Mr Blair also stressed the personal benefit of having a national ID card, saying it would do away with the need to produce other documents for the purpose of proving one's identity. He claimed that because most citizens provided personal information to private companies on a daily basis he did not think "the civil liberties argument carries much weight".
Yes, sell them on about the only plus point they have but then make a comparison that does not really apply. Yes, I will provide data to a private company because it is limited, for a particular purpose and covered by data protection legislation. I won't provide information to the proposed national identity register because it is not limited, not covered by data protection, likely to be shared with all sorts of agencies and partially made available to unspecified private companies, it is likely to be a hackers' honeypot and has the potential to seriously erode our civil liberties. There is a difference between voluntarily sharing some information with private companies limited by law, and being forced to supply rather important data with insecure government agencies who don't appear to be limited by data protection legislation.
The ease of proving identity is one thing, the flip side is that ease translates into increase in requests, translates into potential tracking of movements and behaviour, translates into more attraction to commercial and criminal interests, translates to more pressure on petty official [always the achilles heel of any beaurocratic system] to provide information for a 'consideration' or clever ways to beat the system. Also more data-interrogation points means more hackable or crackable points. We know fingerprints can be copied to fool machine readers. It is likely that iris scans will be too and that is leaving out the misreadings leading to misidentification. Common usage means that the number of people experiencing misidentification will grow and that will likely be seriously inconvenient or lead to widespread mistrust which will undermine the system, or both. In a centralised system which purports legally to be your sole means of proof of identity, the possibility of becoming a non-person or to be held falsely grows.
The convenience Mr. Blair touts would turn out to be very expensive; rather like the convenience of flying cheaply but having to live your old age in a world made unsafe by climate change...
as technology writer Wendy Grossman recently put it, it is one thing to be burgled, quite another to be required to leave the burglar a key.
Blair dismisses civil rights argument against ID cards | Special Reports | Guardian Unlimited Politics: Filed in: ID_cards, UK, government, IT
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