The introduction of new national identity cards in Poland has been delayed indefinitely amid concerns expressed by the Internal Security Agency (ABW) about the threat to state security and personal privacy posed by fingerprint scanners.
The government has confirmed that it is preparing urgent legislation to postpone the issuance of the cards, which were due to come in on 2 August and bring Poland into line with new EU security rules.
National ID cards are already obligatory for all Polish citizens aged over 18 living in Poland and can also be used for travel within the European Economic Area. Around 1.5 million cards are issued each year, including 300,000 to people who have not previously owned one.
Parliament voted almost unanimously in April in favour of the new version of the cards, which are supposed to include the so-called “second biometric feature” of encoded fingerprints (the first is the image of the holder’s face).
They will also feature a signature, which the current cards do not. To sign the form and leave their fingerprints, applicants will have to attend the local administration office in person (and no longer be able to apply online), reports Wirtualna Polska.
Some 7,450 fingerprint scanners have already been ordered at a cost of 1.3 million zloty (€290,000), for offices throughout Poland. But this order has now been blocked by the Internal Security Agency, which expressed major reservations over security issues.
“If the transaction was completed and the scanners started to be used on a mass scale, this could be a situation many times worse than the delay to the change,” an inside source told Wirtualna Polska.
The prime minister’s office confirmed on Tuesday that Janusz Cieszyński, the government’s cybersecurity plenipotentiary, has submitted an urgent bill to formalise the delay because of the “potential security threat of information processed using equipment for collecting fingerprints”, reports TVN24.
“Owing to issues of state and public security, these devices should guarantee the security of the information system in which fingerprints are collected and the security of the information system used for personalisation of identity cards,” said Cieszyński.
As a result of information received from the Internal Security Agency, “it proved necessary to take urgent steps to eliminate this threat, by changing the date of implementation of identity cards with the second biometric feature”.
It is likely to take “several months” to prepare a new order for fingerprint scanners that will satisfy the security authorities, according to Wirtualna Polska’s source. Poland will also have to inform the European Commission and hope to avoid penalties for the delay.
Main image credit: Radoslaw Jozwiak/Agencja Gazeta
Ben Koschalka is a translator and senior editor at Notes from Poland. Originally from Britain, he has lived in Kraków since 2005.
