To guard against "function creep" the home secretary has promised that fresh primary legislation will have to be introduced if extra personal details such as health records, criminal records or other background information were to be added.
It looks like there has been some success in lobbying against ID cards in that these modifications show that real concerns have been heard and there is an attempt to address them. My issue now is that with such an emasculated bill, what is the justification for the things? There's little value in their security and crime fighting functions without a link to police databases, and their value for benefit fraud detection is already overhyped, add that to the biometric scan failure rate and what's left is a false security ripe for criminal exploitation...
Notice too the overoptimism on tech costs: "The Home Office minister, Andy Burnham, said that the infrastructure of scanners and readers needed for the national identity card scheme would have to be introduced anyway to upgrade to the next generation of "biometric" passports." That's true for points of entry, but what about all those places that have no need for a passport reader? That's extra cost.
I'm with Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty.
"The multi-million pound database budget should be immediately diverted to operational intelligence and policing. In addition to the exorbitant financial cost, this scheme comes with immeasurable hidden costs to our privacy, race relations, and traditional freedoms"
The justifications for going ahead with it are just not big enough for the costs.
Guardian Unlimited Politics | Special Reports | Clarke pledges ID card data will be limited to information on passports: On Del.icio.us: ID, ID_cards, legislation, UK, function_creep, database
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