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Some splendid person, writing pseudonymously in the obscurity of an open thread on the Guardian's Comment is Free semiblog, has provided a parallel text translation of the Report of the Independent Scheme Assurance Panel. His discussion begins here. It deserves a wider audience. Excerpt:

DAMN, I really must get back to work, but this is just so wonderful...

3.3 Identity management within Government

Early on, the Panel challenged the assumption that existing sources of identity data should be ignored in favour of a new set.

Like a lot of people, we couldn't understand why the NI number and its related data wouldn't do.

However, safe and reliable maintenance and use of a shared asset across multiple parties is a challenge for any organisation, not least Government with its many departments, each with its own priorities, objectives and challenges.

Then somebody showed us the figures that with a total population of 60M people in this country, maybe a sixth of them under 16, there are over 75M currently-issued NI numbers, and we finally started to understand that the entire current system is a complete balls-up.

People say to me, "Don't worry, it won't work." I would like to remind them that grand government schemes that are not working tend to be adopted anyway, and all the suffering they cause is declared a good thing, necessary for the progress of the nation. Lysenko's 'winterizeation' of wheat, did not work. Protectionism does not work. Most of the world's 'development' projects do not work. It did not stop governments implementing them at the expense of humanity. It does not stop massive numbers of politically influential people still believing in the grand reconstruction of deep natural systems and human institutions by government power, and devoting their working lives to promoting it. The National Identity Scheme still has every prospect of being Britain's 'Great Leap Forward'.

(Hat-tip: Wendy M. Grossman)

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We are marvelling at the multiple possibilities of Oyster, but come back here in 10 years’ time and we will have chips inserted under our skin or inside our heads

- Ken Livingstone, mayor of London, quoted by Computing

[Those foreign readers who are unfamiliar with Oyster should maybe start here. Those unfamiliar with our dear leader, the mayor, can read his official bio here, but Red Ken is a massive subject, and if you can understand his career then you know more about British politics than I do. Here is a recent friendly (!) blog post. Now if you'll excuse me, it is 6.43am and I am off to vote.]

(16)

Laban Tall, blogging at Biased BBC, has posted the latest BBC public service advertisement warning citizens not to fail to pay for a TV licence.

I thought it might be of interest to Samizdata readers.

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You should trust us, because we're trustworthy people who would never do anything wrong (please ignore all we've done wrong over the past few years). So, now that that's settled, let's get this baby rolling...

-Mike Masnick interprets Department of Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff's response to critics of the planned expansion of the US spy satellite program

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"The background to this method of policing is that NuLab became increasingly irritated with the police detecting crime. This tended to militate against the working classes (few question the link between poverty and crime). Being so unutterably incompetent, NuLab were were unable to tackle poverty (unless by increasing it, they can claim to be tackling poverty). One solution to this was to make crime detection a more egalitarian process. By criminalising "anti-social" behavior that was more likely to committed by the middle classes (speeding, hunting etc), then issuing directives for police to ramp up their response to such infractions, the thinking was that this would highlight how criminality was not the preserve of the put upon working classes.

On top of this, there existed a situation whereby the number crunchers claimed that the fear of being a victim of crime far outweighed the reality of being a victim of crime. Hence the emphasis shifted away from tackling crime i.e oppressing the working classes, to tackling the fear of crime. This had a cheap solution: high visibility policing. It is this thinking that lead to the introduction of those decaffeinated police officers known as "PCSOs", along with the requirement for high visibility vests worn with officers. This type of thinking also results in situations such as the Forest Gate incident, whereby the number of officers present seems to far outweigh the threat and the inclusion of the press in high profile operations. All of these things are designed to tackle the FEAR of crime, not crime itself."

From one of our readers, "Fed_Up", commenting on my recent encounter with the police. Thanks for the comments. The one here raises the issue of class. It is sometimes said that these days, the cops, or at least some of them, are the "paramilitary wing of the Guardian newspaper". This represents a significant shift in the cultural/political standing of the police over my lifetime.

Consider this: there is no doubt that during the 1980s, when the Conservatives were in power, some of the police powers used at the time got on to the statute books with relatively little complaint from what I might loosely call "the right". Not everyone was complacent, of course. Libertarian Alliance Director Sean Gabb and the LA's founder, the late Chris R. Tame, were early in pointing out at the time that no consistent defence of liberty makes sense if it is confined purely to economics, a point that some Tories to this day don't seem to grasp. While coppers were pinching Rastafarians in Brixton and hitting coalminers on the head in Yorkshire, a lot of the middle classes were happy to look the other way. As an unashamed middle class Brit with mortgage, happy marriage and decent job, I am the sort of person, I suppose, that has in a certain way been radicalised by the CCTV state, or "parking warden culture", as one might call it. It is important to understand, however, that the sort of petty exercise of power has been going on, sometimes unremarked, for years. So I certainly don't feel sorry for myself. I am, more than anything else, depressed at the fatuity of "security theatre" policing. It must, at one level surely, gnaw away at the morale and self respect of decent coppers. But there is no doubt that the role and status of the police has changed and so has the type of person that might be attracted to making a career in it.

I must say I am still stunned by the open admission of one commenter on my earlier posting that random searches are good for "fishing expeditions". We were not very kind to him on the previous thread. Justifiably.

For a good take on what has been going on with policing in the US, Gene Healy of the CATO Institute think tank has a sharp analysis. Several US readers expressed their horror at what is happening here in Britain; I am afraid that things are not so great in parts of the US, either. And as for France, etc.....

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Random searches of Britons going about their business are now established features of life in this country. The old refrain - "It could not happen here", no longer applies. On Saturday, while driving along the side of the Thames towards Westminster, passing by the Tate Gallery, I was flagged down by a policeman.

Officer: "Could you show me your driving licence? This is a section 41 search" (at least I think that is what he said).

Me: "Section 41 or whatever of what?"

Officer: "The Terrorism Act"

Me: "Why have you pulled me and my wife over?"

Officer: "We are doing searches of vehicles in the area."

Me: "Well obviously you are. Is this a random thing?"

Officer: "Yes. Please hand over your driving licence and we want to search the car."

They searched the car, called up the driving licence authority, and were able to their enormous satisfaction confirm that I was whom I said I was. I was then asked to sign a document stating that the search had been carried out as it should have been. The officer gave me his name, rank and police station number and address. When I signed the form, he asked me how I wanted to classify myself as there were about 15 options, including "White British". He was polite. My treatment was fine. The officer and his colleagues told me they were on duty, searching vehicles, for the rest of the day and into the evening.

Now I will spare you a rant about the impertinence of this. You can, gentle reader, assume as a matter of course that I regard such random searches of members of the public as impertinent. What makes me wonder, though, is what on earth the supporters of such searches expect? Do they honestly, really believe that would-be terrorists will be deterred, frightened off or caught? Unless the police put up roadblocks across London, at god-knows what disruption and cost, I do not see how doing this on one of many major roads will cause a blind bit of difference.

This is what has been called "security theatre": lots of action signifying little. Even the copper who carried out the search had the good grace to look slightly embarrassed.

Update: One commenter has complained that I am getting all upset for no good reason and has used the argument that this sort of behaviour is okay as it can act as a "fishing" expedition to unearth potentially other crimes. It is hard to summon breath to deal with such a brazen argument in favour of abolishing the idea that one is presumed innocent until otherwise.

Update 2: a reader asked for further details on the search. From the time I was pulled over to being let on my way, the process lasted 15 minutes. The police officer's colleague called up the driving licence authority to give them my licence registration number and the authority took about 10 minutes to get back. An officer opened the car boot, rummaged around some bags and luggage - I was travelling up to Cambridge with my wife - and had a look inside the car. They also inspected my clothes and checked my footwear. They did not ask me to open the glove compartment of the car. They also did not look under the car with a mirror or anything similar, or look under the bonnet.

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Apparently they are exclusive alternatives. According to Wired:

Maine is now the lone state not to have been given an extension to long-delayed Real ID regulations, after three fellow protesting states - Montana, New Hampshire and South Carolina - got their extensions in the last two weeks despite not pledging allegiance to Real ID.

What was it Maine in particular did to offend? There is no clue. One might suspect being the easiest to blockade has something to do with it. Bullies like to pick on the weakest victim when making an example.

Assuming no actual bombs get on the plane, then it scarcely matters who the passengers are - particularly since the rules did change in one important respect on September 11th 2001 and few are likely to sit quietly and do what a hijacker says, as they were advised to before that date. If someone could explain to me why any identification at all is needed to board a plane - other than that the government just wants to know where you are going - then I'd be most grateful for the explanation.

[* Yes I know that is New Hampshire, but presumably it is in the line for the DHS's third degree.]

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London and the Database State

A mayoral hustings organised by NO2ID

Londoners are among the most watched people on earth. As well as housing Whitehall, Parliament and the other self-protecting security apparatus, London has many information and identity management systems of its own. How do candidates feel about the civil liberties and privacy implications of, among other things, the Oyster Card, congestion charging, telephone parking? Would they support or oppose national ID schemes as mayor? What is their attitude to the database state?

Invitations have been issued to every party with London representation at Westminster, in Strasbourg or in the GLA. Gerrard Batten (UKIP), Sian Berry (Green), Lindsay German (Respect/Left List), Boris Johnson (Conservative), and Brian Paddick (LibDem) are currently expected to participate, and written responses from other invitees will be read from the chair.

Chaired by Christina Zaba, journalist and NO2ID's Union Liason Officer.

Time: 7pm Tuesday 8th April 2008
Place: Friends House, 173 Euston Road NW1 2BJ
Free and open to all.

[I'd like to take this opportunity to remind EU and commonwealth citizens resident in London, they have a vote in this too.]

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There is a great little article in Slashdot about a well known German hacker group, Chaos Computer Club, publishing the fingerprints of German Secretary of the Interior as part of their protest against state use of biometric ID.

The club published 4,000 copies of their magazine Die Datenschleuder including a plastic foil reproducing the minister's fingerprint - ready to glue to someone else's finger to provide a false biometric reading. The CCC has a page on their site detailing how to make such a fake fingerprint

Sweet. I suppose that is a 'hardware hack' of sorts!

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Hackers in Indonesia have defaced a government website in protest over that increasingly authoritarian nation's plans to block internet access to porn (and what is the internet for if not porn?)... Sadly the site has now been repaired, but nice one, guys. Stick it to them!

And here is a nice list of proxy servers for our Indonesian readers (yes, we do have at least a couple).

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Something for the afternoon tea break:

(5)

One of this Government's proud achievements has been helping to bring democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq - where elections were policed by imprinting a finger of every voter with indelible ink. Yet at home it has corrupted an electoral system that the world once looked up to. Ministers were warned as long ago as May 2000 about the lack of security in postal votes. Yet they ploughed on, claiming that postal voting would reinvigorate the electoral system by encouraging more to vote.

- Ross Clark.

(4)

Heathrow Airport is a horrible place: overcrowded, dirty and unable to cope with the volume of traffic. A few days ago, Terminal 5 was opened. As a result of the demented decision by the British Airports Authority, the Spanish-owned company which has a monopoly franchise on UK airports, to blend international and domestic passengers going through the terminal, BAA has decided to fingerprint everyone who goes through terminal five. Soon all passengers going out of Heathrow, and other BAA airports, such as Gatwick, will be affected. The queues will get worse, and ironically, so will the vulnerability of passengers to terrorist attack during peak times. One hates to think what it will be like during the summer holidays and over the Christmas break.

Richard Morrison has a good old rant in the Times of London today about this issue. He points out that BAA has introduced the system at its own behest, not because of the government. For once, a libertarian cannot just bash the state for this, at least not as the direct culprit. I have no problem per se in a private airport operator setting certain rules which customers are free to ignore by going elsewhere, but as BAA has a monopoly, it hardly is a model of free market capitalism. BAA was privatised initially with its monopoly largely intact, which was a mistake. Of course, if passengers feel safer going to airports which demand iris scans, fingerprints, ID cards, body searches, intense questioning, and all other manner of intrusions into privacy, by all means go to these places. For the rest of us, even those who fear terrorism, we might prefer to take our chances and travel like free law-abiding adults, rather than convicted criminals.

For a good, sober look at the trade-offs with security measures and the unintended bad effects of things like this, this book is a good place to start. The author is not some hard-line civil libertarian and quite friendly to a lot of security ideas, but he understands that there is no security system in the world that is fail-safe and argues that it is about time people were allowed to weigh the risks more intelligently.

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Dallas City Hall has idled more than one-fourth of the 62 cameras that monitor busy intersections because many of them are failing to generate enough red-light-running fines to justify their operational costs, according to city documents.

- Dallas Morning News (with thanks to Engadget for picking up on the story)

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All the London newspapers today are full of a new but familiar "report on strange people to the wonderful and efficient experts in the police" anti-terrorism advertisement.

I am a foreigner. I have five mobile phones. Readers are invited to speculate as to why this is (although it could just be that "I need communication", or perhaps that I find that sitting in a bar sending text messages to myself relieves the monotony of life). I swap their SIMs around all the time, often in public places and for sinister reasons like "The battery ran out on my main phone and I still want to receive calls on that number"..

Also, I like to wander around London and other cities photographing things like bridges, container ports and other critical infrastructure.

When am I going to be reported? Will I be sent to Guantanamo? Will Brian be there too? Why the fuck are these people wasting my taxes like this?

Also, where did the "thousands" come from? If we are talking the whole world, it would be "billions". If we are talking the UK it would be "tens of millions". Statistics actually suggest that there are around seventy million active mobile phones in the UK. Given that that is ten million more than there are people in the national population, and given that there must be at least ten million people who realistically are too young to have one, there are at least twenty million suspicious phones in the UK.

Who knew the terrorism problem was this big?

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I have just received my new passport. I am not British, and I will be deliberately vague about the country that issued it. The fee for getting it renewed was significantly higher than last time. I do like the nice touch of requiring me to pay a "priority fee" for getting the new passport in a reasonable time. The idea that we should help our citizens by being prompt and efficient in the first place is gone completely.

Upon receiving the passport, I perhaps discovered the reason for the higher fee. The passport has a little logo of a chip on the front cover and on the details page. There is an insert stating that "This is an ePassport. This passport contains a microchip which stores the same information that as appears on the data age. The chip can be read electronically to confirm the identity of the bearer. This document complies with International Civil Aviation Organisation standards and incorporates security features to prevent illegal access to the information stored on the chip. See the centre page of the passport for further information".

My country is the sort of place that tends to be proud of being first on the block with respect to implementing fancy new international protocols, so I suppose this does not greatly surprise me. If the chip only contains the same data as the details page, then I rather fail to see the point, given that the passport is machine readable already. If the intention is to add more data to such chips later, I am not sure that the present "This is just a new way of storing the same data" claims are entirely honest. Storing digitally signed data on the chip probably does make sense and genuinely does make such a passport harder to forge. So I will concede that point.

Still, making it possible to read the passport without requiring it to be opened seems to me to rather reduce my security rather than increase it. As for the security features to prevent illegal access, surely for technology to be useful it must be made possible for every border post in every country in the world to be able to obtain equipment for reading it. Even if I made the ludicrous assumption that I trust every government in the world, I still find it hard to believe that such a widely distributed technology would not fall into private hands.

So, where from here. Well, as it happens I can turn to the centre page of the passport. This page is stiffer than the others, presumably due to having a chip embedded in it. It also has information written on it. "This passport contains sensitive electronics. For best performance, please do not bend, perforate, or expose to extreme temperatures or excess moisture".

So, which of those things should I try first?

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Even the most hard-bitten student activist would recognise its not an abrogation of his radicalism to get an ID card if it helps him to provide an assurance of his identity to those who provide services to him.

- Ms Home Secretary Jacqui Smith (quoted in Computer Weekly) reacting to criticism by the National Union of Students of plans to hustle and hassle students to register themselves for life on the great and glorious National Identity Register. It is just extraordinary how tone deaf to human life, how uncomprehending of the impulses to privacy and personal liberty, this strange class of apparatchiks is. Jacqui Smith's own concept of radical activism may not extend very far. A friend who was her contemporary at Hertford College commented:

Yes, I remember Jacqui Smith from college but only vaguely. She was a fairly inoffensive JCR/political hack... you know... terribly earnest. I think she may have been president of the JCR at some point.

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For me the idea of the state installing cameras everywhere to ensure compliance with its edicts was the most memorable aspect to George Orwell's dystopian 1984, with Newspeak a close second. But of course here in the real world, the state would never try to force private business owners to allow the state to place cameras to make sure people are following regulations, right?

Wrong.

Cameras could be placed in about 800 U.S. slaughterhouses to watch for improper procedures and inhumane handling of cattle, a federal official said Thursday. A Senate committee recommended installing the cameras three years ago, but the proposal is getting new consideration in the wake of a massive recall of beef last month, Agriculture Undersecretary Richard Raymond told a House committee Thursday.

And what comes next? Cameras in schools and daycare centres naturally. For the children of course. And after that? I mean, why stop there?

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Last week the Metropolitan police spent shed loads of taxpayers money on pointless advertising launched a new counter-terrorism campaign.

Londoners are being urged to help stop terrorists in their tracks by reporting suspicious behaviour, in a new counter terrorism advertising campaign.

The Metropolitan Police Service is asking people to trust their instincts and pass on information about any unusual activity or behaviour to the confidential Anti-Terrorist Hotline on 0800 789 321.

And now for the visuals:

When I saw those for the first time, I honestly thought these were a joke. And lo and behold, it did not take long for them to become just that...

And of course the Lolcats version:

Long live the internetz.

(7)

Suppose that Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs have lost your personal financial information (along with that of 25 million other people) on a set of lost CDs, or perhaps they have simply lost all the details of your VAT registration.

In any event, the criminals have your National Insurance number. You are worried about fraud. It is good that HMRC have provided information to help you deal with it.

(Via the Register).

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You should see an ID card like a passport in-country.

- Meg Hillier MP, the minister responsible for the scheme, to the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee, today.

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And it is The Economist. Unlike some of my fellow Samizdatistas, I am a fan ^[1]. But then, I am a liberal - conservative only in my suspicion of social management and 'fixing' things without enquiry as to whether they are actually broken.

This week in the print edition there is an excellent supplement: The electronic bureaucrat (introduction here). It is clear-sightedly critical of e-government of all kinds, without falling into the know-nothing technophobic rants that I fear some of those who oppose the database state do:

[G]loom, fear and optimism are all justified.

(14)

Late last year, HM Revenue & Customs succeeded in losing details on 25m Britons. That was quite an impressive achievement; the loss of data on disks, unencrypted, had an almost artistic quality about it. It was glorious to watch BBC rottweiller Jeremy Paxman reduce some hapless junior Treasury minister to dogfood on the BBC Newsnight programme. (The Chancellor, Alisdair Darling, was too busy dealing with the disaster of Northern Rock to go on the show). As Paxman argued by way of a statement more than a question to the hapless government minister (I forget her name, she is totally forgettable): "This does rather kill off the idea of ID cards, doesn't it?"

It certainly does. And alas, my wife this morning received a letter from HMRC to inform her that details she sent to it in relation to her business (I will not give any further details for obvious reasons), have all been lost: date of birth, registration numbers for VAT, the whole shebang. The letter informed us of the need to be super-vigilant about bills, invoices etc. We will have to use services like Equifax or Experian, the credit-check companies, to ensure that our credit history is not damaged. All a great nuisance. I am also writing to my local member of Parliament, Mark Field (Conservative), who voted against ID cards to his immense credit, to inform of this latest case. About 40 or so forms, according to the letter sent to us, have been lost in this latest HMRC cockup. I will ask Field to raise this matter as part of the Tories' opposition to ID cards. There is, of course, no point informing anyone on the government side about this.

Or is it a cock-up? I wonder about what is happening at the moment. If you are a conspiracy theorist, you might start to wonder whether there are criminals working in civil service jobs or major banks - which increasingly operate like state departments due to the amount of regulations these days. The recent massive fraud that hit Societe Generale, the French bank, was, remember, carried out by at least one, if not more, insiders who had knowledge of how the compliance operations of these complex organisation work. Or, it is possible that someone in HMRC has an agenda against ID cards and is using incidents like this to discredit the whole project.

Anyway, whatever your views about ID cards and government use of data, I strongly urge people to use credit-check and verification services at least once a year to ensure they have a clean bill of health. In the current difficult credit market environment since the US sub-prime mortgage disaster, even the smallest blemish on a credit record could cause an individual serious problems, such as inability to get a loan.

Bastards.

(5)

I write a lot of letters to the press. They are usually edited for length by the letters pages subs, and often improved thereby. If you can say something shorter it is usually better. However, occasionally it goes wrong. This week the London Evening Standard mangled something I wrote so badly as to remove most of the point.

The original may not be the most eloquent piece, but it should be published somewhere. I have added a few links to give blogospheric readers the context:

Sirs,

A man is held without charge at the instance of a foreign power and a visit from his MP is secretly recorded on the instructions of police acting without a warrant. A decade ago this would have been Britain only in a science-fictional parallel-world. David Davis is quite right (Article, 5 February) to condemn it. But things are still getting worse. Surveillance powers - most of which date from 2000, before the "War on Terror" was declared - are old hat.

The Government obsession now is "information sharing", connecting the numerous databases now kept on us by various departments. This "Transformational Government" multiplies the attack on privacy and liberty many-fold. Its shadow falls on almost all new legislation. The Counter-Terrorism Bill currently before parliament, for example, would allow information to be disclosed to and passed on by the Intelligence Services, regardless of how it is obtained and despite confidentiality or privilege. Meanwhile the Ministry of Justice has been given a programme to weaken in general the existing controls on information in government hands, and the National Identity Management Scheme (ID cards), the means to join it all up, is being pressed forwards on a new schedule.

We are facing not just a surveillance state, but the building of a new phenomenon, the database state.

Yours faithfully

Guy Herbert
General Secretary, NO2ID

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Anyone worried by Natalie's posting below should be aware that you ain't seen nuttin' yet. Tom Griffin of The Green Ribbon has obtained a full listing of the information it is intended to collect (and distribute among various authorities) concerning those buying tickets to move from any one of Britain, the Irish Republic, and Northern Ireland to any of the others.

There has been a common travel area since St Patrick, and this was formalised in the 20th century when the countries of Britain and Ireland came incompletely apart. Now it seems both governments are in effect conspiring to introduce internal passports and replace a common travel area with a common surveillance area.

[hat-tip: spyblog]

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The writer of this Times story: Pensioner died in attack on his home after parking space row, has, perhaps understandably, concentrated on what exactly Mark, Zoe and Steven Forbes did to the late Bernard Gilbert and whether "We'll smash his car to bits and then his hire car and then whatever he gets after that until he dies" constituted a considered plan.

However that may be, there is an aspect of the story that deserves a story - and a trial - of its own:

Mrs Forbes was upset and called her husband Mark, who told her to note down Mr Gilbert’s numberplate. He then asked a policeman friend to check Mr Gilbert’s address on the police national computer, using the car registration number.

The innocent have nothing to fear - so long as they have not annoyed anyone who knows a copper who can be persuaded to look up an address.

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A most interesting document has come into our possession - and quite coincidentally, we understand, into the possession of several other well-known blogs. It is a scan of the internal document of the Identity and Passport Service outlining the new implementation strategy for the UK's identity card scheme, liberally annotated by the experts at NO2ID.

We think it tends to disprove the denials only just issued by HM Government in relation to the scheme, as well as some half-lies and full lies they have been telling all along. (It may also show up the feeble grip of Gordon Brown's paper Stalinism. "In government, but not in power," ministers will rubber-stamp anything - just as long as it doesn't look like a retreat.) But judge for yourself: (pdf 1.17Mb)

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Anyone in Britain who wishes to file a tax return to Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs must do so online. Oh goody:

The security of the online computer system used by more than three million people to file tax returns is in doubt after HM Revenue and Customs admitted it was not secure enough to be used by MPs, celebrities and the Royal Family.

Thousands of "high profile" people have been secretly barred from using the online tax return system amid concerns that their confidential details would be put at risk.

Of course, as the Daily Telegraph rightly points out, the HMRC is the department that managed to lose details of 25m people back in the autumn; it may be a rash prediction to make, but the more this sort of nonsense piles up, the less likely it is that the ID card will go ahead as planned. We can all live in hope, anyway.

(3)

The British Government does not seem to be able to keep anything secret.

Still, this is 'only' 600,000 people affected, which is quite modest, when you compare it to other recent fiascos.

(47)

Ministers are planning to implant "machine-readable" microchips under the skin of thousands of offenders as part of an expansion of the electronic tagging scheme that would create more space in British jails.

Amid concerns about the security of existing tagging systems and prison overcrowding, the Ministry of Justice is investigating the use of satellite and radio-wave technology to monitor criminals.

But, instead of being contained in bracelets worn around the ankle, the tiny chips would be surgically inserted under the skin of offenders in the community, to help enforce home curfews. The radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, as long as two grains of rice, are able to carry scanable personal information about individuals, including their identities, address and offending record.

This is beyond belief, or, at least, it would be if we had not been covering the various madcap schemes coming out of Whitehall the past few years. What we have here is a government that believes that the rights and liberties of its people ought to be ordered to suit the priorities of British police forces.

Now if you take this to be a good idea, you are going to be hard pressed to deny the logical conclusion, that if we were all implanted with RFID tags, it would be much easier to solve and prevent crimes in the first place. This is very probably true, but it also degrades the individual to the point where humans become mere vassals of the almighty British State.

Given the trend of affairs in the UK, that is probably the way things are going to go- give it a decade or two. Early adapters should get themselves arrested and tagged early, to beat the rush.

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I am prepared to believe that there may be some things (though not many of them) that are of such public benefit that they should be provided at the general expense. That is not to say that I think that if something is good it should be compulsory. Let alone that if it sounds like a good, that is justification for its being compulsory.

But when you are dealing with the state, "free" does not mean 'free as in free speech', nor does it mean 'free as in free beer'. It means 'compulsory'. If the government is advertising free beer, it wants everybody drunk; prepare to have your head held under if you don't feel like a tipple just now.

Hence this Guardian headline, a classic of pusilanimity against spin:

Plan to give every child internet access at home

The actual story is somewhat, er... more nuanced:

Parents could be required to provide their children with high-speed internet access under plans being drawn up by ministers in partnership with some of the country's leading IT firms.

[...]

The initiative is part of a major push which could also see the parents of every secondary school student given access to continuous online updates on their child's lessons, performance and behaviour as early as next year. So-called "real-time reporting", which was first mooted in the government's children's plan last month, could be extended to primary schools within two years.

A sub less versed in the cult of the benign state might have abstracted that as:

"Big business bonanza: Parents must pay for children to be watched at home by online officials."

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Via Andrew Sullivan's blog, I came across this rather nifty map showing how different countries around the world vary in their treatment of privacy. Both Britain and America get a black. Some parts of the world are a sort of grey, like Africa (I guess the thugs that run parts of that continent have other things to worry about besides snooping on everyone). It looks as if Germany is less intrusive than France, and less than Britain. Canada is less intrusive than the USA, etc. The link takes you to the methodology that Privacy International, a civil lberties group, uses to calculate its rankings.

Here's hoping that British lovers of liberty have rather more reason to feel less ashamed of what has happened in this nation in 12 months' time.

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Sometimes it is worth plagiarising yourself.

I was asked in a pre-interview chat the other day, about 30 seconds from live TV, "Why is the government doing this? 'Terrorism' doesn't seem to make sense; there has to be something more to it." It's hard to be snappy on the point even without crazy pressure, so mumbled something about my interlocutor going to Google and typing "Transformational Government". I do recommend it, but I have a fairly neat explanation for why Transformational Government too. Just not quite neat enough to recall and pitch in 30 seconds on a GMTV sofa at 6:30 in the morning.

I actually wrote it about 3 years ago, in the days when I had time to think, as a comment on Phil Booth's (whatever happened to him) blog, the Infinite Ideas Machine:

My answer arises from a pub conversation a while back with the post-Marxist commentator Joe Kaplinsky. He maintains "they" don't know what they want the information for, they are just collecting it just in case it should ever come in useful, because that's what bureaucrats do. There is much in that, but I think there's slightly more.

The slightly more is a glimpse of bureaucratic fundamentalism to rival the more explicit fundamentalisms of religious and political fanatics. The administrative class ("class" in the cultural not economic sense) in Britain, but also in Europe more generally - and from which New Labour is almost exclusively drawn - holds it as self evident that the life and personality of an individual is a unitary object capable of being better managed if only there is enough information collected and enough "best practice" followed.

It is a fundamentalist faith in that if the world is out of line with the model, the world is wrong; that written rules and established methods are unquestionable from outside the tradition; and that forcing people to live within the categories determined by the faith is justifiable for a general and individual good that is evident to the elect.

It's not that control is sought for its own sake, more that they yearn for the best well-ordered and coherent society, and believe this can be determined and imposed given sufficient expertise and information. Hence joined up government. They really do believe that efficiency is achieved by connecting everything to everything else in a giant bureaucratic system. It is the Soviet illusion, dressed up in "new technology" and market-friendly initiatives that co-opt corporate bureaucracies into the dream rather than setting them up as enemies.

The same people who claimed to have absorbed Hayek's explanation of why 5-year plans can't work during their turn away from Old Labour are too dull (or too intoxicated by the vision of the power to make a good society) to see that replacing some of the clerks with machines and the telegraph with the internet makes no difference to the basic proposition.

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My sparser (even) than usual blogging lately is largely the result of the expanding demands of NO2ID. Thank you to everyone (including several Samizdata contributors) who has added to the avalanche of cheques into our legal fund. The bank clerks in Marylebone High Street are grateful for the work, too.

We (NO2ID) are about to make things even more fun by recruiting a new cohort of refuseniks to join those 10,000 immortals who committed themselves in 2005. In the aftermath of the HMRC data-sharing scandal, the British public is ready for the message that the only way to stop the state from debauching your personal information is not to give it a chance.

When Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne vowed to defy the ID scheme recently, it quickly became clear that not many people really understood what this meant. We have formulated a nice clear promise that anyone at all can make, and set it free, online and off. It will be an interesting exercise in network effects.

What follows is a piece I wrote for public distribution explaining the point of the whole thing:

You might be prepared to go to gaol rather than have an ID card. But you can't.

David Blunkett has been smugly pronouncing that there will be no ID card martyrs because the intent is to have a system of penalties – like monstrous parking fines – hard to contest in court. So further punishments would relate to failure to pay, not ID cards. That silly distinction is currently irrelevant, since powers of direct compulsion have been dropped, for now. It has not stopped Mr Blunkett repeating it, though.

Subtler minds have been at work. The Home Office plans to make you to "volunteer". It hopes almost all the population will "volunteer", before most people have even noticed what is happening. Well before it rounds-up and force-fingerprints a few pariahs. Official documents will one by one be "designated", so that you cannot get one without at the same time asking to be placed – for life – on the National Identity Register.

The civil servant, Sylvanus Vivian who originated this idea in 1934 – yes, that’s right, nineteen thirty-four – called it "parasitic vitality". In other words, the scheme is a vampire. It has no life of its own, and thrives only if it feeds.

There is its weakness. We, collectively, can choose to starve the Identity and Passport Service. It only works smoothly if few are prepared to face a little inconvenience to resist. It only works at all if a large majority of the population can be hypnotised into thinking that it is just routine, no big deal. If enough of us refuse to be bled willingly, the beast will either starve or show its fangs.

Already 'e-Passports' have been used as a pretext to build a chain of interrogation centres to service the ID scheme. But further growth of the parasite will be harder to hide. Which is where you come in.

Making martyrdom hard, made resistance easy too. Actually breaking the law at this stage is hard to do. There is scarcely any ID card law to break; it is designed to be brought in silently by regulations, alongside administrative changes.

So that’s why NO2ID is suggesting a new form of non-violent direct action: pre-emptive resistance. You can do something positive now. Something totally legal; that has its own life, not determined by us, but by you. Anyone can do it. Anyone can help others do it. The more who do, the easier it is.

You can resolve openly, and clearly, not to do those specific things that give the ID scheme its "parasitic vitality":

I solemnly and publicly promise that:

• I shall not register for a national identity card
• I shall not supply personal details or fingerprints to a National Identity Register
• I shall not apply for any document or service if joining the National Identity Register is a condition of obtaining it
• I shall not co-operate with any Identity and Passport Service interview concerning my identity.
• I also promise by my example to encourage others to do the same.

In just one month of 2005, over 10,000 people pledged online not to register. Many more will take this NO2ID Pledge, and pass it on to others. Maybe the Government thinks it could force tens of thousands to submit by denying them access to their own lives. It would be a very brave Government that tried.

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Not since Sue Lawley invited him on to Desert Island Discs can Gordon Brown have agonised for so long over his CD collection.

- Alice Thompson.

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I am old enough to remember the run-up to the 1979 general election, and a lot of what swung that for Thatcher was the feeling that our country seemed about to descend into a state of South Americanness. This extraordinary lost data discs business is, I think, particularly wounding to the Brown regime, for it gives off that same vibe, of a government descending into anarchy, and not in a good way. The whole world is now sniggering at Britain.

However, good news for Brown comes from a commenter on this posting at Guido's:

There are about 13million children under the age of 16, most of whom have two parents. So that gives us about 25million individuals listed. However, only about a quarter of these will have bank details listed, so the BBC's claims that the bank details of 25million people have been lost is actually misleading. It is probably about 7million.

Oh, only seven million. That's okay then.

This comment reminds me of an amazing peacenik meeting I once attended, almost as long ago as the 1979 election, in which the speakers on the platform all took it in turns to explain how ghastly a nuclear explosion over a built-up area would be and that therefore we should chuck away our nuclear weapons, and a particularly bonkers middle-aged woman in the audience, called Daphne if I remember it right, got up to explain that actually, if you got lucky with the prevailing wind, and if proper civil defence measures were taken, it might not be that bad. The looks on the faces of the platform speakers were truly treasurable. I got up and said that the speakers certainly had me convinced me that nuclear war would indeed be rather nasty, and how about the replacement of Soviet communism with liberal democracy, as the least implausible way to end the nastiness? But that's another story.

Getting back to this lost discs thing, I agree with everyone else here who is, quite rightly making such a fuss of this business. Don't collect the damn data into these huge compulsory gobs in the first place.

Whatever David Cameron, says now ...

Mr Cameron said people were "desperately worried" and they would "find it frankly weird" that Mr Brown still wanted to go ahead with plans for a national ID cards scheme and register.

... his conclusion if and when he becomes Prime Minister (which this whole thing makes that much more likely) will presumably be that it will be a sufficient answer for his noble self to be in charge of the government's compulsory databases, and that all will then be well.

But it does occur to me, just as Black Wednesday saved the pound from being swallowed up by the Euro - which it surely did, whatever you think about that - this fiasco might just have done something similar to the database state. Not abolished it, or even reversed it seriously, but at least thrown a bit of a spanner into its works. Suddenly, ID cards are looking truly scary, combining malevolence with incompetence – Soviet even - to Mr and Mrs Average. I wrote that before reading what Guy Herbert said in the previous posting but one here, and I see that he reaches an identical conclusion. If so, good. Campaign for Database Disarmament anybody?

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You cannot trust any agency with people's personal data.
- Frank Abagnale, quoted in The Daily Telegraph.

The quote of Britain's political week. There is a massive breakthrough in the public understanding of the database state, and the Government is finding it a real struggle to contain it. BBC journalists (Eg. Newsnight, The World Tonight, etc) are making an explicit connection between the three real monsters: the National Identity Scheme, Connecting for Health, and ContactPoint. My personal touchstone for success is when Criminal Records Bureau disclosure starts to be criticised in the public presses.

Bonus quote:

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,
Or close the wall up with our English dead!
In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility;
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger:
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood.

Now is not a time to rest.

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A commenter on Samizdata wrote the following lines, which got me thinking:

Has anyone here heard anyone (other than another libertarian) suggest that child benefit should be abolished so that this never happens again?

No I had not, but now that you mention it....

I don't think it's difficult to follow the argument that child benefit is a waste of everybody's money except that of net welfare recipient families.

I do not have a problem with welfare for poor families - it is state welfare that is the problem. The all-important word "state" is the problem.

It certainly cannot operate without a database of every child and their parents.

Indeed. As the late Ronald Reagan used to say, a state that is powerful enough to give the public everything it wants is powerful enough to take it from them too. And I think that one, perhaps unintended insight of this debacle is how it demonstrates that 25m British citizens receive some form of state benefit, or 'tax credit' (ie, benefit). That is a shocking statistic in its own right. 25m people, the vast majority of whom are not poor by any objective basis, now are caught into the welfare system. I am not saying, of course, that if the welfare system is rolled back, that disasters like this will not happen, but the need to hold so much data on us in the first place would certainly be greatly reduced, if not eliminated.

It goes without saying that this fiasco is a gift to opponents of ID cards. The sun was shining on my way to work this morning.

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I have just sent NO2ID a cheque. Now might be a good time for many people to do the same, whether or not they took the pledge.

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Further to my recent post about new measures from our Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families. Foreign readers may be surprised that we have a department for children schools and families (sic). I, on the other hand, am alarmed: even the name indicates the totalitarian intent of the New British state.

Prompted by a clip on TV news, I have now found the full text of Ed Balls's speech given to the Fabian Society yesterday. Didn't the resolution to announce new policy to parliament, not outside bodies - in this case a para-Party body - last a long time? It bears close reading:

Excerpt I:

Our ambition must be that all of our young people will continue in education or training.

That is what our Bill sets out to achieve - new rights for young people to take up opportunities for education and training, and the support they need to take up these opportunities; alongside new responsibilities for all young people - and a new partnership between young people and parents, schools and colleges, local government and employers. ....
But it is important to make clear that this is not a Bill to force young people to stay on at school or college full-time. They will be able to participate in a wide range of different ways through:

* full-time education, for example, at school or college
* work-based learning, such as an apprenticeship
* or one day a week part-time education or training, if they are employed, self-employed or volunteering more than 20 hours a week.

But the Education and Skills Bill is a bill of responsibilities as well as a bill of rights.

Because if young people fail to take up these opportunities, there will be a system of enforcement - very much a last resort - but necessary to strike the right balance between new rights and new responsibilities.

Phew - not necessarily locked up in schools then, but on probation otherwise (as will of course any employers be - they'll have to have enhanced CRB checks, of course). This is enlightening as to what Mr Brown means when he talks about a Bill of Rights and Duties, "building upon existing rights and freedoms but not diluting them - but also make more explicit the responsibilities that implicitly accompany rights...". It confirms what many listeners will have guessed: you have the right and freedom to do exactly what the big G te