Starting next year, the Identity and Passport Service will begin giving out their version of the biometric ID cards to British citizens, starting with airside workers at two airports.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said: "In time identity cards for foreign nationals will replace paper documents and give employers a safe and secure way of checking a migrant's right to work and study in the UK."

Dominic Grieve, shadow home secretary for the Conservative party, said the system was pointless. "This is a gimmick but it's a gimmick with a price. While these 'ID cards' won't stop illegal immigration or terrorism, they will land the taxpayer with a multi-billion pound bill," he said. "At a time of economic hardship this is the last thing the taxpayer needs."

For those who disagree with the scheme, anti-ID card group NO2ID told IT PRO it plans to demonstrate against the cards at immigration centres today. In addition, the government recently launched a consultation on the cards.

Click here for a timeline of the cards' arrival in the UK.

ID cards will cost 30 and, once you have one, you'll be forced to keep the registry updated on your address and other details, according to a Home Office briefing attended by IT PRO.

The Identity and Passport Service (IPS) has released the details as part of secondary legislation (click here for the pdf), which it will take consultation on for the next 12 weeks so if you're not happy, drop them a line here.

The cards will start to be rolled out in 2010 to young people on a voluntary basis, but the Borders Agency is rolling out its own version of the cards to foreign nationals starting next Tuesday, as well as to airside workers at London City and Manchester airports in 2009.

If this round of legislation is passed expected to happen next spring the cards will not be compulsory for UK citizens, but will be required for anyone applying for a passport. The government is also looking to make the cards a requirement for anyone requiring a criminal record background check such as for all airside workers or teachers and possibly for those applying for driving licences, though that's not on the cards quite yet.

Under the proposal, the cards will cost 30 until 2010; the cost after that is still unknown. They will be valid for 10 years, like passports and indeed could be used as a travel document inside the European Union.

Unlike passports, however, anyone with an ID card will be required to update the registry if any of their essential data changes such as their address. Failure to do so could lead to a civil fine of up to 1,000, but the Home Office officials stressed that it was not a revenue-raising scheme and that anyone who forgets to update their address after a move, for example, will be simply reminded.

Those who refuse to do so face an initial fine of 125 only reaching the 1,000 maximum if they continue to refuse to update their details. A similar system is in place for driving licences, the officials said.

Also under the draft, once a card is expired, people will no longer be expected to update their addresses and other details, the Home Office said.

As the cards are rolled out to more people, banks and other private companies will be able to go online to check a card's validity, but only after their systems have been checked and approved by the government.

The same goes for public sector organisations. They too must first prove they have secure and probably encrypted - systems the officials stressed, adding that if a government organisation is turned down, the Home Office will work with them to get their technology up to the required level.

Such groups both private and public sector must ask individuals for their permission before checking the registry. However, the Home Office and policing bodies will not require such consent when the case is in the "public interest" such as crime, immigration and national security.

"Police and a number of specified crime prevention organisations may be able to use information on the register for the purposes of detecting or preventing crime," Home Office spokesman San Matthews told IT PRO.

"The Identity Cards Act 2006 provides for a small number of organisations that may request information from your record for a specific purpose," he added. "These are the security services, the police, HM Revenue and Customs. In each cast they will be required to justify why they need the information."

That access, and other aspects of the cards, will be under the watch of a National Identity Scheme commissioner who will report to parliament. That role is yet to be filled.

Click here for pictures of the ID cards, and click here for a timeline of how the identity cards came to be.

23 January 2008: Leaked documents reveal plans to push back the ID card roll-out three years, until after the next election. The news comes after various high-profile data breaches at government departments. 25 January 2008: BAE and Accenture, two leading systems integrators, pull out from the shortlist of bidders for the ID cards contract. Six other companies remain in the running for the contract.

6 March 2008: The Home Office announces delays to the timeline of the ID card plan, with participation for all UK citizens not being necessary for another two years. Home Secretary Jacqui Smith also explains that the bulk of the population will already have new ID cards before they become mandatory.

8 May 2008 The National Identity Card Scheme has risen by 37 per cent according to a report. It says that costs for the decade from October 2007 will rise from 245 million to 335 million.

23 May 2008 Framework contracts for the ID card scheme are signed with CSC, EDS, Fujitsu, IBM and Thales. The firms will still battle out for the contracts on offer, but the framework speeds up the procurement process.

1 August 2008: The UK National Identity Scheme awards its first contract to French defence systems engineering firm Thales, which signs a four-year contract worth over 18 million.

25 September 2008 Starting November 25, the new identity cards will be issued to foreign nationals'. Pictures are also revealed, showing that the ID cards are the same size as a credit card and contains basic details as well as an electronic chip holding biometric data.

6 November 2008: The ID card roll-out continues with Manchester and London City airport workers, who will be issued biometric cards containing finger print data during a 19-month period.

The previous ID card timeline which shows events in 2007 is available here.

Manchester and London City airports will be the first to sign up for the government's National ID card scheme.

The Home Office has confirmed that Home Secretary Jacqui Smith will announce that the workers at the airports will be the first to be issued biometric cards containing fingerprint data in the trials that will test them during an 18-month period.

The spokesman denied that this was a scaling back of plans earlier this year for up to 200,000 airport workers to carry the cards from the middle of next year, with the Home Office telling the BBC that it was on track to meet the commitment.

However, the government did say they will waive the 300 per person fee as a concession to the airline industry, with the scheme now estimated to cost 4.7 billion over 10 years.

The British Air Transport Association (BATA) said it did not see any economic benefit from the ID card scheme, with airside workers already the subject of vigorous checks.

BATA Secretary General Roger Wiltshire told Reuters: "We won't be volunteering for ourselves until we see some real benefits from going along with it."

Foreign nationals from outside the first 30 countries of the European Economic Area will be the first to be issued the cards on November 25, with the Home Office expecting that 40,000 cards will be in circulation by April of 2009.

Both opposition parties say they will ditch cards for British nationals if they win power.

The police have confirmed plans to expand trials of mobile fingerprint scanners nationwide.

The handheld biometric devices about the size of a smartphone are being rolled out to every police force in the UK under the Mobile Identification At Scene (Midas) scheme.

The system works by allowing an officer to scan a suspect's fingerprints at the roadside before comparing them to the police national biometric database, Ident1.

Peter Mandich, National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) spokesman, told IT PRO that 200 trial handsets in use across 20 forces had been able to return identity confirmation from a suspect's fingerprint scan in under two minutes, 87 per cent of the time, which he described as a "stunning success that would keep more officers on a community's streets more of the time".

The 40-million scheme has been designed to save officers the average 67 minutes needed to fingerprint a suspect back at a police station. And there are plans to further develop the system to transfer pictures of suspects as well, where development requirements were put out to European tender earlier this year.

But civil rights campaigners, concerned about increased powers of surveillance and random checks, called for the roll out to be halted until legal protections are put in place.

Although the NPIA confirmed mobile fingerprinting would be entirely voluntary and that no scanned fingerprints would be stored on any databases, some critics of the scheme questioned its ability to operate accurately and safely.

Cross-party campaigners against the National Identity Scheme and other public initiatives they maintain will create a database state, NO2ID pointed to failure rates, as high as 1 in 5 for fingerprints, in the only medium-scale test of biometrics on the general population to date, carried out by the UK Passport Service in 2004.

Phil Booth, NO2ID's national coordinator, said: "This implies a completely new power for police to fingerprint you in the street, using an iffy technology. If refusing to cooperate can get you arrested, then you would have not just fingerprints but DNA on a criminal database for the rest of your life. That means the state can pick on anyone at any time."

The principles and work behind STORK (Secure Identity across Borders Linked), a scheme which will provide online access to public services across EU borders, has been revealed.

An industry workshop for the three-year 20 million (15.9 million) scheme was held at the ISSE 08 security conference in Madrid. Individuals working on the scheme described some of the work already done as well as the real-world pilot schemes for the ambitious project which includes 14 member states including the UK, Germany, France and Spain.

Jim Purves, head of product strategy for the UK government gateway at the Department of Work and Pensions, was one of the individuals at the forefront of the scheme and described a case study for one of the pilot schemes that he was going to be involved with.

He gave an example of an Estonian resident who wanted to work in Belgium. For this he would have to enroll in its portal, an existing service. He said today you would have to fill in your details manually, but the aim would be to link it to the STORK environment so it could be done in an automated fashion.

He said: "The first step is around authentication, with the Estonian resident authenticating to the Belgium portal with their ID card. The first thing we would be implementing on the STORK portal would be a list of services that can be accessed.

"This is one central place where the user can come to and understand what services are available to them in a cross-border context. The user has navigated to the STORK portal and see they can access the Belgium portal."

It was made very clear that the STORK project would not get directly involved in the national electronic identity technology of individual members, but rather develop common rules and specifications to assist the recognition of these identities across the different countries involved.

When asked about the UK's role in the scheme Purves said: "It's not a question of influence, it's about collaboration. The UK is collaborating on this because we believe it's the right thing to do.

"The lead department for in the UK for this is the Identity and Passport Service (IPS). As you know our identity passport service is very much focused on the national identity scheme. The Department of Work and Pensions currently runs the e-infrastructure associated around the government gateway."

The UK is set to see the first ID cards given to so-called foreign nationals next month.

Was it likely to end up any other way? September was Google's month as it came out with its own browser Google Chrome, with IT PRO reporting on its launch as well as giving our own verdict to the new competition to Firefox and Internet Explorer. And it's not even out of beta...

This month was also the first glimpse of a Google Android-based handset and a first-look review. Although most observers agreed the hardware wasn't much to write home about, it was all about the open-source operating system, which is likely to make it a major force in the mobile phone market.

There's hardly a month that goes by without some story of a government data breach, and September wasn't to be the exception. The government axed a 1.5 million contract with PA Consulting after the loss of an unencrypted USB stick which contained details of all 84,000 prisoners in England and Wales.

Better news (depending on your point of view) was to come with the first pictures of the controversial ID card, which will be issued to foreign nationals from November. The big question is whether the data held in these biometric cards can kept safe successfully.

Don't forget Apple although there weren't many iPhone related stories as usual, it was the month where new ranges of the iPod Touch and Nano were released to the world.

Dell was also busy. The long-awaited Dell netbook was finally launched the Inspiron Mini 9 - to a pretty crowded mini PC marketplace. Other technology under the spotlight was the new EliteBook, which had a claim of being able to last 24 hours without having to be charged.

And finally, although it looks like it may be broken down for the near future, the Large Hadron Collider held the attention of the technology world this month as scientists try to find out what happened in the Big Bang.

Google announces the T-Mobile G1 Android phone

When it comes to hype, the Google Android has been approaching Apple iPhone levels. But finally this week, there is news of an Android-based handset manufactured by HTC, and perhaps unsurprisingly, it doesn't look very different to its Windows Mobile devices in terms of hardware.

But of course the main attraction is the actual new open-source operating system, and this looks like a key step in Google's attempt to grab a major piece of the mobile internet pie.

Photos: Government unveils first ID cards

After a huge amount of consultation, argument and controversy, images of the first identity card have been released. They will be issued to foreign nationals from the start of November. It is the same size of a credit card, holds basic information and also contains an electronic chip holding biometrics.

NHS doctors need permission to access patient records

The NHS has decided to change its consent model which had previously caused confusion into one which is more simple patients need to give permission for doctors to access their Summary Care Records. The NHS also made a strong denial that it was willing to sell patient data as was reported last week.

Father of the internet' warns on IP address drought

The world better get a move on because unless the current IPv4 system is changed to IPv6, then we may run out of internet addresses. The US have already started to migrate, but UK and Europe seem much slower to do so.

Mayor wants London covered in Wi-Fi

Broadband connectivity is still of major importance to the government as Boris looks at universal Wi-Fi which he says is possible if the right infrastructure is put in place. In the meantime, Gordon Brown promises 300m to get everybody online by means of 100 to 700 vouchers.

The government has today revealed the design of the new identity card, which will be issued to foreign nationals' beginning in November.

The same size as a credit or debit card, the document shows the basics such as name, date of birth, and a photograph as well as immigration status. It features an electronic chip holding biometrics which at this point includes fingerprints and a digital photo.

For photos of the card, click here or on 'Gallery' above.

A statement from the UK Borders Agency described the chip as "secure."

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith argued the controversial cards will fight ID fraud, illegal migrants, and crime and terrorism.

She added: "ID cards for foreign nationals will replace old-fashioned paper documents, make it easier for employers and sponsors to check entitlement to work and study, and for the UK Border Agency to verify someone's identity."

The cards will be compulsory for foreign nationals people from other countries who work or live in the UK with the first round going out on 25 November. All foreign nationals will be expected to have the cards within three years.

Next year, the government wants to see such cards in the hands of workers in "sensitive roles" such as airport staff a move which has met with resistance from unions.

From 2010, ID cards will be given to younger people but only those who want them and following that, the rest of the population can apply.

The scheme has long had its detractors. Lobby group NO2ID said showing off the card's design was nothing but a branding exercise.

"No doubt the Home Secretary is relieved to be able to wave a plastic card and claim it for the ID scheme, given her department has now spent over 100 million pounds of public money; but this is still a cynical branding exercise," said Phil Booth, the group's national coordinator.

He also called out Smith for starting the programme with people who can't refuse the cards so easily and suggested such a plan won't work.

"To suggest ID cards are somehow connected to immigration policy, Jacqui Smith is deliberately engaging in populist bullying of the soft targets anonymous individuals seeking marriage visas or education those who have no choice but to keep quiet and comply.

"All resident foreigners are a different matter. When it comes round to fingerprinting Madonna and her family, say, such tactics will backfire."

US authorities have charged 11 people from five countries with stealing tens of millions of credit and debit card numbers from major retailers, including TJX, in one of the largest identity-theft schemes on record.

The US attorney in Boston said the ring also stole 41 million credit and debit card numbers from retailers BJ's Wholesale Club, OfficeMax, Boston Market, Barnes & Noble, Sports Authority, Forever 21 and DSW.

TJX, which owns the TK Maxx chain in the UK, was the hardest hit - acknowledging last year that data from 45.7 million credit cards was stolen from its computers, with as many as 94 million compromised in total.

The scheme originated with a Miami man - a one-time government informant - who drove around Miami with a laptop computer looking to hack into wireless networks, authorities said. It ended with consumers, retailers and banks losing tens of millions through fraudulent transactions.

Three people from the US, three from the Ukraine, two from China, one from Estonia and one from Belarus were all charged. An 11th defendant was not identified.

"Computer crimes are not confined within national borders," US Attorney General Michael Mukasey told reporters. "Criminals can now operate from almost anywhere on the global to steal personal information from almost anywhere on the globe."

The ring, which authorities said was headed by Albert Gonzalez, hacked into retailers' computer networks to steal the data, which was stored on computer servers in the US and Eastern Europe.

The ring sold the numbers to people in the US and Europe for thousands of dollars. The buyers then withdrew tens of thousands of dollars at a time from automated teller machines, officials said.

Authorities did not know the total amount of money stolen, but Michael Sullivan, the US attorney in Boston, said it was in the "tens of millions of dollars."

Gonzalez, being held by New York authorities on another computer hacking charge, was charged with computer fraud, wire fraud, access-device fraud, aggravated identity theft and conspiracy.

Gonzalez was working as an informant in a separate US Secret Service hacking investigation when authorities learned he was using information from their probe to help fellow hackers avoid arrest, authorities said.

"Obviously we weren't happy that someone we had working for us as an informant was double-dealing," said Michael Sullivan, director of the US Secret Service.

Gonzalez faces life in prison if convicted on all charges.

TJX agreed since disclosing the breach to pay more than $60 million (30 million) to credit card networks Visa and MasterCard to settle complaints related to the theft - one of the largest on record based on the number of accounts involved.

"The sheer number of retailers attacked by these cyber criminals demonstrates the much broader challenges in protecting sensitive consumer data from this increasing threat," said Sherry Lang, senior vice president at TJX.

The vulnerability that Gonzalez exploited has been around "as long as we have had Wi-Fi" wireless networks," said Ted Julian, vice president of strategy and marketing at Application Security, a maker of database security software.

With multiplying entry points into corporate networks via wireless store networks, cash registers and even in-store computer kiosks for job applicants, hackers have more weak spots to exploit.

Corporations may need to protect specific internal databases that contain sensitive consumer data, Julian said.

"Rather than locking every single door, let's get all the safes," Julian said. "Not that we don't want to lock the doors, but if that worked, then we wouldn't be in this mess."

Thales, the French defence systems engineering firm, has won the first contract for the UK's National Identity Scheme.

The firm will work with the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) to design, build, test and operate the technology that will deliver the controversial National Identity Register.

The four-year contract with Thales is worth 18 million. Another contractor, yet to be disclosed, will be responsible for manufacturing the cards.

Thales will also support the issuing of identity cards from the second half of 2009, according to the IPS.

In a statement released by the IPS, the deal "follows a procurement exercise using the NIS Strategic Supplier Group framework arrangement", which was originally awarded back in May.