The French minister of the Interior Dominique de Villepin has announced plans to force every Frenchman to buy a new electronic ID card with a chip containing photograph and fingerprints. On 11 April the French government outlined its plan to introduce biometrics on passports by 2006 and on ID cards by 2007.
In an interview with the newspaper France-Soir a day later, De Villepin said ID cards should be made compulsory again in France, after the obligation was deleted in 1955.
IDG News reports that the current French obligation to show ID at request is relatively mild. Citizens may present a driving license or a passport, even an expired one, or call witnesses. A passport currently costs about 60 euro in France, while identity cards are free. "The price of the passport will be increased a little. And there'll be a fee for the identity card: that's the price of security," De Villepin told the newspaper.
The biometric information and other identifying information will be stored in a separate encrypted block on the chip, allowing access only to authorised officials. The chip will also contain some digitised authentication, to be able to file electronic tax declarations.
Because the information is stored on a contact-less chip, citizens may well be scanned secretly, a major concern of civil rights organisations. But according to the French newspaper Le Monde the architecture of the system consists of 4 separate central databases, and only authorised officials may link information about fingerprints or facial scans to the database with general identifying information. Access to the databases will be tracked, and there will be penalties for wrongful use.
Both IDG and Le Monde provide interesting lists of ID obligations in other European countries, following the decisions by the European Council of Justice and Home Affairs in December 2004 and the European Commission in February 2005 to include biometrics on contact-less chips on passports (see EDRI-gram 3.7). The decision does explicitly not cover ID cards, but many countries seem very happy to include the data on chips on these cards as well.
The resistance in the UK against mandatory ID has been covered extensively in EDRI-gram and has proven very effective so far. In Germany a paper ID card is compulsory, to be replaced by an electronic card containing fingerprints in the future. In Belgium an electronic ID card will be compulsory by the end of 2006, but there are no plans yet to introduce biometrics. In Italy, Estonia and Finland electronic ID cards are voluntary. Italians may choose to provide their fingerprints, while the Finnish card only contains only the holders name. In the Netherlands, which recently introduced compulsory identification, both passports and ID cards will contain a face scan before the deadline of August 2006, stored on a contact-less chip. Fingerprints will be added later.
French may have to buy compulsory biometric ID cards (12.04.2005)
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/index.cfm?go=news.view&news=4668
Le Monde: Feu vert pour la carte d'identité électronique (12.04.2005)
http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3244,36-638179@51-627772,0.h...
EDRI-gram 3.7: No delay for EU biometric passports (06.04.2005)
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number3.7/biometrics
French government organised national debate about electronic ID cards (February-June 2005)
http://www.foruminternet.org/carte_identite/