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back to article MPs praise e-passport roll out

MPs say project management of the first electronic passport has been an outstanding success. The Identity and Passport Service (IPS) has been praised for its management of the introduction of the first type of e-passport, which contains an electronic chip storing biographical data and a digital facial image of the holder. MPs …

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  1. Matt Black

    Exemption from procurement rules...

    Fine to hear of a success - all credit. Procurement rules seem designed to (a) promulgate an adversarial environment; and (b) thwart the PRINCE2 principles espoused by our own Governments's OGC... So no surprise to me that (again credit where due) something that worked broke the mould...

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  2. druck Silver badge

    Deliberately crap

    They might not be patting themselves on the back when the new chip based passports all start failing due in a couple of years because the chip isn't guaranteed to last 10 years.

    Or will they?

    As this will then force all of us who've renewed early to try to avoid the ID card scheme for as long as possible, to have to come back in for the interrogation and fingerprinting like the common criminals we are all now deemed to be.

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  3. Dale

    2 year warranty

    So the manufacturer will only give a 2 year warranty. That means potentially having to replace your passport every two years even though the document is supposed to be valid for 10, if that is all the confidence the manufacturer has in its product.

    Presumably there will have to be provisions for faulty passports at airports. How long before the passport forgers realise all they have to do is make sure their fake passports go prematurely "faulty", then they're just as good as a fake ordinary paper passport?

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  4. James
    Joke

    Bollocks

    I've been watching this for some time now and these are my issues.

    If the systems so secure why won't MP's and famous people be on it - simple, all our details will have to be provided to foriegn countries to allow them to validate us giving them full access to ... well ... everything.

    As addressed, why purchase a 10 year passport which may only work for 2 years.

    We should be supplied with all the companies involved & see who & at what level of government benifits directly from the project (inluding wife's and children).

    Address all the above then we can move forward from that!

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  5. Jim

    A couple of interesting points missing...

    Just read the BBC version of this story and noticed a couple of things

    In this article, the analyst says "There's a distinct possibility that the cost of the e-passport could rise again, as the government seeks to pass on the additional costs of the second generation passport to the citizen." This is interesting considering that the the BBC claim "Passport costs have gone up since 2003 to pay for the new biometric passports and future security measures." So does that mean that the IPS has forgotten that it has already charged for the 2nd Gen document and double dip?

    Also, missing from this article was a quote from 'an IPS spokesman' that is quite worrying - "The ID card will enable you to confirm your identity in a secure, convenient way in a range of transactions with public and private sector organisations that you cannot with an ePassport,"

    Is this spec creep? I thought the idea of an ID card was that it was a 'passport lite', ie a form of identification only. Are we now being told that the ID card is to hold far more personal info than is necessary just to confirm identity?

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