The other day i was sat pondering what had happened to the identity Cards infrastructure after the project had been scrapped.

Well today I came across this video:

ID Cards Database Destroyed

I’ve watched the progress of the UK Identity Cards project for quite some time, primarily because of the writing’s of Kim Cameron.

From Kim’s perspective the project was doomed from the start, because it broke the fundamental Laws of Identity.

Readers of Identityblog will recall that the British scheme was exceptional in breaking so many of the Laws of Identity at once.  It flaunted the first law – User control and Consent – since citizen participation was mandatory.  It broke the second – Minimal Disclosure for a Constrained Use – since it followed the premise that as much information as possible should be assembled in a central location for whatever uses might arise…  The third law of Justifiable Parties was not addressed given the centralized architecture of the system, in which all departments would have made queries and posted updates to the same database and access could have been extended at the flick of a wrist.  And the fourth law of “Directed Identity” was a clear non-goal, since the whole idea was to use a single identifier to unify all possible information.

It also stands out as an example of poor Conceptual Integrity – get it wrong at the outset and you end up in a complete mess.