Five hundred hard-disk drives and 100 back-up tapes, containing the personal details of early ID card applicants, have already been electronicaly wiped. They will be taken to an Essex industrial estate to be shredded and the remains burned in a factory furnace in Birmingham.The ashes will then be collected and transported in a diplomatic pouch to the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan where they will be loaded onto a Soyuz rocket and launched into the sun.
Man Hubert of ID?NO! will accompany the ashes on their three month trip to the sun just to make sure that no one gets to them before they complete their journey. He has kept his plans for the ashes once he arrives there secret.
Mr. Hubert, said: "I have no doubt that there are those in Whitehall who will not rest until these ashes are reassembled."
OK, I made up all of that italicized text after the block quote.
It is possible, even relatively straightforward and inexpensive to destroy the data completely using only software. Or, you can go straight to the burning. The number, the complexity, and the geographic dispersion of the steps outlined in the linked article constitutes security theater. And as long as we're in the theater business, nothing makes for better spectacle than rockets and solar explosions.
As for the ID system itself, most British observers thought the government was going about the project all wrong. We, of course, followed the saga with interest as the list of posts below indicates.
The most important of these is Goodbye ID cards - is it time to say hello to identity banks? because it links to a 2008 report by Sir James Crosby, then at HM Treasury, entitled Challenges and Opportunities in Identity Assurance (.pdf). The report is worth considerable attention.
Other posts on this subject:
May 14, 2010: UK to Kill Off National ID Card Program
May 21, 2010: Goodbye ID cards - is it time to say hello to identity banks?
Sept. 21, 2010: Citizen or subject: The politics of personal identity
Dec. 21, 2010: UK: ID Cards Scrapped by Coalition Government
Jan. 20, 2011: UK: Destruction of ID card data to cost £400,000
