Obviously the Labour government's plans for compulsory ID Cards and registration on a centralised biometric database (see the NO2ID campaign) would not have prevented the apparent abuse of United Kingdom Passports recently in Dubai, by an alleged assassination squad, inept enough to leave behind lots of CCTV evidence.
Retired UK Ambassador Charles Crawford points out, on his blogoir blog, the difference between faked or cloned UK Passports, and fraudulently obtained genuinely issued ones:
Hamas Killing: Cloned Or Fraudulent Passports
1 Real blank passports, misused: in secure British government locations in the UK and overseas are piles of 'blank' passports in serial number order, waiting to be issued. Procedures are in place to check regularly that the stocks of blank passports match the lists of passports printed and despatched to each location to await issue.
I have done some of these checks myself in Embassy strong-rooms. It would be relatively easy for a corrupt UK official to steal a few of these blanks to pass on to gangsters/KGB/Mossad, but the risk of detection would be very high since sooner or later it would be spotted that issuing numbers were out of sequence with stock-lists and production/despatch-lists.
2 Real passports of real people, misused: the killers could have managed to get hold of real, properly issued passports of real people and alter and then use them for their own purposes. This would have to be done very well for it not to be detected, although having observed for myself the meticulously microscopic and ingenious efforts of teenage boys to alter dob on ID cards to win under-age access to Warsaw nightclubs, that presumably is no problem. The original owners would have to be left with an almost perfect copy of their passports to avoid suspicion. Too complicated?
3 Fake passports of real people, original identities kept: the killers borrowed a number of real passports of real people, then copied and altered them for their own purposes but retained the purported identity of the original owners. If that was done in this case, why would the serial numbers be incorrect?
A day after Dubai police announced the names of the Irish suspects as Gail Folliard, Evan Dennings and Kevin Daveron, a spokesman for Ireland's Department of Foreign Affairs said: "We are unable to identify any of those three individuals as being genuine Irish citizens.
"Ireland has issued no passports in those names."
The passport numbers had the wrong number of digits and did not contain letters as authentic passports do, he added.
4 Fake passports of real people, new identities: the killers took a number of real passports of real people, then copied and altered them for their own purposes but added new names and manipulated the photographs to create new identities.
Some combination of 1-4 above: maybe this was done for operational reasons (a hurried job, and/or the killers could not acquire enough passports in any one category and/or wanted to mix 'n' match to reduce the risk of detection and/or later muddy the waters).
Charles Crawford's points apply equally well to the older non-biometric Passports, which were apparently used in Dubai, as well as to the newer International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) compliant "biometric" ones, since these only currently contain a digitised image of the passport photograph and what is written on the face of the passport, and do not yet contain any fingerprint or iris scan biometric identifiers.
Facial Recognition is pretty useless at a passport control checkpoint, where there are lots of variations in ambient lighting etc. The UK Passport Service and some other foreign government equivalents do try to use it on their centralised digitised Passport Photo databases (which is why there are stupid rules on the size of such photos, in which you are now forbidden to smile), to try to spot obvious multiple applications in different names, but this is hardly an infallible automatic system - it needs plenty of experienced human facial recognition effort as well.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown has mumbled something about an "urgent inquiry" into the affair, although we suspect that he is secretly pleased at the further embarrassment of his potential rival for the leadership of the Labour party, the useless Foreign Secretary David Milband, whose Jewish family background does not seem to have helped the UK in diplomatic relations with Israel..
According to The Guardian, it seems that the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) is responding to Mutual Legal Assistance (MLA) requests from the Dubai police and Interpol, regarding the UK Passports in question.
SOCA inherited the role of being the first port of call for foreign MLA request from one of its now defunct predecessor organisations NCIS (the National Criminal Intelligence Service, not to be confused with the popular TV action drama about the US Naval Criminal Investigative Service).
However, in spite of their secrecy and lack of public accountability, SOCA are unlikely to progress very far with what should perhaps be a counter-intelligence or counter -terrorism investigation, neither of which are their areas of frontline expertise.
The media coverage of "fake" or "stolen" UK "identities" reminds us of our Freedom of Information Act Request to the Metropolitan Police Service (rejected on the spurious grounds of requiring a "real" name !)
Operation Maxim - breakdown of statistics of United Kingdom versus Foreign passports seized
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