Wednesday 8 April 2009

Sack them and tear up the contract

Really:

Airport face scanners designed to verify travellers’ identity against their passport photographs are working at such a low level that they would be unable to tell the difference between Osama bin Laden and the actress Winona Ryder, it has been claimed.

In a leaked memo, an official says the machines have been recalibrated to an “unacceptable” level meaning travellers whose faces are shown to have only a 30 per cent likeness to their passport photographs can pass through.


Sack them for wasting public money. Tear up the contracts. Employ people to guard our borders and don't depend on technocracy.

Cunts.

10 comments:

Roger Thornhill said...

THis sound to me like breech of contract at best, misrepresentation of goods act or even plain Fraud.


Who signed off on the deals? Who got envelopes? And we are mean to have our ID "protected" by such crap?

Mark Griffiths said...

Cunts indeed.

How much more of our own fucking money do we have to see disappearing into the pockets of these smartarse IT fuckwits to pay for bollocks systems that don't fucking work, before there is rioting in the streets?

Eckersalld said...

The iris recognition has been the same, the machine works infrequently and you just get sent to the front of the queue on the regular security checks.

Problem is you have a load of clueless fucking numbnuts (AKA 'MPs') being sold a load of bullshit by snake oil salesmen from the biometrics companies.

And they won't rip up any contracts, because its fucking amazing just how much taxpayers money you can net by funding some twats dinner at the Ivy or Claridges, and then sending them to the Wimbledon final for an all-expenses paid jolly.

Eckersalld said...

@Lancastrian Oik

It's not always the fault of the IT companies, they tend to be given nebulous and incorrect criteria, which - when they try to clarify - discover the person with all the answers is on sick for the next 3 months, is on holiday or taking some form of career break.

At the same time various committees are asking to see progress, so the IT companies try to knock something out based on what they already have, which of course doesn't work as desired.

It's why certain companies now either use contractors for blaming, or hand it over to junior coders so they can learn how not to to run a project and get on-the-job experience.

Getting Public Sector contracts is great for cash flow, but sodding painful in every other department.

JuliaM said...

"Sack them for wasting public money. Tear up the contracts. "

Bet the contracts are drawn up so loosely this ISN'T actually 'breach of contract' at all. Despite what it would mean in the real world.

This isn't just any IT contract. This is a government IT contract...

AntiCitizenOne said...

My company won't deal with the state.

Their just not worth it. The money might be OK (but tainted), but once you include dealing with the clueless cunts who work there you're losing money.

Concentrate on good clients, because they'll survive the recession. Most of these non-jobs will be searching tips for food by 2014.

Umbongo said...

Taking up JuliaM's point, these contracts bear a startling similarity to the regulations covering MPs expenses. The contractors can get away with murder because the contracts are effectively written in their favour (by civil servants purportedly looking after "our" interests) and MPs can loot public funds because "our" representatives write the rules in their own favour. It's that impossibility in science but the norm in public finance; a perpetual motion machine which always mulcts the taxpayer without any adverse consequencies for those doing - or benefitting from - the mulcting.

Mac the Knife said...

"Employ people to guard our borders and don't depend on technocracy."

Er, 'ang on Noxers, the other week you were calling for us all to get the boot. I'm getting really confused, do you want civil servants or not? Just so's we know eh... :)

Anonymous said...

The flaw in your plan though is this is Labour and they want a diverse workforce that represents the UK so you end up with immigration officers like this....http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/kent/4223665.stm

ejoftheweb said...

only solution:

a Public Contract Transparency Law:

"a contract to which the Crown or any public body, or Local Authority, is a party, is valid in law only to the extent that it is published"

Shine a light on these shoddy practices and they'll soon clear themselves up.