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While it is pointless to even pretend that they are not enjoying every single second of this, we should bear in mind that Messrs.Blunkett & Co at the Home Office did not dream up this ID card malarkey all by their iddle-widdle selves. Let us not forget who is really giving the orders:
EU citizens will have their fingerprints stamped on their passports or undergo an iris scan as from next year, under proposals to be drawn up by the European Commission.
By putting two and two together (generally a rewarding activity) we can see why HMG is so grimly determined to see us all electronically tattooed. They have no choice in the matter. Mind you, the EUnuchs might argue that neither do they:
These measures partly stem due to a US law enacted in 2002, which will start demanding visas from EU citizens from 26 October 2004 if they do not have biometric information (fingerprints, iris scans or DNA) on their passports.
Only ‘partly’, though and it is an argument I would be reluctant to buy. Given the top-down nature of continental societies, I find it very hard to believe that the EU would not have been busily constructing some grand cattle-branding scheme without any prompting from Washington. If, as we are constantly being assured, the Euros were truly determined to establish themselves as ‘the alternative superpower to America’, they would, presumably, tell Uncle Sam to get stuffed.
Most instructive though, if rather disheartening, to actually watch the foundations of a global security state being hammered into place. The technology exists, you see.
Guardian argues that the key question about ID cards is not whether we have to carry them but what will be on the national database:
Now it is about how much information the government has on each of us, what the authorities want to do with it, and what rights are lost by those who don’t have what is, after all, officially being called an “entitlement” card. The real dangers now are over “function creep” and what will happen to a new cardless underclass who could be called the sans plastiques – a new British cousin for the French sans papiers.
Already function creep is beginning to surface, even though the cabinet is only now getting down to discussing the fine detail of the legislation to be introduced this autumn. In fact, as Blunkett’s white paper last July made clear, the proposal is really about setting up the first national central database of all people over 16, including foreign nationals, who are legally resident in Britain. It is this register, and not the bit of plastic in our wallet, that causes the real anxiety.
The white paper makes clear that one of the aims of the scheme is to “establish for official purposes a person’s identity so that there is one definitive record which all government departments can use if they wish”.
Some commenters have already complained about the bovine and passive nature of the British public, so this should just confirm their views:
The real problem is that we are only too willing to sell our privacy cheap. We will happily give a supermarket our entire personal lifestyle profile simply to get a plastic loyalty card. We are going to help the government create an immensely powerful personal database on each of us, not because of some damnable Whitehall conspiracy but because we couldn’t wait to get our hands on a new piece of plastic.
Also, an earlier Observer article calls for outright abandonment of the whole idea of identity cards:
The arguments against are clear and unchanging. Identity cards create new crimes and criminals while being blunt and ineffectual weapons against fraud and identity theft. They are expensive (Mr Blunkett bypasses Treasury objections only by suggesting we pay £25 for the privilege of holding records of our own fingerprints). Above all, a regime of ID cards, whether kept in a drawer or carried on our person, will create new tensions between police and ethnic minority communities, undoing much positive progress. The divisive ‘sus’ laws will be back with a vengeance.
The Home Secretary hopes to bring forward legislation after a general election. We hope the Cabinet will change his mind.
Guardian has an interview with Beverley Hughes, Home Office minister for immigration, about asylum centres, entitlement cards, and the future for refugees in the UK. Here is the section about entitlement cards, the New Labour pseudonym for identity cards. (Well, the Tories seem to be pushing them also…):
TH: What about entitlement cards?
BH: The home secretary is quite keen that the government proceeds down this route, and that’s because there’s only so much you can do towards certain kinds of issues – like illegal working, to some extent illegal immigration itself – towards knowing who’s going in and out of the country at any one time. The decision has got to be made by cabinet, which will be when we’ve actually published the results of the consultation, which we’re still considering. Cabinet will make a decision, and that will probably be by the end of the summer. But we’ve yet to publish our consultation results, and we hope to do that as soon as possible.
Welcome to White Rose, a protest blog collective which looks at the issue of personal freedom and privacy and their erosion in the UK.
Why another blog when Samizdata.net has been increasingly drawing attention to the undermining of individual freedom and privacy? The reason is in the differing objectives. Samizdata.net is about meta-context and changing the way people view their world.
White Rose is about bringing together people from across the political spectrum to oppose invasive government, with specific focus on civil liberties. Its aim is to stimulate debate, offer practical ways to oppose and resist measures that deny personal liberty and encourage practical alternatives to problems that do not abridge individual’s freedom.
During the last year and a half I have become more aware, and more concerned with the stealthy New Labour transformation of the country that I have come to respect and admire. Many qualities of venerable British institutions have been ‘reformed’ out of recognition and, in my opinion, certainly not for the better.
Another disturbing factor is the lack of awareness by the British public of the fundamental changes that their country has been undergoing and the dire consequences these will have on their lives and personal freedom.
Some of the changes originate within the successive governments’ toxic mixture of discredited ideologies and spineless disregard for truth and reality. New Labour, however, has perfected the ‘virtual reality politics’ where facts are spinned until they fit their world-view and policies. Other tectonic changes to the fabric of British society are coming from the EU and reinforced by the government’s drive to let EU engulf the UK.
There are worthy organisations such as Privacy International, Liberty, Statewatch and others, who have been campaigning for the protection of civil liberties and fighting the good fight on a daily basis. We bow to their expertise and presence in the mainstream media and do not intend to duplicate their labours. Nevertheless, we would like to offer them a higher soapbox on which to stand in the blogosphere.
Having been an editor and contributor to Samizdata.net for some time, I have experienced first hand the scope and power of the blogosphere. By power, I mean the blogosphere’s ability to spread ideas, concepts and generate debate. In Samizdataspeak – its meme distribution potential. Recently there have been examples of bloggers reaching into the ‘real world’ but however gratifying this may be, I would not want to base my expectations of White Rose’s success on them.
The idea is to harness the interest of those individuals in the blogosphere (both bloggers and their audiences) who are concerned about erosion of civil liberties by the state. Our objective, ambitious though it may be, is to create a platform and a resource that may eventually extend its reach well beyond the blogosphere.
The motivation is to rally the Anglo part of the blogosphere to chronicle what is happening in the UK and help us make our voices heard. Again, why did we not choose to do this on Samizdata.net? Because it has a particular character and personality, with clearly stated opinions, which may not be palatable to everyone. In fact, we know they are not. However, in this battle we need people from across the political spectrum who oppose the state’s heavy handed imposition on individual freedom. Please join us here on White Rose.
Contributing bloggers can either post here exclusively or cross-post, linking back to original articles on their blogs. That means you can blog as normal and there is no the dilemma of posting either to White Rose or your own blog… you can do both. If things go well, the extra exposure from White Rose could be considerable… The objective is to extend White Rose’s contributors’ reach beyond the blogosphere into the mainstream debate.
White Rose editors are God and God moves in mysterious ways. We welcome erudite and interesting contributions but would like to avoid rants, sweeping generalisations and unfounded statements. Please help us to make a good case against the government’s attempts to strengthen its hold over the civil society.
Contact: email Gabriel Syme at gabriel at samizdata dot net or Perry at pdeh at samizdata dot net.
ZDNet has an update on the ID card situation.
The Home Office has disclosed that 4,856 people sent emails via Stand’s Web site that opposed the introduction of entitlement cards, but the final result of the consultation hasn’t yet been revealed. The government is still refusing to disclose the result of its public consultation on the introduction of entitlement cards, even though the process closed over five months ago, it has emerged.
The government has said that entitlement cards, which would include an individual’s personal details and possibly also biometric data, will help to prevent identity fraud and illegal workers. They are likely to cost upwards of £1.5bn to introduce — most of which would go to technology companies. Opponents, though, claim that they will actually work as ID cards.
Civil liberty groups Stand and Privacy International’s efforts resulted in almost 6,000 people taking part in the consultation through the organisations’ specially created Web site and phone lines.
Statements made by government ministers since the consultation closed had implied that these 6,000 responses might be bundled together into a single petition and not treated as individual views.
There’s a good piece in today’s Sunday Telegraph about the British government’s unceasing determination to introduce ID cards. This time it was yet another “consultation procedure”, the purpose of which was to demonstrate overwhelming public support for the idea:
But the Home Office had not counted on nine enterprising young people who work in the IT sector and who, in their spare time, run an unfunded website that encourages their peers to take part in such national debates. They posted a form on their site – www.stand.org.uk. This was not a petition, just a mechanism for readers to participate in the consultation procedure. They were gratified that more than 5,000 people used their service, of whom 4,856 were against the scheme.
The Home Office initially dismissed these responses, and stuck to the claim of overwhelming public support for ID cards. That all changed this week, when the Home Office Minister Beverley Hughes belatedly acknowledged in the Commons the existence of Stand’s response. Thus, the overwhelming public support has vanished, and, by the only measure that has been taken, ID cards can be deemed unpopular.
One of the many things this episode illustrates is the great power of quite small groups, whenever any politician claims that there is “overwhelming” support for anything. You can prove that wrong just by opening your mouths and mouthing off, and if they’re wrong about that, what else are they wrong about?
“Unanimous” support, which often takes the form of some ass in a suit saying that “nobody is saying” what you then proceed to say and prove that you’ve been saying for years, can be even more easily punctured.
If White Rose is all about how little bits of bad news add up to a bigger, badder picture, then my experience today of some things that were said during a BBC4 Radio programme to be broadcast in the autumn is, I think, relevant.
The programme is to be about organ donation, organ selling, etc. I was arguing for the right of individuals to sell their body parts, but the dominant attitude was that donation for free would be quite sufficient, provided that presumed consent replaces the rule of presumed non-consent. This was what Dr Michael Wilks, the Chairman of the Ethics Committee of the British Medical Association, said, and as you can see from this 1998 BBC report, he has been arguing for this switch for some time.
At present, if you want it to be known that your bodily organs are available for transplant in the event of your death, you are urged to carry a card to this effect. What Wilks wants is that if you do not want your organs used thus, you must carry a card to that effect. Or maybe, by way of an alternative, that you must put your name on a national computerised register of the unwilling, so to speak.
I don’t know exactly how huge a change this would be. As infringements of civil liberties go, this one is quite subtle, quite deft, quite gentle. But as with so many proposed new arrangements, much depends upon the people running the system being both highly competent and highly trustworthy.
Wilks said something else rather creepy, which explains a lot about the way the law is increasingly being misused in Britain to impose new arrangements of questionable value. He said that in practice, reversing the principle of presumed consent wouldn’t make that much difference, because what really mattered was for the NHS to spend more (i.e. be given more to spend) on transplant surgery. The reason we do less transplant surgery than certain other countries (Spain in particular was held up for our admiration) is not that we still presume non-consent, but that we spend less on transplant surgery. So, in other words, this national donor card system or this national computerised register, which you must carry or register on if you do not want your organs being transplanted after you’ve finished with them, would, in Britain, be somewhat superfluous.
So why bother with it? Well, the nearest to an answer we got was that switching the law around like this would stir up some good publicity for the general cause of transplant surgery, and thus indirectly make it more likely that those “increased resources” of which he spoke would in years to come be forthcoming from the aroused taxpayers of Britain – it being easier to change the law than get all the money he wanted. But I got the distinct impression that if offered either the law change or the money, but not both, he’d take the money in a blink and leave the law untouched. This is our old friend “law as sending a message”, law as the way to scare up a “national debate” which lots of people take part in because the law is threatening to mess them about, law change as the answer to “apathy” (a word that was much used in this particular debate).
Wilks is not the only one to think like this about the law. Indeed, proposing legal change simply to get attention for one’s particular enthusiasm is a national mental disease right now, I would say. It’s one of the many reasons why we have so many laws, and so many more laws than we should have. And having lots of laws means that the idea of only the guilty needing to fear increased state surveillance doesn’t work, because all of us are bound to be guilty of something.
But I digress. Personally, face to face, Wilks was civility and sanity itself. He was just the sort of GP that you’d want, and in fact used to be a GP. That he thinks like this is not, I should guess, because he is in any way a wicked person, but merely because he breathes the same intellectual air that the rest of us do.
It’s somewhat off the message of this blog, but I can’t resist adding that after Wilks had gone, a rather more down-market contributor to the programme – a lady Jehovah’s Witness no less – pointed out that part of the reason that Spain excels in transplant surgery, more so than Britain, is that they are worse drivers than us, and thus have a greater supply of nice fresh young organs, of the sort that the transplant surgeons prefer. Hah!
A year ago, Simon Davies of Privacy International had an opinion piece in the Telegraph pointing out how vulnerable ID systems are. His arguments are as valid now as they were a year ago, however, the government has recently intensified its call for compulsory ID cards.
Corruption […] besets most official ID schemes from Australia to Thailand. High black-market demand and huge investment by criminals entices officials to bend or break the rules of eligibility. An ID card system is a gift for corrupt civil servants or contract staff in search of extra cash.
[…] the technology gap between governments and organised crime has now narrowed so much that within weeks of their introduction even the most secure ID cards can be available in the form of blanks onto which individual identity information can be incorporated.
What a gift this would be for criminals. Whereas before they might have carried a copy of a dead person’s birth certificate, and maybe a driver’s licence and a savings bank number – all of which could be checked – they would now possess the ultimate no-questions-asked ID. They would have penetrated the plastic wall of security. Once inside they are safe.
On the positive side, Simon Davies points out, this would keep the Home Secretary busy, as in due course he will be able to announce yet another one of his crackdowns – on ID card fraud.
Criminals carrying fake or stolen documents — such as passports and driving licences — will face up two years in jail under the new law. Home Office Minister Beverley Hughes will tell a conference in London entitled Combating Identity Fraud today:
This new offence will enable the police to crack down hard on criminals involved in identity fraud. False identities are commonly used by those engaged in organised crime and terrorism. The new offence would provide the police with the means to disrupt the activities of organised criminals and terrorists in the early stages of their crimes.
The Home Office Minister added the legislation was not solely targeted at organised crime and terrorism.
In a Free Country update Telegraph shows how security imposed by the state, crowds out not only its citizens security awareness but that of its police force.
Would identity cards help police in Bradford, who are having difficulty finding a one-armed, hunchbacked dwarf with a limp and an Irish accent, in connection with a £10,000 jewellery raid?
If this useful combination of aural and visual clues is not enough to track him down, you might have thought a card would help. The history of ID cards shows the opposite – that police start to depend on them, as they have on security cameras, and give up on more traditional sleuthing tools such as, say, eyes and ears.
[…]
Police end up turning a blind eye to criminals, who develop an expertise for card fraud, and come down hard on absent-minded old ladies who leave them on the Tube. And one-armed, hunchbacked dwarves with limps and Irish accents find it easier and easier to blend into the crowd.
The Times (which we do not link to) has reported that Home Secretary, David Blunkett believes the public will back the introduction of identity cards if reassured that their privacy would not be violated.
Mr Blunkett indicated that, in conjunction with Cabinet colleagues, he will assess the desirability of introducing an ID card system by the end of the summer. Apparently, the Home Office has been conducting a consultation exercise on such schemes.
Any idea as to when, where and with whom?
Phil Zimmermann, the man who in the early 90s developed the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption product, believes that Moore’s Law and surveillance cameras make for a particularly dangerous cocktail, as reported by ZDNet.
Moore’s Law represents a “blind force” that is fuelling an undirected technology escalation, referring to what he sees as the threat to privacy from the increased use of surveillance cameras.
The human population does not double every 18 months but its ability to use computers to keep track of us does. You can’t encrypt your face.
Zimmerman sees surveillance as the biggest threat to civil liberties and nowhere, he believes, is this more egregious than in the UK.
You have millions of CCTV cameras here. Every citizen is monitored, and this creates pressure to adhere to conformist behaviour. The original purpose of cameras was to catch terrorists, but to my knowledge they haven’t caught many terrorists using cameras.
Another problem with using technology for surveillance according to Zimmermann is that while laws that are brought in during times of a perceived increase in threats to national security, they can be relatively easily repealed. I find it hard to believe that anything can be more inert and irrepealable than laws but his point about technology still holds:
The technology market doesn’t work that way. It has more inertia, and is more insidious. When you put computer technology behind surveillance apparatus, the problem gets worse.
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