UK biometric ID card morphs into 'passport lite'

UK biometric ID card morphs into 'passport lite', an internal passport perhaps:

"If the US is going to read UK ID cards, it's mainly going to want to read them at border control, right? The information on UK ID cards is going to be essentially the same as on UK biometric passports, with the initial variation that the first generation of biometric passports will not include fingerprint. Therefore, the ID card will be more likely to provide the US immigration authorities with the data it wants than the earlier biometric passports. So the US ought to prefer an ID card over a passport.This points us towards a logical conclusion. The US-G8-EU vision of the biometric future is of a world where machine-read biometrics ID everybody. This requires, obviously, that everybody's readers read everybody's cards, plus a level of compatibility between different countries' cards, and a level of data interchange between countries. Now, if in that world everybody has interoperable ID cards and everybody has readers that will read them, what's a passport for? It's only there because it's currently the only single international standard for travel (which could change in the longer term), and in the UK, in order to provide a fictional* justification for charging people shedloads of money.Fortunately the brave new biometric world will never go fully live, and stands a pretty good chance of crashing and burning before doing so as far as the EU and US are concerned. Nor does it seem absolutely certain that the UK ID Cards Bill will even make it onto the statute book, never mind actually work/ship. Nevertheless, the total demise of the UK scheme would not of itself turn the clock back. Take the ID scheme out of the equation and we still have the US, the EU and the G8 committed to widespread use of biometric ID. In the EU we will still have a biometric visa system (with accompanying database and data exchange), biometric ID cards for resident non-EU nationals, and the intent to produce an EU standard for biometric ID cards. Tony Blair regards biometric ID as inevitable, and he should know, given that he's one of the ones who'll make it so, if they're not stopped. �"