French home secretary announces chip ID card

A "perfectly secure" electronic identity card will be in use in France by 2006, French Home Secretary Nicolas Sarkozy has announced. The card will carry a chip which will combine "the standard type of personal data you get in this type of document and an electronic certification system". A digital authentication system with a public key infrastructure (PKI) will be used to guarantee the authenticity of the holder and ensure confidentiality.

But when it comes to whether the card will contain biometrics, Sarkozy said it is still too early to tell but underlined that the card is still in the project stage. For Sarkozy, the potential applications for the card are far clearer, however. Citizens will be able to use the card with central government, local authorities as well as businesses, he said.

The minister also announced that "a strategic blueprint for electronic public services from 2003 to 2007" will be published in the coming weeks. "It's no longer up to the citizens to come to e-government, it’s up to e-government go to them", he said.

But the question of the protection of personal data hasn't gone away and is still being asked by the public. The electronic card looks set to stir up the debate about all the possible byproducts of using a "unique identification" to access all the e-government services. The then civil service minister Michel Sapin had ordered a white paper on the subject, which was completed in February 2002, by Pierre Truche, honorary president of the Supreme Court of Appeal. He highlighted the difficulty of defining the concept of digital identity which, he said, wasn't "unambiguous and uniform".

Equally, the government is questioning how to reconcile the one uber-ID card with all the other cards people use for everyday life. Faced with these questions, the government has decided to relaunch discussions on the subject of security and date security. A forum devoted to the subject was opened on 26 September.

However, the preamble to the forum already gives a taster of what to expect from the government in the future. "To access a particular service, a citizen will be able to use the authentication tool of his choice, with the level of security it provides corresponding to the level of sensitivity of the service," it reads, "Some people will choose a single card, others will want to 'partition' the various services by using different cards. The government will give the citizen the freedom of choice."

Estelle Dumout writes for ZDNet France.