November 08, 2005
Identity theft; my name is nobody
Great Britain is faced with an obscure case of identity theft. In this case the ploy of stealing the identity of a dead baby was copied from Frederick Forsyth's thriller The Day of the Jackal. The "lord" managed to live on with the stolen identity for more than 22 years. The fraud was discovered when a routine check showed that his passport was revoked in 2003 after a security trawl by the Passport Agency revealed an exact match with the Register of Deaths.
It will be interesting to see if the passport issuance systems in the various countries are or will be adapted in such a way that these situations are easy to detect. With a biometric passport people will not only be able to have a genuine "government certified" analog identity but an electronic identity as well. How's that for a responsibility?
