An intriguing, and slightly concerning, job ad has appeared on freelancing website People Per Hour, entitled: “URGENT!!! Delivery of a National e-ID System”.
The post is from an unidentified small IT consultancy which is submitting a bid to deliver a National e-ID system, including a biometric enrolment for all citizens and residents above the age of five years*, for a population coverage of approximately 4 million people.
The advert did not state which country the system is for, but from the spelling it reads as if it has been posted by a US outfit.
It states: “I am working to extremely tight deadlines so will need you/your company to urgently provide these details. You will need to sign a non-disclosure document,” it said.
According to the scope of the programme, the company is looking for alphanumeric and biometric data, which can be assigned a unique national identification number (NIN) and a card “to each citizen and resident thereby creating a clean population database that ensures that each person has only one trusted identity”.
The project will also issue a smart card for each unique ID “designed to incorporate the combination of biometrics and cryptographic functions” as well as smart card technology.
The company is seeking a contractor to help it develop a protocol for securely sharing collected data “with authorized agencies and accredited organizations/ institutions and provide for the addition of new records, renewal of expired cards and replacement of damaged, lost and stolen cards.”
El Reg would be keen to hear from anyone who knows anything more about this mysterious and urgent request. (Drop us an email here.)
Alternatively, if anyone would like to apply, the job ad is here.
Hat tip to reader Ken for the spot. ®
Foot-and-fingerprint note
* For those of you who think enrolling children’s biometrics is completely and staggeringly outrageous, apparently that’s not the case. You learn something new every day…
