The Metropolitan Police Service is in the market for mobile identification units that can read card chips and biometrics.
It has issued a tender notice in the Official Journal of the European Union for a framework agreement for the provision, support and integration of handheld mobile identification units.
The notice says these must be capable of reading the information on the microchips and machine readable zones of passports, bank cards, identity cards, credit cards and other identification documents, along with fingerprints, facial recognition or iris recognition.
The mobile identification units (MIUs) should also be capable of securely transferring data across a police gateway.
The agreement, which will last three years with an option to extend for a further two, will also be open to other police forces in the UK.
The National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) already has a tender for MIUs open under the Midas programme, although in this case the units are only required to read fingerprints. The programme has been hit by delays due to concerns over network security.
Philippe Martin, a senior analyst at Kable, commented: "This announcement may signal the end of the Midas project in its current form. The procurement of the projects has suffered delays and it would seem inappropriate now for the NPIA to continue with it if the Met Police is looking at a much more sophisticated system.
"Once the contract is awarded, however, the Met Police could hand over the management of the project to the NPIA, which would help the implementation by other police forces."
Talkback
Lets just hope that they hold back on signing anything until after the dust clears post election. Chances are they won't have anything to examine with these devices once the next government finally brain bolts the identity card scheme and particularly the National Identity Register as they have all promised. I am of course excluding NeoLabour from the above list. Maybe it's wishful thinking, but they surely won't get another chance to wreak even more havoc!
The thing is are they doing this of there own free will or have they being told to do this to make it look like there's a market suddenly taking off for the governments flawed scheme.
Either way, if it overcomes the inertia and negative publicity, it doesn't matter to them since it is our money they are spending on it, and not theirs. I think I can hear the sound of defence electronics companies (sorry, "homeland security" companies) getting rich developing things there is no market for... and all the time the police are getting bigger and bigger balls with their shiny new toys they can "deploy".
When is the rest of this country going to wake up?
Don't answer that... :(
N
So the Met is now getting the work done on behalf of all the rogues that want to steal IDs and personal data. I fear that a policeman who extracts my personal data using a glorified card reader without my express permission will be breaching my human rights and offending under the Data Protection laws.
There will be a definite need for banks and credit card companies to develop a new chip that cannot be READ until a PIN is entered in the reader. The data in the chip must be encoded and the encryption change every time the card is used in a bank's machine.
No way must police or any other taxpayer funded or government organisation be permitted or able to access card data on a microchip.
That old tale again who watches the watchmen.