Italy issues first electronic identity card

Interior Minister Enzo Bianco on Saturday issued Italy's first electronic identity card, making the Mediterranean nation the world's second country, after Finland, to introduce the IT-friendly document.

Bianco presented the credit-card sized ID to a 17-year-old Neapolitan student, Paolo Mossetti, to mark the final day of a global forum on e-government in Naples, which was overshadowed by violent clashes between police and anti-globalization demonstrators.

The cards, which are produced by the Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, the state printing works and mint, feature microprocessors and optical memory bands with a capacity of 1.8 M-bytes, Maurizio Bruschi, the head of the identity card project at the interior ministry said in a telephone interview Monday. The optical memory strips employ technology bought from Laser Card Systems Corp. of Mountain View, Calif., a subsidiary of Drexter Technology Corp., Bruschi said. The first cryptographic microchips were purchased from Siemens AG of Germany, but future cards will contain the best value chips available on the market at the time, he said.

"Finland has introduced an optional electronic identity card which is still accompanied by a paper document. The two are not fully integrated," Bruschi said. "Ours is the first project in the world which substitutes the conventional identity card and contains the individual's tax code and identity details."

The new cards will be more difficult to forge than the old ones and will allow citizens to interact online with government departments, to book a visit to the doctor and even to travel abroad within the European Union, Bruschi said. The cards will be introduced initially in 83 major cities, with some 1 million due to be delivered by the end of the year, the interior ministry official said. Within five years around 50 million people are expected to hold the new cards, which can also be issued to children and will allow adults to vote electronically.

"France and Germany are watching the progress of the Italian project with great interest and they are also waiting to see how Italy's project for a digital signature, which could be combined with the electronic ID cards, catches on," Bruschi said. Future versions of the cards will incorporate the owner's fingerprints and as much health information as the individual is prepared to authorize. The final say on the incorporation of sensitive health information into the electronic cards must rest with the individual citizen, Italy's privacy commissioner, Stefano Rodota, told the Naples conference.

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