UK EU presidency aims for Europe-wide biometric ID card

[Anne & Lynn Wheeler]

http://www.theregister.com/2005/07/13/uk_eu_id_proposal/

UK EU presidency aims for Europe-wide biometric ID card

The UK is using its Presidency of the Council of the European Union to
push for the adoption of biometric ID cards and associated standards
across the whole of the EU. In a proposal issued on Monday (11th July),
the UK calls for the drafting of "common standards for national identity
cards taking into account the achievements in relation to the EU
passport and in the ICAO framework."

,,, snip ...

note that some EU govs. are trying to have legislation that has an x.509
identity certificate appended to every digital signature. this
effectively turns even the most lightweight digital signature
authentication even into a heavyweight identification event.

when we were called into help word-smith the cal. state and later the
fed. electronic signature law ... a lot of effort went into making the
wording technology agnostic as well as trying to avoid confusing
authentication and identification. the other force that was somewhat at
work was moving things in the direction that a digital signature could
take on the attributes of a human signature (possibly because of
semantic confusion over both terms; *digital signature* and *human
signature* containing the word *signature*) ... including that if a
digital signature was discovered ... that human intent, read,
understanding, agrees, approves, and/or authorizes was somehow implicit
in the existance of a digital signature.

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