EG’s ‘history lesson’ is also nonsense on its face – there were no ‘English’ in what later became England when the Romans arrived, rather there were Celtic Britons of various tribes

That’s why I said Britons.

Talk of the English as some homogenous “race” or tribe is meaningless, both in pre-Roman times and today.

EG

They say “ID” when really they mean “database” and movement tracking.

One isn’t nearly so easy without the other. You make the same presumption that many people do, and which is a founding principle of the pigeonholed society that is the object here: that we each have only one ID, that is and ought to be consistent, coherent and connected to every other bit administratively, socially and temporally, that one may/should not be a different person in different circumstances… that one may/should not be able to reinvent onself and leave the past behind.

In an effort to ‘assure the validity of your data’ the system will of course have to keep your biometrics in a master data file, just like the driver’s license data.

They will, ‘for your own protection’ of course, insist that cards be compared against the biometrics on file in order to validate that card. After all, it might be a stolen or illegally made card, you know. And ‘we can’t allow forgeries, now, can we?’

They will be validated by a central data base and those validations will be retained.

It almost seems like it is just a massive conflating of very different issues, which admittedly the government has done deliberately. They say “ID” when really they mean “database” and movement tracking.

My assumption is that any thing affiliated with the government even remotely (funding, etc), including tollways, city parking garages, public events, they will ‘swipe’ the card. That is unless you think someone will look you in the eye and estimate your retinal scan.

The nature of the positive identification process is biometrics. No more glance at the picture and let you in. Could get sued or prosecuted. Card scanning at every step. All of it will be logged. Even if they say it isn’t. Data storage is just too cheap.

Curious, the spambot Turing code for this comment ends with ’666′. (cue theme from Twilght Zone)

1- renounce foreign travel for the rest of one’s life
2- die before needing another passport

3- Become a citizen of a foreign nation. I became elegible to become a US citizen last year. I was ambivalent about the idea but the ID card thing has made up my mind.

Rich

Why couldn’t you design a computer system that would do something similar? It just performs some sort of code check, beeps “yes” and doesn’t even have the memory to store the log.

The state and its agents should do their utmost to explain all this rather than expect Joe Public to take it all on trust, particularly if we are going to be forced to have these cards against our will and suffer the indignity of also paying for them.

“(essentially checking a number against a name) and that would be the only data they would need.”

I think that is virutally impossible. I know of no identity checking system since people manually thumbed through sheafs of paper, that didn’t log queries. They will log name, location and time at a bare minimum.

They could track your approach to a political rally and probable presence by the trail of time and date stamps as you pay tolls, buy fuel, pay for parking, oyster card, etc. I just don’t see a way that an ID only card can’t of necessity log name/time/location as part of its verification process.