Why national ID cards lack signatures

can be used in multiple applications.

The controversial national ID scheme has been widely criticised as being a colossal waste of taxpayers' money, but NIDA officials said the cards were actually more secure and accessible to the majority of Tanzanians, in part due to the missing handwritten signatures.

The Guardian secured an exclusive interview with the top NIDA management and received explanations from several directors of the authority on features of the new national ID card.

Paul Bwathondi, NIDA's director of management information systems, told The Guardian in an interview that the national ID cards have adopted state-of-the-art biometric authentication, which is technologically way advanced and relatively forge-proof compared to the conventional handwritten signatures used by other ID cards such as drivers' licences and voters' cards.

“NIDA deliberately opted for biometric identification because the technology is credible and cost effective and many people could be reached with this type of technology,” he said in an interview at NIDA offices along with other senior officials of the authority.

According to Bwathondi, more than 40 percent of Tanzanians eligible for ID cards who cannot read or write or have hand writing impairments could have been exluded from the national identity scheme if it opted for handwritten signatures instead of fingerprints as a source of identification.

NIDA officials said the authority's servers had in fact stored digital signatures of national ID card holders that were captured along with fingerprints during the registration process, hence it had all relevant information in its database.

He explained that all the card holders’ important details collected during the registration and identification process can be accessed either from the holder’s smart card chip or from NIDA's data base.

Bwathondi said since the card holder’s digital signature ia stored in the authority’s computer server database, it can also be easier to make the signature more accessible in future especially for financial institutions.

He said the technology used in the IDs could not be easily forged, describing it as multi-application and highly sophisticated.

“With advancement in technology, the national ID card can be used as an automated teller machine (ATM) card, e-wallet, driving license or voter ID,” he said, noting that the contactless smart card chip was designed for security purpose.

“The chip has high storage capacity, which contains biometric information such as fingerprints, photograph and other key information,” he said, noting that the information contained in the smart card chip can be accessed via special card reading devices.

“For an institution to access information contained on the smart card chip, it must have a card reader with specifications issued by NIDA. We have conducted sensitization campaigns with several commercial banks ... So far, we have provided 200 card readers to banks to encourage them to use the system."

He mentioned some of the institutions provided with special ID card readers linked to NIDA's computer servers as commercial banks, the Higher Education Students' Loans Board (HESLB), the Prevention and Combating of Corruption Bureau (PCCB), the Financial Intelligence Unit, the Tanzania Social Action Fund (TASAF), the Social Security Regulatory Authority (SSRA) and some pension funds.

NIDA’s information communication technology (ICT) director, Alphonce Malibiche, said that institutions need to get specifications from NIDA on the type of card readers that can access data from the national ID cards before purchasing the card readers.

“Any institution can purchase the national ID card readers from any vendor, but must have special specifications required by NIDA for it to access the information from the IDs," he said.

In order for institutions to access information from the national ID cards, they must be provided with a digital key to activate NIDA’s smart card, he daid.

A Malaysian company awarded the contract to produce the ID cards, Iris, is yet to respond to requests from The Guardian for comment.

How a fingerprint optical scanner works

A fingerprint scanner system has two basic jobs -- it needs to get an image of your finger, and it needs to determine whether the pattern of ridges and valleys in this image matches the pattern of ridges and valleys in pre-scanned images.

Only specific characteristics, which are unique to every fingerprint, are filtered and saved as an encrypted biometric key or mathematical representation. No image of a fingerprint is ever saved, only a series of numbers (a binary code), which is used for verification. The algorithm cannot be reconverted to an image, so no one can duplicate your fingerprints.

On the other hand, a contactless smart card is a card in which the chip communicates with the card reader through an induction technology. These cards require only close proximity to an antenna to complete a transaction. They are often used when transactions must be processed quickly or hands-free, such as on mass transit systems, where a smart card can be used without even removing it from a wallet.

Examples of widely used contactless smart cards are Germany's contactless national ID, which was issued to its citizens in November 2010. The programme is one of the first contactless-only electronic ID programmes. It also employs a unique privacy scheme to protect cardholders.

Lat week Home Affairs Minister Charles Kitwanga said the government doesn’t intend to recall around 2 million electronically-produced national identity cards issued to citizens so far despite widespread complaints that the ID cards are flawed, saying instead that the cards will be rolled out to all eligible Tanzanians by the end of the year.

In an interview with The Guardian in Dar es Salaam Kitwanga, described the technology used to produce the disputed national IDs as ‘state-of-the-art’, and said more of the same cards would be issued.

The national IDs have lately become a subject of rising debate and some dispute, especially after President John Magufuli personally faulted them in public as being poor ‘value for money’ due to the absence of some key features like signatures of card holders.

Magufuli suspended the NIDA director general, Dickson Maimu, and four other officials last month to pave the way for a thorough investigation on procurement processes after it was found that a total of Tshs 179.6 billion/- had questionably been spent on the far-from-completed national IDs project so far.