Death of ID card scheme left £6.5m of kit going begging The government is working out what to do with £6.5m worth of kit left gathering dust after it pulled the plug on the ID card scheme earlier this year. Home Secretary Theresa May was asked in a commons question: what the cost was of IT equipment purchased by or on behalf of the government in respect of the identity cards scheme …
I do hope that they do not securely wipe those drives and that the early adopters' details do leak out and end up in teh wrong hands.
For that would be the ultimate irony in this whole fiasco - the morons who bought Wacqui-Jacqui's bullshit about ID Cards protecting identity find that by applying for the card they ultimately ended up having their identity details compromised :-)
At the very least the disks will be securely erased using blancco which is pretty much the UK Gov standard for disk erasure, however, it's possible the disks will be physically shredded. The rest of the hardware will be stuck in a store somewhere, but it unlikely to be offered to any project for free to use, so it'll end up gathering dust, since nobody likes to buy old kit.
This seems to happen in pretty much every government department I've ever worked in. When an IT project in government fails, assets associated with it are never written off against the project and made available for free use to some other enterprise, it is always sheltered in the hope that some money can be returned to the coffers of the failed projects balance sheet by some kind of cross charging that may somehow make the project seem like less of a failure. Such is the short sighted bureaucracy of the UK Civil Service.
That there is still a significant amount of ID scheme kit still in use, in the chunks of the scheme that were protected from cancellation by disguising them as something else sufficiently that ministers in a hurry wouldn't have time to unwind them.
Thus we have biomentric residence permits backed by a fingerprint database, 'enhanced' passport application procedures, and little booths with video-links in Post Offices, none of which will need to be reinvented when next Whitehall finds a sucker.
The ID card scheme was let in a number of lots (5 lots if I recall), each lot to a different supplier and the different lots are largely self contained... only two of the lots were cancelled as they were specific to the issuing of ID cards to UK citizens (the majority being what are called Air side workers - or those staff at airports who work on the runway side of the security barriers), the others have some link to biometric passports or the ability to reading other countries Identity cards, so were still required or seen to be of value.
I've been using the same kit for supporting and developing an MoJ application for over 5 years now, it's mostly held together with sellotape and bits of string and wasn't really fit for purpose when it was bought 5 years ago. Every time there's a new development that needs doing I ask for more kit, pointing out the other stuff is on it's last legs and we've cannibalised 3 environments to what now really is only 1 and a half, nobody realises that this will be a problem eventually despite me telling them we can't keep developing this way.
Anon of course.
Perhaps the government should leverage the financial value of the early adopter database to defray some of the costs of this white elephant?
I mean these early adopters are people with a proven tendency to accept information at face value. Think how much certain types on the net would pay for their details. There would be a boom in seaside property in Oxfordshire purchased with the money from Nigerian dictator's widows.
Meanwhile we - the public - managed to pay £41,000,000 for 'developing the policy legislation and business case' (a case which anyway failed in every respect).
We've all been mugus.
The solution is simple. They can insert all this kit up Shagger Blunkett's arse. And the rest of his ID cardtards - Wacky Jacqui, Tony Bliar, Alan Johnston, John Reid, etc. After these orifiices are duly plugged any remaining kit can be stuck up the arse of the Home Office officials who suggested this stupid idea to Bliar and Blunkett
... maybe donate it to the guy who originally gave the information to Wikileaks, and who is now languishing in prison without St Julian Assange's organisation having donated a single penny to support him?
So let me think here, Hmmmmm, Wikileaks paid for the lifestyle of who ... ahh, don't worry, the information they trade on is ... Oh fuck! It's free and without any sort of cost. Yaaaa!
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