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Interviews for first time passport applicants have been massively successful - because, er, no fraudulent applications at all have been detected since the government introduced the system last May. In answer to a Freedom of Information request, the Home Office said last week that 38,391 interviews had been held to date, 222 applications were currently under investigation, but that so far no application had been rejected.

An Identity & Passport Service spokesman told the Press Association, optimistically, that interviews discouraged people from making false passport applications in the first place. He also claimed that IPS had detected 6,500 fraudulent passport applications last year. These will have been rejected before the interview stage, although not all will have been made by first time applicants.

But that 6,500 claim is a bit of a puzzle. In January of this year the Home Office Minister i/c identity, Meg Hillier, said that for the 11 months to 30 September 2006 IPS estimated that 0.25 per cent of passport applications, or 16,500 cases, were believed to be fraudulent. A further 1.61 per cent (105,000) included "some element of false declaration", but the identity and eligibility of these individuals "was not otherwise in doubt" (answer to Parliamentary question).

As IPS clearly differentiates between an "element of false declaration" and attempting to obtain a passport fraudulently, its definition of passport fraud obviously has some flexibility to it.

Answering another question in the same vein last July, Hillier said that IPS was then investigating "some 2,000 cases" of suspected fraud. Which puts the total of 222 interview-derived investigations into perspective. The Home Office has also claimed in the past that half of all fraudulent applications are made via the first time application process.

Doubts about the actual rates of fraud and detection are further reinforced by IPS figures, produced in answer to an FOIA request in August 2006. These put detected fraudulent applications at 1,126 in 2005, 1,880 in 2004 and 1,571 in 2003, the overall trend being downwards since 2001.

Obviously, not everybody can be right here. If the 6,500 detection number IPS is now claiming is genuine (i.e., not the consequence of a more brutal approach to the odd "element of false declaration"), then historically IPS must have been relatively useless at nicking passport fraud villains. If however IPS' estimate of 16,500 is correct, then the 6,500 actual detections indicate that IPS might not be as useless as it was, but that it is still fairly useless.

And the point of interviews? It seems bizarre that in ten months, interviewing almost 40,000 people, IPS has not been able to identify a single one as sufficiently obviously fraudulent to reject them. Are all the would-be first time fraudsters sufficiently smart to realise they'll be nicked if they apply? Or are all of them sufficiently smart to sail through the interview anyway? There really ought to be some kind of population in between these two extremes, and 222 doubtfuls doesn't look large enough to accommodate it.

According to Hillier, IPS is due to complete a sampling exercise similar to the one that produced the 2006 estimates next month. If the Home Office claims that half of all frauds were first time applications, and that the interview process deters frauds, are correct, then the numbers this time around - covering the first year of interviews - should be substantially down.

If not, then Tory and Liberal claims that the interview process, which involved setting up a network of 70 offices at a cost of £93 million, is an expensive waste of time will be borne out. Unless of course you were to view the interview centre network as softening the population up for mass biometric enrolment, starting 2012...

THE WHITE HOUSE told a federal judge late last Friday that it shouldn't be ordered to copy hard drives to preserve its zillions of missing emails because it destroys the older computers that it replaces, that emails are missing is merely speculation and doing that would be too expensive and cause it too much work and it has a bit of a headache and is going for a lie down.

US Magistrate Judge John Facciola had last week ordered the administration to show just cause why it should not be required to produce copies of computer hard drives in response to lawsuits filed by citizen watchdog groups.

In a sworn affidavit filed just before the deadline, Theresa Payton, CIO of the White House Office of Administration, may have said: "When workstations are at the end of their lifecycle and retired... under the refresh program, the hard drives are generally sent offsite to another government entity for the forced imposition of democracy or physical destruction, whichever occurs first."

In another filing, the White House claimed that "the allegation of missing e-mail from archives is unconfirmed,... the allegation of missing e-mails from backup tapes is conjectural", and even if some older computers were still in use, finding them and copying their hard drives would "impose a significant burden."

This is just the latest development in a long saga stretching back at least five years. Harpers has a brief take on it here, noting that most of the US media is conveniently burying the story.

On Tuesday, Anti-Malware Test Lab and AV-Comparatives.org announced an alliance toward becoming one of the most respected sources of objective and independent information about antivirus products. Together they intend to create a unique system of integrated tests for determining the effectiveness of commercial antivirus software by the end of 2008.

Andrea Clementi, founder of AV-Comparatives, said in a statement that "the partnership with Anti-Malware Test Lab will allow us to evaluate more aspects of antivirus software and to offer users a more comprehensive independent view of various security products."

Clementi further hinted that if this alliance works out, there may be additional alliances of independent antivirus software-testing labs.

"I'm sure that our partnership will act as a driving force for the development of the industry as a whole," said Sergey Ilyin, founder of Anti-Malware Test Lab. Anti-Malware Test Lab is an independent Russian test laboratory, a subsidiary of Anti-Malware.ru. The laboratory is best known for testing active infection treatments, antivirus heuristics, and anti-rootkit protection.

This is the second partnership of antivirus-testing organizations in recent months. In January, various antivirus vendors and media outlets gathered in Spain to discuss creating an antivirus test standards group. That group includes F-Secure, Kaspersky Lab, McAfee, Panda Software, and Symantec, according to Andreas Marx, managing director of AV-Test.org.

The war against tech espionage in America continues, with a US beak sentencing 66-year-old Chinese-American Chi Mak to 24 years in jail.

According to an AFP report, District Judge Cormac Carney said yesterday that his tough sentence would "provide a strong deterrent to the People's Republic of China not to send its agents here to steal American military secrets".

Mak, a longtime US citizen and resident orginally hailing from Guangzhou, was found guilty last May of conspiracy to violate export regulations and of failing to register as a Chinese importing agent after a six week trial. He was not charged with espionage, according to prosecutors, because none of the information he lifted was actually classified. However, the feds successfully contended that the data was of military value and that Mak had committed crimes in passing it to the People's Republic.

"We will never know the full extent of the damage that Mr Mak has done to our national security," wrote Carney in his sentencing statement.

The main information said to have been stolen related to "Quiet Electric Drive" technology developed for US submarines by Mak's employer Power Paragon. Chi Mak's brother Tai found himself wearing a pair of federal bracelets when he tried to fly to the People's Republic with a diskful of silent-sub knowhow in 2005. Another Mak relative, Gu Wei Hao, was said to have rashly tried to recruit an undercover fed to act as go-between in an attempt to blag Space Shuttle blueprints.

Greg Chung, the 72-year-old longtime US citizen who was supposed to have furnished Gu with the spaceship secrets and other valuable intel, was finally arrested in February. He could face up to 150 years in prison if convicted on all charges.