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Lunching with David Blunkett

To outside observers, it's obvious that SA needs to do more to protect its citizens' identity.
Samantha Perry
By Samantha Perry, co-founder of WomeninTechZA
Johannesburg, 25 Apr 2008

I had the pleasure, and privilege, of lunching with ex-UK home secretary David Blunkett on Thursday. Blunkett was on a short visit to SA, meeting with government officials.

The reasons for, and topics of discussion, in said meetings have been kept quiet for security reasons; but, given that the topic of discussion over lunch was e-government, and specifically electronic identities and passports, one can guess what at least some of those talks covered.

Accompanying Blunkett was Andrew Pinder, CBE and Entrust VP of global e-government strategy, and ex-UK government CIO. Pinder was here in his Entrust capacity, with local Entrust partner L@wtrust, and its inimitable business development director Maeson Maherry, who set up the lunch.

The issue of e-passports and electronic identities is becoming critical for this country, given the UK government's insistence that Home Affairs clean up its act or South Africans will henceforth have to apply for visas to get into the UK.

There is also the issue of fraud, particularly ghost employees in government departments, and ghost pension claimants. And, of course, there's the fake marriages issue.

Blunkett's take on the matter is simple. He says SA's government should invest in trusted, secure and reliable identities for citizens as a way of ensuring citizens actually get what their tax money is paying for, like pensions. When citizens consider it to be a given that other citizens are intent on defrauding them, he says, you're in real trouble. Digital identities, based on biometric information that is nigh-impossible to counterfeit, is a good start.

E-sheep programme

As Pinder noted, what SA actually needs is a fully-fledged identity management system, built from the ground up, on accurate, reliable and trustable data, both biometric and otherwise.

At this point, I felt compelled to mention Hanis, which has been under way since I started out as a cub reporter. Perhaps pressure from the UK government and other international bodies will help kick this initiative into high gear, was the general sentiment in response.

At this point, I felt compelled to mention Hanis, which has been under way since I started out as a cub reporter.

Samantha Perry, features editor, Brainstorm

On the other hand, as both Blunkett and Pinder noted, getting governments to move on anything at any speed is difficult. And then you have the politics, both party politics with a capital 'p' and the organisational politics within and between government departments. It is the latter which currently has the most potential to herald disaster. Instead of agreeing on one standardised system for identity, each department, I'm told, wants to go its own way.

The EU and UK have begun to introduce passports with chips embedded in them. These chips contain all the relevant bits of information a government could need on a body, including biometric.

The EU will, Pinder says, by June next year have all the cross-verification systems in place so that a Polish customs officer can scan a UK passport via a reader that, firstly, will be able to read the chip, and then contact the server in the UK to verify, and send back the appropriate response.

The EU, Pinder says, has even advanced to the point where it is now chipping cattle, with sheep scheduled for 'the chip' next. This, of course, is intended to curb fraud by farmers fluffing up stock numbers when claiming EU farming subsidies.

The EU has the identity of its peoples so firmly bedded down that it is now chipping livestock, whereas in SA, Pinder notes, we're not even at the people stage. The message is clear: SA needs to digitise identities, it needs to do so in a way that will let it seamlessly co-exist with other nations, and it needs to do it now.

PS: The lunch was fabulous.
PPS: CBE means Commander of the order of the British Empire, for those of you not up on the peerage and ranks on that fair isle.

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