Delivered-To: dfarber+@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Mon, 13 Oct 2003 10:42:38 -0400 (EDT)
From: Freematt357@xxxxxxx
Subject: French home secretary announces chip ID card
To: Dave Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
http://www.silicon.com/news/500022/1/6228.html
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[Note from Matt Gaylor: My favorite quote- "It's no longer up to the citizens
to come to e-government, itâ??s up to e-government go to them"]
Wed 1 October 2003 05:17PM BST
French home secretary announces chip ID card
Privacy concerns raised sound familiar?
A "perfectly secure" electronic identity card will be in use in France by
2006, French Home Secretary Nicolas Sarkozy has announced. The card will
carry a
chip which will combine "the standard type of personal data you get in this
type of document and an electronic certification system". A digital
authentication system with a public key infrastructure (PKI) will be used
to guarantee the
authenticity of the holder and ensure confidentiality.
But when it comes to whether the card will contain biometrics, Sarkozy said
it is still too early to tell but underlined that the card is still in the
project stage. For Sarkozy, the potential applications for the card are far
clearer, however. Citizens will be able to use the card with central
government,
local authorities as well as businesses, he said.
The minister also announced that "a strategic blueprint for electronic public
services from 2003 to 2007" will be published in the coming weeks. "It's no
longer up to the citizens to come to e-government, itâ??s up to
e-government go
to them", he said.
But the question of the protection of personal data hasn't gone away and is
still being asked by the public. The electronic card looks set to stir up the
debate about all the possible byproducts of using a "unique
identification" to
access all the e-government services. The then civil service minister Michel
Sapin had ordered a white paper on the subject, which was completed in
February
2002, by Pierre Truche, honorary president of the Supreme Court of Appeal. He
highlighted the difficulty of defining the concept of digital identity which,
he said, wasn't "unambiguous and uniform".
Equally, the government is questioning how to reconcile the one uber-ID card
with all the other cards people use for everyday life. Faced with these
questions, the government has decided to relaunch discussions on the
subject of
security and date security. A forum devoted to the subject was opened on 26
September.
However, the preamble to the forum already gives a taster of what to expect
from the government in the future. "To access a particular service, a citizen
will be able to use the authentication tool of his choice, with the level of
security it provides corresponding to the level of sensitivity of the
service,"
it reads, "Some people will choose a single card, others will want to
'partition' the various services by using different cards. The government
will give
the citizen the freedom of choice."
Estelle Dumout writes for ZDNet France.
silicon.com