Nouslife: This ID project is even more sinister than we first thought

23 March 2006

This ID project is even more sinister than we first thought

I know I keep banging on about ID cards, but I really do feel threatened in my civil liberties by the things. This Observer article tells well the story of why we should be concerned.

You will need the card when you receive prescription drugs, when you withdraw a relatively small amount of money from a bank, check into hospital, get your car unclamped, apply for a fishing licence, buy a round of drinks (if you need to prove you're over 18), set up an internet account, fix a residents' parking permit or take out insurance.
Every time that card is swiped, the central database logs the transaction so that an accurate plot of your life is drawn. The state will know everything that it needs to know; so will big corporations, the police, the Inland Revenue, HM Customs, MI5 and any damned official or commercial busybody that wants access to your life. The government and Home Office have presented this as an incidental benefit, but it is at the heart of their purpose.

If that isn't an automated [and so cheaper] version of Orwell's dystopia, or at least the foundation for it once someone is interested enough and has excuse enough, well, what is? Like Big Brother, our present gov are convinced that, since they are the good guys, there is no threat; we can leave such powers in their hands and sleep easy under their benign surveillance. I repeat what I have said before; the road to hell is paved with good intentions which are no defense in practice against creeping cultures of misuse, neglect or the occasional wily miscreant We need checks and balances against such things and in this case that means not centralising all that info in one database backed by legal requirement.

A few postings back I blogged that the lie to many of UK gov's claims is given in the recent announcement that rather than biometrics, chip'n'pin was to be the de facto mode of employment of the cards for many transactions. Henry Porter's comment in the Observer is worth quoting here.

Andrew Burnham, a junior minister at the Home Office, confirmed the anonymous email by admitting that the ID card scheme would now include chip-and-pin technology because it would be a cheaper way of checking each person's identity. The sophisticated technology on which this bill was sold will cost too much to operate, with millions of checks being made every week. That is a very important admission because the government still maintains the fiction that the ID card is defence against identity theft and terrorism. The 7 July bombers would not have been deterred by a piece of plastic. And it is clear that the claim about protecting your identity is also rubbish because chip-and-pin technology has already been compromised by organised criminals. What remains is the ceaseless monitoring of people's lives. That is what the government is forcing on us.

At the moment the bill is going between the two houses of parliament. The main issue is the interpretation of 'voluntary', the Lord's insists that the government are in effect breaking a manifesto promise and so the bill may not pass...

Labour's manifesto said: 'We will introduce ID cards, including biometric data like fingerprints, backed up by a national register and rolling out initially on a voluntary basis as people renew their passports.'
It turns out that there is nothing voluntary about it. If you renew your passport, you will be compelled to provide all the information the state requires for its sinister data base. The Home Secretary says that the decision to apply for, or renew, a passport is entirely a matter of individual choice; thus he maintains that the decision to commit those personal details to the data base is a matter of individual choice.