We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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More creepy Big Blunkettry, this time from Scotland (on Sunday):
EVERY secondary school pupil in Scotland is to be issued with an ID card bearing his or her name, age and address, under a controversial government scheme branded last night as an assault on privacy.
The ‘entitlement cards’ will be issued to 400,000 12 to 18-year-olds from March next year and will be used for a range of services including school meals and leisure centres.
Nice trick. Get a card, or go hungry.
But the scheme – which has already been piloted in Aberdeen – was condemned yesterday as a cynical ploy to introduce national identity cards for adults by the back door.
The bit of this Scotland on Sunday story that did most to threaten my digestion was this:
An Executive spokesman told Scotland on Sunday that the scheme, officially called ‘Dialogue Youth’, would see 400,000 cards given to all Scotland’s 12-18 year olds. The spokesman said they would not be compulsory.
Dialogue Youth. Puke. And they won’t be compulsory. It’s just that if you don’t carry one, you won’t be able to do anything or buy anything.
Worrying words from Blair’s conference speech:
“And in a world of mass migration, with cheaper air travel, and all the problems of fraud, it makes sense to ask whether now in the early 21st century identity cards are no longer an affront to civil liberties but may be the way of protecting them.”
I don’t mind him asking the question, I just wish he’d listen to the answer.
Statewatch reports that the European Commission has produced two draft Regulations (25.9.03) to introduce two sets of biometric data (fingerprints and facial image) on visas and resident permits for third country nationals by 2005. The biometric data and personal details on visas will be stored on national and EU-wide databases and be accessible through the Visa Information System (VIS) held on the Schengen Information System (SIS II).
Another proposal for the inclusion of biometrics and personal data: “in relation to documents of EU citizens, will follow later this year”.
Statewatch summarises the proposals:
- biometric documents for visas and resident third country nationals to be introduced by 2005
- biometric passports/documents for EU citizens to follow
- “compulsory” fingerprints and facial images
- data and personal information to be held on national and EU-wide databases
- admission that powers of data protection authorities cannot cope
- no guarantees that data will not be made available to non-EU states (eg: USA)
Tony Bunyan, Statewatch editor, comments:
These proposals are yet another result of the “war on terrorism” which show that the EU is just as keen as the USA to introduce systems of mass surveillance which have much more to do with political and social control than fighting terrorism.
The Guardian reports that the cabinet has secretly given the go-ahead to the chancellor, Gordon Brown, to set up Britain’s first national population computer database that is the foundation stone for a compulsory identity card scheme.
The “citizen information register” is to bring together all the existing information held by the government on the 58 million people resident in Britain.
It will include their name, address, date of birth, sex, and a unique personal number to form a “more accurate and transparent” database than existing national insurance, tax, medical, passport, voter and driving licence records.
The plans for a citizen information register have not been announced and the only official reference was a brief mention to a feasibility study in the government’s consultation paper on identity cards published last July. The scheme is a joint project between the Office of National Statistics and the Treasury and is designed to ensure that “public sector organisations have the right records about the right people at the right time.”
The New York Times has an article today on the pros and cons of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) being attached to products in supply chains and in stores. A couple of highlights.
Tags with the technology known as radio frequency identification, or R.F.I.D., transmit a digital response when contacted by radio signals from scanning devices. Older versions of the technology have been around for decades, but now major manufacturers and retailers and the Defense Department are pushing to speed the development of a new version that could be read by scanners anywhere in the world, making it cheaper and more efficient to track the flow of goods from global suppliers to consumers.
The Defense Department expects to issue a statement in the next few days calling on suppliers to adopt the new version of the technology by 2005. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. made a similar announcement in July when it said it was requiring its top 100 suppliers to place tags with the new technology on cartons and pallets shipped to its stores by the end of 2004.
The Department of Defence. A government mandate for doing business with that part of the government. One doesn’t have to be cynical, here. There are obvious reasons why the DoD needs and wants this technology that have nothing to do with taking away people’s privacy. (It simply allows them to run their logistics better, and potentially to keep track of what is going on on a battlefield). However, these are not the sorts of people I expect to want to put protections in place that safeguard my privacy, either.
Ms. Albrecht and other critics say that companies and government agencies will be able to monitor what people read or where they assemble from radio tags embedded in their books or woven into clothing. Unlike bar codes, which cannot be scanned unless a laser has a direct line of sight to them, the radio tags can be read through walls, and multiple tags can be read in an instant.
“R.F.I.D. certainly has value in the supply chain and in inventory management,” said Beth Given, director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse in San Diego. But she added that “there are so many potential issues once it gets beyond the point of sale that consumer protections need to be written into law.”
And thus we once again hit the usual quandry. There are potential benefits, very real ones, in adopting these sorts of technologies. And yet the privacy and surveillance implications are such that if we adopt them we give up a lot of privacy and hand the information to governments and large organisations almost automatically. Once again, what needs to be said is that it is possible to design such technologies so that the benefits are there and the privacy violations are not, or at least so that the privacy violations are transparent and we are informed when they are happening. But to build such safeguards in, these issues have to be discussed at the very beginning, by which I mean right now. And on the whole it isn’t happening. Do I actually expect to see such safeguards put in place. Well, to tell the truth, no.
(Link via slashdot).
ZDNet UK reports the Taiwan government has completed the distribution of 22 million Java-based ID cards to its citizens, in one of Asia’s largest deployments of such cards. The country’s Bureau of National Health Insurance (BNHI) adopted US-based Sun Microsystems’ Java card technology primarily to prevent identity theft, according to a statement from the computing firm.
Each card contains a microprocessor with 32 kilobytes of memory that allows data such as allergy information, emergency contact numbers, medication, and personal insurance to be stored. Daniel Yu, Sun Microsystems Greater China vice president of global sales operations said:
Java card technology allows card issuers to modify the services and applications on the card as the user’s needs change, without incurring additional costs to replace the card.
The distribution of the 22 million health cards started in July last year to replace its original paper-based system was expected to finish by May this year. The cards cost around $2 (£1.21) each.
In an even larger scheme in Thailand, the government plans to issue a Java-based national ID card to all 61 million citizens, according to a report in the Bangkok Post. The card will contain biometric identification, as well as insurance, tax and welfare benefit information. The scheme is expected to be launched later this year.
Speaking on BBC1 Question Time yesterday, Trade and Industry Secretary Patricia Hewitt made public her “grave reservations” over Big Blunkett’s plans to introduce compulsory National Identity Cards for innocent UK citizens.
By going public on the eve of the Labour Party conference Hewitt is taking a large political risk. She needs our support.
Cross-posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe
In America, the airline Jet-Blue Airways is now facing several lawsuits for illegally handing over the passenger data of more than a million customers to a Pentagon contractor. The contractor, trying to set up a programme to enhance security at military bases, wanted access to commercial databases in order to assess the risk of a person turning out to be a terrorist.
Jet-Blue Airways has apologised for the surrender of the information, while at the same time trying to drag back a little dignity by saying that at least it did not pass the details on to a government body – scant consolation to anyone who has just had their secrets stolen from them.
The general point of this episode is that whenever a new intrusion into privacy emerges – entitlement cards, identity cards, Customs’ swaggering taste for impounding cars and goods – the Government defence comes down to the old adage, “the innocent have nothing to fear”.
Well, that just plain isn’t true when the system breaks down because of incompetence or malice. Those little boxes in adverts saying “Tick if you would prefer that your details are not passed on to other organisations” aren’t always watertight.
The BBC reports on the latest application of RFID technology: London Undergound’s new “Oyster” cards.
These are smart cards that will replace existing season tickets. The advantage is that they don’t even have to be swiped through a gate and will hopefully speed passenger flow through the stations.
The disadvantage is that they will be personalised to you and will – surprise, surprise – record full details of every journey you make on a central database. This information will be retained for “a number of years”.
Even more worrying, there have been suggestions that the people responsible for these cards are keen to extend them to “other applications”.
An anonymous card will be available, but will cost more. An estimated £200 pa for an average commuter.
So the question for London commuters is: Are you willing to sell your privacy for 200 quid?
Cross-posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe
Ministers are preparing legislation for the next session of parliament to make local authorities create files on every child in England, including intimate personal information about parents’ relationships with other partners and any criminal record, alcohol or drug abuse in the extended family. The files will be available to teachers, social workers, NHS staff and other professionals dealing with children to help them piece together symptoms of neglect or abuse that might require intervention by the authorities.
The green paper produced as a response to the murder of Victoria Climbié, an eight-year-old who died in London in 2000 after months of torture and neglect, said the need to protect children had to be balanced against preserving the privacy of parents. But Charles Clarke, the education secretary, said yesterday that the interests of children “absolutely” took precedence over the civil liberties of adults.
Mark Littlewood, the campaigns director of Liberty, said Mr Clarke’s remarks were even more disturbing than the green paper.
We have to make sure social workers are sharper, smarter and better focused. That’s done by better training, not by casting the net so wide that every child in the country will be in it. That creates the danger that investigations will be triggered by supposition, guesswork, gossip and rumour. Our concern is that there will be witchhunts rather than protection of the relatively small number of children in real danger.
The Adam Smith Institute Weblog seems to have hit the ground running, and Jonny Fraser’s piece about harassment in the USA by cops and bureaucrats and stupid laws is provoking a fine old comment fest. Quote:
On entering the country, with no matter what passport, you are treated like a criminal or socio-economic migrant. Several forms need to be filled in, many of their requirements duplicated, unnecessary and arbitrary. This practice does not stop at international boundaries. There are occasional police checks on interstate roads, and even occasionally at state borders. Post 9/11 fear is all encompassing.
Rights are being eroded and regulations piled on like cheese and freedom fries at a burger joint. It seems that obesity and laughable laws have a bizarre relationship. In America, you can die for your country at 18, but you cannot buy a beer until you are 21. In America you can kill on the roads with reckless driving at 15 in some states, but experienced drivers usually have to stay below 55 miles per hour or risk a ludicrously overpriced speeding ticket.
California is the worst state for this sort of thing. Their claim to liberalism extends as far as a blanket ban on smoking in public places, …
I particularly liked Kevin Carson’s comment, responding to American critics of American critics. Final paragraph:
Well guess what? I DO have a bad attitude. It’s because of people with “bad attitudes” that we’re not still working on chain gangs to build a pyramid, or eating our lunches standing up during a sixteen hour shift on an assembly line. For every liberty that sets us above the level of a slave, you can thank somebody with a bad attitude. Rights are not granted by government; they are forced on it from below.
It is good that the ASI blog is not confining itself to municipal bus privatisation and such like. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
There are several disturbing features of this panoptican state in which we will soon be living not the least of which is the sheer breakneck pace of its assembly.
It seems like only yesterday that speed cameras suddenly appeared on every lamppost but even they are so much old hat now:
Automatic Number Plate Recognition systems are set to be deployed by police forces throughout the UK as a major plank of a campaign of “denying criminals the use of the roads.” The system will link up to the DVLA, Police National Computer and a National Insurance Database, with these links alone giving it the capability of identifying untaxed, unroadworthy and uninsured vehicles, but they’ll also facilitate police surveillance operations, the swapping of data on “prolific offenders” between forces and, well, other stuff… Take this, for instance:
“Eventually the database will link to most CCTV systems in town centres, meaning that all vehicles filmed on one of the many cameras protecting Bedford High Street, for instance, can be checked against the database and the movements of wanted cars traced to help with serious crime investigations.”
As far as the drivers are concerned, well, that just about wraps it up, folks.
But truly one hardly has time to digest one horror before the next one comes galloping over the horizon. Dr.Sean Gabb has suggested that our rulers our ‘drunk with the technology’ but I am not so sure. More like they are stone-cold sober and determined to get the whole country locked down before the public realises exactly what has been done to them.
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