Once you are on the Register, you will never get off until it is abolished. But you'll be exposed to all the risks and dangers of the scheme immediately. The Home Office is building the most complex and intrusive ID control system in the world. It will certainly go wrong. Once you are on the Register — with or without a card — you will also be forced to keep all the details that are kept about you up to date (and sort out any government errors). Once you are on the Register you will face penalty charges for not telling the Home Office if you move house or if any other of your registered details change. Far from being 'foolish', renewing your passport to avoid all this is just plain common sense.
I've been waiting to see if there might be such an action and I'm pleased to recommend this campaign to you. I'm imagining, on the basis of what we are seeing and hearing at the moment about this, a situation where we have to produce 'voluntarily' an ID card for routine financial transactions and any government-related activity. All of which will be logged by a central database. This database will in turn become a potential commercial goldmine, even with aggregated and anonymised info.
Do we trust low paid NIR personnel to be immune from the temptations of bribery [and remember it could be your own details at risk]? Do we trust a government keen for extra spending but not extra taxes to resist selling some info, and then some more, and so on until it becomes relatively easy to work out more personal stuff?
Is the pope German?
Big brother will be watching you via database logs; welcome the surveillance state. Remember those phone calls from your credit card company whenever a few 'out of normal pattern' purchases take place? Well, similar 'out of pattern' logs in the database will be automatically passed on to the new National Crime Squad, MI5, the Special Branch ... Nothing to fear if you've done nothing wrong? Except the permanent record of the logging and the intrusive calls, and perhaps loads of time at inconvenient moments having to explain yourself to officious burocrats or suspicious crime investigation officers making you feel like a criminal. You know that's how it'll be. Admit it.
And to add weight to the concerns, get this:
David Blunkett ... once said: “No one should fear correct identification.” Those words always remind me of one the more distressing details of the Eichmann trial: how he told his executioner that the fate of those killed in the Holocaust was sealed by their answers to the 1939 census on religious background recorded on paper for a Hollerith machine, an early mechanical computer. Quite literally, their cards were marked.
Speaking of which, there are concerns about whether it really is possible for a UK government to get a project like this sorted out adequately. But then, if they get it wrong, the legislation provides the solution; mistakes would be our fault and we pay a 2000 quid fine: that should finance the fixes.
renew for freedom - MAY 2006 - renew your passport:
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