Because, according to this interesting article in The Telegraph, you are on average being recorded 3000 times a week!
Wednesday, 20 August 2008
Smile and speak/write nicely
Because, according to this interesting article in The Telegraph, you are on average being recorded 3000 times a week!
Sunday, 17 August 2008
Westwood Cross: bring your money, but not your ideas
Thanet NO2ID recently attempted to campaign at the Westwood Cross shopping centre in Broadstairs. Though some people dislike Westwood Cross there is no denying its popularity and we were keen to see if we could make a dent in this privatised zone of unlimited consumption.
Our attempt was always a long shot and sure enough it was not to be. Within about one minute of setting up (in a discreet spot, in nobody’s way and not interfering with any advertising) a black-suited security man toting a walkie-talkie came over and indicated by his body language that we were not welcome. I went over and engaged with this man, in my usual diplomatic manner, and he confirmed that without permission from the management we had to pack up and move on. Before leaving I tried to secure permission from the said management to campaign and they told me to contact a company called “Space and People”, based in Glasgow of all places, to seek permission, but the management man (always a man) added that anything “political” was basically not going to be allowed.
Of course, we are not going to contact that company—why should we? Here is Thanet, not Glasgow. After leaving Westwood Cross we took our campaign to Ramsgate where we got a good response from the good Thanet/Ramsgate public. But it bothers me that an important site of struggle has been closed off to us.
Some people might say that at least Westwood Cross is being consistent in not allowing any political campaigning. But actually there is no such thing as a neutral political position and by not allowing political campaigning Westwood Cross effectively serves the interests of the ruling class who increasingly seek to keep us all in line with CCTV and yet more rules about what we can and cannot do. Is this really a free country?
Our attempt was always a long shot and sure enough it was not to be. Within about one minute of setting up (in a discreet spot, in nobody’s way and not interfering with any advertising) a black-suited security man toting a walkie-talkie came over and indicated by his body language that we were not welcome. I went over and engaged with this man, in my usual diplomatic manner, and he confirmed that without permission from the management we had to pack up and move on. Before leaving I tried to secure permission from the said management to campaign and they told me to contact a company called “Space and People”, based in Glasgow of all places, to seek permission, but the management man (always a man) added that anything “political” was basically not going to be allowed.
Of course, we are not going to contact that company—why should we? Here is Thanet, not Glasgow. After leaving Westwood Cross we took our campaign to Ramsgate where we got a good response from the good Thanet/Ramsgate public. But it bothers me that an important site of struggle has been closed off to us.
Some people might say that at least Westwood Cross is being consistent in not allowing any political campaigning. But actually there is no such thing as a neutral political position and by not allowing political campaigning Westwood Cross effectively serves the interests of the ruling class who increasingly seek to keep us all in line with CCTV and yet more rules about what we can and cannot do. Is this really a free country?
Monday, 11 August 2008
NO2ID and the Art of Campaigning
Thanet NO2ID has been actively campaigning on the street in a summer offensive. Campaigning is a great experience and I always feel refreshed by the struggle. But there again it is not that much of struggle—very few people are in favour of the government’s ID database scheme once it has been properly explained to them what it all entails. Loads of Thanet people have signed our NO2ID petition.
One thing we say to people is that we are not against ID cards per se (though there is enough ID about already), but strongly oppose the National Identity Register (NIR). The NIR will hold all your information and will be shared about by government. That is wrong period. ID cards will be linked to this very dangerous database if the government gets its way.
Some people say to us is that the government has all our information already. Well, there is some truth to this assertion but the government does not have all that information concentrated in one place and on tap as it were. Currently, information about us is held on multiple databases and in separate domains, and that is the way it should be. The idea of “joined up” government is silly beyond words and breaks all common sense rules about protecting data.
Understandably, a few people are defeatist and believe the government will do whatever it likes anyway. This negativism is unjustified, however, and it is a fact that with a just cause campaigning does make a difference. Politicians are forced to listen to us, even if they don’t like what they hear, and if they get it wrong—and New Labour has got it very wrong on ID cards—then it is within our ability to see that they do not remain in power.
Speaking of which, it was with some disappointment that I recently learned from one of our members that Stephen Ladyman, Thanet South MP, remains committed to the ID database scheme. I suppose it is hard to admit you got something so very wrong, but it is not too late for Dr Ladyman to take another look at this flawed scheme, and we urge him to do so.
What can you do?
1.Consider getting a new passport now before passports are linked to the NIR.
2.Get informed about the ID scheme and join/make a donation to NO2ID.
3.Write to Stephen Ladyman to express your dissatisfaction with the ID scheme if he is your local MP. (When writing to MPs you should put your point of view across politely but assertively. Don’t write until you grasp the issue fully.)
4. Be cautious about giving out your information.
Educate your children about their rights and ensure that they refuse to be fingerprinted.
5. Join our Thanet campaign by coming to a meeting or joining a stall.
NO2ID now has over 40,000 members nationally. Canterbury NO2ID and Dover NO2ID are both active in East Kent. There are other groups all over the country, and a Maidstone NO2ID group was recently formed. Join our fight to keep Britain free.
One thing we say to people is that we are not against ID cards per se (though there is enough ID about already), but strongly oppose the National Identity Register (NIR). The NIR will hold all your information and will be shared about by government. That is wrong period. ID cards will be linked to this very dangerous database if the government gets its way.
Some people say to us is that the government has all our information already. Well, there is some truth to this assertion but the government does not have all that information concentrated in one place and on tap as it were. Currently, information about us is held on multiple databases and in separate domains, and that is the way it should be. The idea of “joined up” government is silly beyond words and breaks all common sense rules about protecting data.
Understandably, a few people are defeatist and believe the government will do whatever it likes anyway. This negativism is unjustified, however, and it is a fact that with a just cause campaigning does make a difference. Politicians are forced to listen to us, even if they don’t like what they hear, and if they get it wrong—and New Labour has got it very wrong on ID cards—then it is within our ability to see that they do not remain in power.
Speaking of which, it was with some disappointment that I recently learned from one of our members that Stephen Ladyman, Thanet South MP, remains committed to the ID database scheme. I suppose it is hard to admit you got something so very wrong, but it is not too late for Dr Ladyman to take another look at this flawed scheme, and we urge him to do so.
What can you do?
1.Consider getting a new passport now before passports are linked to the NIR.
2.Get informed about the ID scheme and join/make a donation to NO2ID.
3.Write to Stephen Ladyman to express your dissatisfaction with the ID scheme if he is your local MP. (When writing to MPs you should put your point of view across politely but assertively. Don’t write until you grasp the issue fully.)
4. Be cautious about giving out your information.
Educate your children about their rights and ensure that they refuse to be fingerprinted.
5. Join our Thanet campaign by coming to a meeting or joining a stall.
NO2ID now has over 40,000 members nationally. Canterbury NO2ID and Dover NO2ID are both active in East Kent. There are other groups all over the country, and a Maidstone NO2ID group was recently formed. Join our fight to keep Britain free.
Saturday, 28 June 2008
High level reports confirm dangers of government’s looney ID-database scheme
Quite a lot has been going on recently. Among other things, the public’s attention is now temporarily focused on the issue of excessive surveillance. NO2ID is certainly concerned about the burgeoning surveillance society, and we would question, for example, whether it was really necessary to set up such an expensive, though essentially limited, high-tech surveillance operation at the recent Margate Land Air Show, which you can observe in this video.
It seems the police had those cameras there as a means to enforce good behaviour. The terrible message given to the public is: we don’t trust you. But this kind of high-tech surveillance is actually far inferior to having two police officers just walking about keeping there eyes open for trouble. The impression you get is that the police are actually hiding behind their technology.
Last month an important Home Affairs Committee report posed the question: “A Surveillance Society?” The report makes fascinating reading, not least because it clearly highlights the dangerous propensity of the current government to engage in obsessive surveillance and unnecessarily grab information. Interestingly, in this report one senior detective testified to the committee that only about three percent of crimes were solved thanks to CCTV evidence—a lot less than one might imagine—and that “billions” spent on high-tech kit could have been better spent on, for example, having more trained police on the streets.
But it was what the Home Affairs report had to say about databases that really struck a chord with me, and with all those fighting against the government’s looney ID-database scheme: “In the design of its policies and systems for collecting data, the government should adopt a principle of data minimisation. It should collect only what is essential, to be stored only for as long as necessary.”
Bang on. But the government’s ID-database scheme operates on totally different principles: it operates on the principle of data maximisation. It wants to collect all kinds of information about you, including biometric information which cannot be replaced. It wants to store this information on a centralised database and keep it forever. Your identity, in other words, will become government property, and it will be shared about willy-nilly.
The government’s database-linked Identity cards are so dangerous because, as the Home Affairs report notes, technologies such as internet search engines potentially make our personal information available to anybody at the click of a mouse. And once your info is out there in cyberspace, your privacy has gone forever. In addition, the National Identity Register—the centralised database where the government plans to keep your information—will allow government to start profiling people, a very sinister prospect but one that is very much on the cards.
The government’s misuse and loss of data, and obsessive surveillance will, the Home Affairs report suggests, contribute to individual’s withdrawing co-operation from authority: “…the risks associated with the collection and use of personal information in databases in particular and the monitoring of individual’s behaviour in general, should not be underestimated. Mistakes or misuse of data can result in serious practical harm to individuals. Those less demonstrable risks which relate to the erosion of one’s sense of privacy or individual liberty also have a practical aspect and a broad application in that they affect the way in which citizens interacts with the state.”
Speaking of privacy, should you surrender and sign up on the National Identity Register (NIR) you simply won’t have any privacy left. You’ll be tagged for life. In a barely concealed criticism of the government’s database-linked Identity scheme, the Home Affairs report calls on the government to stop the blanket collection of identifiable transaction data—that’s the audit trail created every time you use your ID card. The government should change their mindset of collecting more data than is needed, says the report. Are the government listening? Nope. Andy Burnham, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, recently had the temerity to suggest that no one in this country had a right to anonymity.
The Home Affairs report calls for an “explicit statement that the NIR will not be used as a matter of routine to monitor the activities of individuals.” Here NO2ID parts company with the report; we say: the NIR places far too much power in the hands of the state, DON’T REGISTER ON THE NIR IN THE FIRST PLACE. We cannot trust government “assurances” which are mere platitudes but not legal rights. Why the hell should the Home Secretary have the right to know everything about me when I do not have a similar right to view her information? Why should no less than one hundred people—we discover from testimony in the Home Affairs report—have total access to all my personal information when experience in the private banking sector shows that at least one in a hundred people will do something corrupt given half the chance?
Think on good people of Thanet. “If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear”—what a load rubbish! Governments kill a lot more people than terrorists do, and we must make government accountable to us and not the other way round. What about Germany in the 1930s—all those nice respectable Jewish people had nothing to hide, and look what happened to them. I am obviously not trying to equate the present British government with the Nazis here, but rather am emphasising a point: in a democracy we are in charge of the government, and it is the government who must be accountable to us. We have to stay in charge, and keeping control of our identities is integral to the democratic project.
Which brings me on to the Treasury’s “Challenges and Opportunities in identity assurance” report published the month prior to the Home Affairs report thus far referred to. Bless you, Sir James Crosby, a voice of reason. The Treasury in this neat report put forward a very good case for having a universal identity scheme. But, crucially, they lay out the democratic principles on which such a scheme must be based:
1. The purpose of any scheme should be restricted to enabling citizens to assert their identity
2. Governance should inspire trust. It should be independent of Government
3. The amount of data stored should be minimised. Full biometric images (other than photographs) should not be kept
4. Citizens should "own" their entry. It should not be possible, except for national security, for any data to be shared without informed consent
5. Enrolment should minimise costs and give citizens a hassle-free experience
6. To respond to consumers and give benefits, it should be capable of being rolled out quickly
7. Citizens who lose cards or whose identity is compromised should be able to get it fixed quickly and efficiently
8. The scheme's systems should work with existing, efficient, bank systems to reduce risks
9. To engage consumers enrolment and cards should be provided free of charge
10. The market should play a role in creating standards, to ensure ease of use and minimise costs
All this is perfectly reasonable and sensible and could form the basis of an alternative identity scheme—NO2ID is not opposed to identity cards per se. But in fact the present Identity scheme, being implemented by the Home Office, breaks every one of the Treasury’s summary list of principles. What we cannot accept is the shape of the present Identity scheme, the lunatic grab for power, the obsession with surveillance. Commenting on the Treasury’s idea of Identity assurance, Sir James notes: “ID assurance is not ID management, in which an organisation keeps close track of people and their movement. The distinction between the two is fundamental. ID management is designed to benefit the holder of the information; ID assurance is focused on bringing benefits to the consumer.”
All this is old news though. “The LSE Identity Report”, authored by a whole slew experts sponsored by the London School of Economics in 2005, convincingly demonstrated that the present Identity-database scheme is flawed in both principle and in design, and would be ridiculously expensive to implement. The report, constructively, went on to suggest an alternative model for an identity card, one in line with the Treasury’s principles. The government’s reaction was to nitpick over some details of the LSE’s suggested alternative, and deny the super high costs of their own scheme. You see, the government does not listen, not even to the many bright people within its own party, the government executive and in academia.
Conclusion: New Labour’s identity-database scheme is in the long run doomed, another example of hubris. But how much damage to democracy can we accept in the meanwhile? People of Thanet take up the cudgels and join NO2ID right now.
It seems the police had those cameras there as a means to enforce good behaviour. The terrible message given to the public is: we don’t trust you. But this kind of high-tech surveillance is actually far inferior to having two police officers just walking about keeping there eyes open for trouble. The impression you get is that the police are actually hiding behind their technology.
Last month an important Home Affairs Committee report posed the question: “A Surveillance Society?” The report makes fascinating reading, not least because it clearly highlights the dangerous propensity of the current government to engage in obsessive surveillance and unnecessarily grab information. Interestingly, in this report one senior detective testified to the committee that only about three percent of crimes were solved thanks to CCTV evidence—a lot less than one might imagine—and that “billions” spent on high-tech kit could have been better spent on, for example, having more trained police on the streets.
But it was what the Home Affairs report had to say about databases that really struck a chord with me, and with all those fighting against the government’s looney ID-database scheme: “In the design of its policies and systems for collecting data, the government should adopt a principle of data minimisation. It should collect only what is essential, to be stored only for as long as necessary.”
Bang on. But the government’s ID-database scheme operates on totally different principles: it operates on the principle of data maximisation. It wants to collect all kinds of information about you, including biometric information which cannot be replaced. It wants to store this information on a centralised database and keep it forever. Your identity, in other words, will become government property, and it will be shared about willy-nilly.
The government’s database-linked Identity cards are so dangerous because, as the Home Affairs report notes, technologies such as internet search engines potentially make our personal information available to anybody at the click of a mouse. And once your info is out there in cyberspace, your privacy has gone forever. In addition, the National Identity Register—the centralised database where the government plans to keep your information—will allow government to start profiling people, a very sinister prospect but one that is very much on the cards.
The government’s misuse and loss of data, and obsessive surveillance will, the Home Affairs report suggests, contribute to individual’s withdrawing co-operation from authority: “…the risks associated with the collection and use of personal information in databases in particular and the monitoring of individual’s behaviour in general, should not be underestimated. Mistakes or misuse of data can result in serious practical harm to individuals. Those less demonstrable risks which relate to the erosion of one’s sense of privacy or individual liberty also have a practical aspect and a broad application in that they affect the way in which citizens interacts with the state.”
Speaking of privacy, should you surrender and sign up on the National Identity Register (NIR) you simply won’t have any privacy left. You’ll be tagged for life. In a barely concealed criticism of the government’s database-linked Identity scheme, the Home Affairs report calls on the government to stop the blanket collection of identifiable transaction data—that’s the audit trail created every time you use your ID card. The government should change their mindset of collecting more data than is needed, says the report. Are the government listening? Nope. Andy Burnham, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, recently had the temerity to suggest that no one in this country had a right to anonymity.
The Home Affairs report calls for an “explicit statement that the NIR will not be used as a matter of routine to monitor the activities of individuals.” Here NO2ID parts company with the report; we say: the NIR places far too much power in the hands of the state, DON’T REGISTER ON THE NIR IN THE FIRST PLACE. We cannot trust government “assurances” which are mere platitudes but not legal rights. Why the hell should the Home Secretary have the right to know everything about me when I do not have a similar right to view her information? Why should no less than one hundred people—we discover from testimony in the Home Affairs report—have total access to all my personal information when experience in the private banking sector shows that at least one in a hundred people will do something corrupt given half the chance?
Think on good people of Thanet. “If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear”—what a load rubbish! Governments kill a lot more people than terrorists do, and we must make government accountable to us and not the other way round. What about Germany in the 1930s—all those nice respectable Jewish people had nothing to hide, and look what happened to them. I am obviously not trying to equate the present British government with the Nazis here, but rather am emphasising a point: in a democracy we are in charge of the government, and it is the government who must be accountable to us. We have to stay in charge, and keeping control of our identities is integral to the democratic project.
Which brings me on to the Treasury’s “Challenges and Opportunities in identity assurance” report published the month prior to the Home Affairs report thus far referred to. Bless you, Sir James Crosby, a voice of reason. The Treasury in this neat report put forward a very good case for having a universal identity scheme. But, crucially, they lay out the democratic principles on which such a scheme must be based:
1. The purpose of any scheme should be restricted to enabling citizens to assert their identity
2. Governance should inspire trust. It should be independent of Government
3. The amount of data stored should be minimised. Full biometric images (other than photographs) should not be kept
4. Citizens should "own" their entry. It should not be possible, except for national security, for any data to be shared without informed consent
5. Enrolment should minimise costs and give citizens a hassle-free experience
6. To respond to consumers and give benefits, it should be capable of being rolled out quickly
7. Citizens who lose cards or whose identity is compromised should be able to get it fixed quickly and efficiently
8. The scheme's systems should work with existing, efficient, bank systems to reduce risks
9. To engage consumers enrolment and cards should be provided free of charge
10. The market should play a role in creating standards, to ensure ease of use and minimise costs
All this is perfectly reasonable and sensible and could form the basis of an alternative identity scheme—NO2ID is not opposed to identity cards per se. But in fact the present Identity scheme, being implemented by the Home Office, breaks every one of the Treasury’s summary list of principles. What we cannot accept is the shape of the present Identity scheme, the lunatic grab for power, the obsession with surveillance. Commenting on the Treasury’s idea of Identity assurance, Sir James notes: “ID assurance is not ID management, in which an organisation keeps close track of people and their movement. The distinction between the two is fundamental. ID management is designed to benefit the holder of the information; ID assurance is focused on bringing benefits to the consumer.”
All this is old news though. “The LSE Identity Report”, authored by a whole slew experts sponsored by the London School of Economics in 2005, convincingly demonstrated that the present Identity-database scheme is flawed in both principle and in design, and would be ridiculously expensive to implement. The report, constructively, went on to suggest an alternative model for an identity card, one in line with the Treasury’s principles. The government’s reaction was to nitpick over some details of the LSE’s suggested alternative, and deny the super high costs of their own scheme. You see, the government does not listen, not even to the many bright people within its own party, the government executive and in academia.
Conclusion: New Labour’s identity-database scheme is in the long run doomed, another example of hubris. But how much damage to democracy can we accept in the meanwhile? People of Thanet take up the cudgels and join NO2ID right now.
Saturday, 22 March 2008
The Politics of the ID scheme
Instead of wasting hundreds of millions of pounds on compulsory ID cards as the Tory Right demand, let that money provide thousands of extra police officers on the beat in our local communities. Tony Blair
Here here to that, but oh dear Blair the flibbertigibbet came to change his mind so disastrously on ID cards—a war here, an ID card scheme there, it all seemed like a good idea at the time, but was he really in command of all his faculties one begins to wonder…This post attempts to explore some of the political background to the UK’s current ID scheme to put Thanet residents more clearly in the historical picture. Bear in mind that there is a lot more to the ID scheme than meets the eye…
The idea of re-introducing ID cards in the UK was first raised back in the 1990s by some members of the Conservative Party. At that time, the idea seemed to be that ID cards would help tackle crime, a perennial theme of pro-carders. A committee was duly set up to investigate the possibilities of introducing a card. Roger Gale, Thanet North MP, was on that committee, and basically it concluded that the introduction of mandatory ID cards would be costly and not necessarily the solution to the problem of crime that some people seemed to think, though some kind of voluntary card might be considered. Eventually, however, the distracted Conservatives lost enthusiasm for ID cards, and the policy initiative ran out of steam.
The 9/11 terrorist strikes on the United States in 2001 were, as we all know, spectacularly successful, and could have been even more so. The attacks cast a long shadow over the millennium, and would have a profound affect on the domestic and foreign policies of the US and the UK for years to come. The US responded aggressively to the attacks, and the UK government backed the US to the hilt. The “War on Terror” had begun. And at exactly the same time, the democratic rights and civil liberties of the citizenries of both countries slowly began to erode with a concomitant corruption of thought and language at the highest political levels—systematic torture and abuse now went by the innocuous-sounding term “rendition”, for example.
It was within this larger security/political context that Blair’s Labour government revisited Identity cards around 2002, at first tentatively. They had a model set up and running on a small scale in the form of the Citizen Card, a smart card carrying a photograph and fingerprint data that all asylum seekers in the UK had to register for as of 2002. Within the year, the government announced the decision to build a database for a compulsory national identity card, initially citing the need to combat fraud as its motivation. What is so amazing is how fast this decision was arrived at, and how the government moved from disinterest to total commitment to a maximum, high-tech, centralised-database model ID scheme so quickly. Initially cautious, David Blunkett became politically invested in the scheme, and its most powerful sponsor.
In relation to ID cards…I think there is no longer a civil liberties objection to that in the vast majority of quarters. There is a series of logistical questions, practical questions, those need to be resolved, but in my judgement now, the logistics is the only time delay in it, otherwise I think it needs to be moved forward. Tony Blair
On April 2, 2004, the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, uttered the words quoted above in parliament, words that are very significant. They are a prime example of “framing”, or of a politician construing reality to fit in with the reality they want; of determining the parameters of legitimate debate. Who on earth says there is no longer a civil liberties objection to that [the ID scheme] in the vast majority of quarters? Answer: Tony Blair: “I think...” He cleverly primes the ground: “logistics” is the only “time delay in it”, by inference the only issue worth debating. A discussion based on serious political principle was being suppressed. Otherwise, the government did indeed think it needed to go forward and nothing has changed in the years since; the government simply ignores any discussion based on civil liberties objection, which were actually growing in many quarters in 2004, and continue to grow today.
In 2004, a select committee was set up to investigate the quality of the government’s draft ID cards legislation. The committee, weighted in favour of the government, also stated that they did not emphasise principle: “…identity cards should not be ruled out on grounds of principle alone: the test should be whether the costs are proportionate to benefits…” Hilarious really: spend ten billion pounds for almost no benefits, but I’m jumping ahead…the point is that a momentum was gathering behind the ID legislation, and those sponsoring it were dismissive of all discussion based on principle (obviously because the scheme was so totally flawed in principle). Nevertheless, the committee did state that “the draft bill goes wider than is necessary to introduce a simple system to establish and demonstrate identity”, an understatement if ever there were.
By mid-2004 the government got it into its head to go ahead with its plan to introduce the Identity Cards draft Bill into parliament, basically rigging the consultation process which was neither open nor sustained. Considering the proposed legislation represented the biggest and most profound change in the British constitution since the 1832 Reform Act, the level of consultation was a joke. A major propaganda effort went into gear, Blunkett stating that the ID scheme “will deliver real benefits in particular making a significant contribution to tackling organised crime, terrorism [and] illegal immigration.” The Home Secretary did not produce a shred of evidence to back up his sweeping claims. The “Identity Cards Bill” was published on November 29th 2004, and a slightly amended version re-introduced into the new parliament on May 25th, 2005.
That such a Bill could have made its way into parliament at all is a sad reflection on the state of UK democracy in the aftermath of 9/11. Everyone was angry, no one was thinking straight, bureaucrats and IT companies stepped up promising a brave new world based on the ID scheme, and MPs, with many exceptions, went to sleep at the wheel. The Bill, which of course became law the following year after a tug and pull in the upper house, was just astounding. The true and frightening nature of this most ill-thought out scheme was crystal clear to anyone who read the Bill: this wasn’t about identity cards at all; it was about a system of surveillance of the whole population.
Briefly, the Bill called for the setting up of a National Identity Register (NIR) on which all citizens must register. In addition to the normal type of personal information one has on a passport, citizens would have to hand over up to fifty “registrable facts” that would include biometric data such as fingerprints and iris scans. This information would be held on a "secure" centralised database, and one’s identity could be checked against it by government, and by accredited private sector institutions. But all sorts of people in government would be allowed to access this information without the consent or knowledge of the citizen: the police, the security services, the Inland Revenue, Customs and Excise etc. In addition, the “Secretary of State may provide information without consent to a public authority where provision is necessary in the “public interest.” British society would be reduced to a series of numbered records on a database, information about us would be freely shared across government, and the audit trail of checks made against the database would be kept for inspection, forever. You would get an identity card: “voluntary”, but of course eventually you won’t be able to do anything without one, and every time you do use it a record would be added to your file on the database. Needless to say, the intrusiveness of this identity scheme was totally unprecedented and went far beyond anything operating in any other country of the world. When the Identity Cards Act was passed in 2006, Britain went from being a model democracy, of a kind, to being a model regressive democracy overnight.
Since the Act was passed in 2006, progress towards setting up the NIR has been going on apace behind the scenes, and the government has not changed its tune since making the decision to go for a centralised database-linked compulsory Identity card scheme in 2003. Indeed, and despite some very good expert advice from many quarters—the CBI, Qinetiz, Microsoft, Liberty, the Law Society, and the London School of Economics, to name but a few—the basic parameters of the scheme have not changed one iota, and the government merely tries to deal with the question of “how”, ignoring “why” or “whether”—the latter important questions put out of the frame by Tony Blair in 2004. Government and Whitehall officials act like nothing is wrong, and its business as usual despite its loss of the personal information of every family in the land on two discs at the end of 2007.
What we are concerned with here is not to go into detail about what’s wrong with the government’s ID scheme—it’s just plain wrong in principle period, but we’ll get onto a whole bunch of specific problems in future posts—but to examine the government’s political strategy and its ability to get the scheme implemented. After all, there is still a long way to go, and so far the government has not been able to meet its initial roll-out schedule. This is not surprising, because in addition to the scheme’s basic wrongness which is getting harder to camouflage, it also presents the government with potentially insurmountable practical political difficulties.
One obvious practical difficulty is persuading the public that the ID scheme is a good idea. So far, it has been relying on a smokescreen of propaganda that feeds off of people’s fears, such as the terrorism, crime, and immigration factors. But the government has not been able to win over the intelligentsia, and the very fact that an organisation like NO2ID exists—with over 40,000 members nationwide and growing—shows that there is significant disquiet about the ID-database scheme. The government likes to refer to opinion polls to suggest that it’s on the right track, but on balance when people find out what the ID scheme is really all about the government will face increasing and vigorous resistance—that is what all polls together indicate when analysed more rigorously.
Another difficulty, from the government’s point of view, is actually getting 60 million people registered on the NIR in the first place. The costs and practical difficulties of doing this are enormous, but actually the real problem was always political. It is one thing to pass an Act of Parliament, it is quite another to get the whole of the British citizenry to line up and have their fingerprints taken. Not very nice: not a vote winner. The government has had no real chance to work this one out because in its (very) limited trial of biometrics it did not meet the kind of resistance it will when the population as a whole gets inconvenienced—all those mismatches, false negatives and false positives are going to be a nightmare for everyone, and not a few are in for an epiphany. Of course, as we now know from leaked documents, the government is adopting “salami tactics”—it is planning to force people onto the NIR group by group. Most recently, we learn they will start with foreign residents (this year) and airport workers (next year). Can’t wait to see how that goes.
My prediction is that the ID scheme is not going to be implemented smoothly, if at all, because of the enormous amount of friction that is soon going to be generated by its roll-out. Many of us may be put onto the NIR by stealth—when getting a passport, or doing something else like buying an air ticket, the government will register us on the database without our consent anyway—but lots of people are not going to take kindly to being fingerprinted or handing over a vast amount of personal information to an Identity official. Of course, the government is giving itself a generous amount of time, not to mention an unlimited budget, to achieve its objectives. If enough money (our money folks) is thrown at it, some kind of centralised ID system could emerge, but it will be almost useless, extremely dangerous, and totally undemocratic…sometimes changing your mind is OK.
Here here to that, but oh dear Blair the flibbertigibbet came to change his mind so disastrously on ID cards—a war here, an ID card scheme there, it all seemed like a good idea at the time, but was he really in command of all his faculties one begins to wonder…This post attempts to explore some of the political background to the UK’s current ID scheme to put Thanet residents more clearly in the historical picture. Bear in mind that there is a lot more to the ID scheme than meets the eye…
The idea of re-introducing ID cards in the UK was first raised back in the 1990s by some members of the Conservative Party. At that time, the idea seemed to be that ID cards would help tackle crime, a perennial theme of pro-carders. A committee was duly set up to investigate the possibilities of introducing a card. Roger Gale, Thanet North MP, was on that committee, and basically it concluded that the introduction of mandatory ID cards would be costly and not necessarily the solution to the problem of crime that some people seemed to think, though some kind of voluntary card might be considered. Eventually, however, the distracted Conservatives lost enthusiasm for ID cards, and the policy initiative ran out of steam.
The 9/11 terrorist strikes on the United States in 2001 were, as we all know, spectacularly successful, and could have been even more so. The attacks cast a long shadow over the millennium, and would have a profound affect on the domestic and foreign policies of the US and the UK for years to come. The US responded aggressively to the attacks, and the UK government backed the US to the hilt. The “War on Terror” had begun. And at exactly the same time, the democratic rights and civil liberties of the citizenries of both countries slowly began to erode with a concomitant corruption of thought and language at the highest political levels—systematic torture and abuse now went by the innocuous-sounding term “rendition”, for example.
It was within this larger security/political context that Blair’s Labour government revisited Identity cards around 2002, at first tentatively. They had a model set up and running on a small scale in the form of the Citizen Card, a smart card carrying a photograph and fingerprint data that all asylum seekers in the UK had to register for as of 2002. Within the year, the government announced the decision to build a database for a compulsory national identity card, initially citing the need to combat fraud as its motivation. What is so amazing is how fast this decision was arrived at, and how the government moved from disinterest to total commitment to a maximum, high-tech, centralised-database model ID scheme so quickly. Initially cautious, David Blunkett became politically invested in the scheme, and its most powerful sponsor.
In relation to ID cards…I think there is no longer a civil liberties objection to that in the vast majority of quarters. There is a series of logistical questions, practical questions, those need to be resolved, but in my judgement now, the logistics is the only time delay in it, otherwise I think it needs to be moved forward. Tony Blair
On April 2, 2004, the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, uttered the words quoted above in parliament, words that are very significant. They are a prime example of “framing”, or of a politician construing reality to fit in with the reality they want; of determining the parameters of legitimate debate. Who on earth says there is no longer a civil liberties objection to that [the ID scheme] in the vast majority of quarters? Answer: Tony Blair: “I think...” He cleverly primes the ground: “logistics” is the only “time delay in it”, by inference the only issue worth debating. A discussion based on serious political principle was being suppressed. Otherwise, the government did indeed think it needed to go forward and nothing has changed in the years since; the government simply ignores any discussion based on civil liberties objection, which were actually growing in many quarters in 2004, and continue to grow today.
In 2004, a select committee was set up to investigate the quality of the government’s draft ID cards legislation. The committee, weighted in favour of the government, also stated that they did not emphasise principle: “…identity cards should not be ruled out on grounds of principle alone: the test should be whether the costs are proportionate to benefits…” Hilarious really: spend ten billion pounds for almost no benefits, but I’m jumping ahead…the point is that a momentum was gathering behind the ID legislation, and those sponsoring it were dismissive of all discussion based on principle (obviously because the scheme was so totally flawed in principle). Nevertheless, the committee did state that “the draft bill goes wider than is necessary to introduce a simple system to establish and demonstrate identity”, an understatement if ever there were.
By mid-2004 the government got it into its head to go ahead with its plan to introduce the Identity Cards draft Bill into parliament, basically rigging the consultation process which was neither open nor sustained. Considering the proposed legislation represented the biggest and most profound change in the British constitution since the 1832 Reform Act, the level of consultation was a joke. A major propaganda effort went into gear, Blunkett stating that the ID scheme “will deliver real benefits in particular making a significant contribution to tackling organised crime, terrorism [and] illegal immigration.” The Home Secretary did not produce a shred of evidence to back up his sweeping claims. The “Identity Cards Bill” was published on November 29th 2004, and a slightly amended version re-introduced into the new parliament on May 25th, 2005.
That such a Bill could have made its way into parliament at all is a sad reflection on the state of UK democracy in the aftermath of 9/11. Everyone was angry, no one was thinking straight, bureaucrats and IT companies stepped up promising a brave new world based on the ID scheme, and MPs, with many exceptions, went to sleep at the wheel. The Bill, which of course became law the following year after a tug and pull in the upper house, was just astounding. The true and frightening nature of this most ill-thought out scheme was crystal clear to anyone who read the Bill: this wasn’t about identity cards at all; it was about a system of surveillance of the whole population.
Briefly, the Bill called for the setting up of a National Identity Register (NIR) on which all citizens must register. In addition to the normal type of personal information one has on a passport, citizens would have to hand over up to fifty “registrable facts” that would include biometric data such as fingerprints and iris scans. This information would be held on a "secure" centralised database, and one’s identity could be checked against it by government, and by accredited private sector institutions. But all sorts of people in government would be allowed to access this information without the consent or knowledge of the citizen: the police, the security services, the Inland Revenue, Customs and Excise etc. In addition, the “Secretary of State may provide information without consent to a public authority where provision is necessary in the “public interest.” British society would be reduced to a series of numbered records on a database, information about us would be freely shared across government, and the audit trail of checks made against the database would be kept for inspection, forever. You would get an identity card: “voluntary”, but of course eventually you won’t be able to do anything without one, and every time you do use it a record would be added to your file on the database. Needless to say, the intrusiveness of this identity scheme was totally unprecedented and went far beyond anything operating in any other country of the world. When the Identity Cards Act was passed in 2006, Britain went from being a model democracy, of a kind, to being a model regressive democracy overnight.
Since the Act was passed in 2006, progress towards setting up the NIR has been going on apace behind the scenes, and the government has not changed its tune since making the decision to go for a centralised database-linked compulsory Identity card scheme in 2003. Indeed, and despite some very good expert advice from many quarters—the CBI, Qinetiz, Microsoft, Liberty, the Law Society, and the London School of Economics, to name but a few—the basic parameters of the scheme have not changed one iota, and the government merely tries to deal with the question of “how”, ignoring “why” or “whether”—the latter important questions put out of the frame by Tony Blair in 2004. Government and Whitehall officials act like nothing is wrong, and its business as usual despite its loss of the personal information of every family in the land on two discs at the end of 2007.
What we are concerned with here is not to go into detail about what’s wrong with the government’s ID scheme—it’s just plain wrong in principle period, but we’ll get onto a whole bunch of specific problems in future posts—but to examine the government’s political strategy and its ability to get the scheme implemented. After all, there is still a long way to go, and so far the government has not been able to meet its initial roll-out schedule. This is not surprising, because in addition to the scheme’s basic wrongness which is getting harder to camouflage, it also presents the government with potentially insurmountable practical political difficulties.
One obvious practical difficulty is persuading the public that the ID scheme is a good idea. So far, it has been relying on a smokescreen of propaganda that feeds off of people’s fears, such as the terrorism, crime, and immigration factors. But the government has not been able to win over the intelligentsia, and the very fact that an organisation like NO2ID exists—with over 40,000 members nationwide and growing—shows that there is significant disquiet about the ID-database scheme. The government likes to refer to opinion polls to suggest that it’s on the right track, but on balance when people find out what the ID scheme is really all about the government will face increasing and vigorous resistance—that is what all polls together indicate when analysed more rigorously.
Another difficulty, from the government’s point of view, is actually getting 60 million people registered on the NIR in the first place. The costs and practical difficulties of doing this are enormous, but actually the real problem was always political. It is one thing to pass an Act of Parliament, it is quite another to get the whole of the British citizenry to line up and have their fingerprints taken. Not very nice: not a vote winner. The government has had no real chance to work this one out because in its (very) limited trial of biometrics it did not meet the kind of resistance it will when the population as a whole gets inconvenienced—all those mismatches, false negatives and false positives are going to be a nightmare for everyone, and not a few are in for an epiphany. Of course, as we now know from leaked documents, the government is adopting “salami tactics”—it is planning to force people onto the NIR group by group. Most recently, we learn they will start with foreign residents (this year) and airport workers (next year). Can’t wait to see how that goes.
My prediction is that the ID scheme is not going to be implemented smoothly, if at all, because of the enormous amount of friction that is soon going to be generated by its roll-out. Many of us may be put onto the NIR by stealth—when getting a passport, or doing something else like buying an air ticket, the government will register us on the database without our consent anyway—but lots of people are not going to take kindly to being fingerprinted or handing over a vast amount of personal information to an Identity official. Of course, the government is giving itself a generous amount of time, not to mention an unlimited budget, to achieve its objectives. If enough money (our money folks) is thrown at it, some kind of centralised ID system could emerge, but it will be almost useless, extremely dangerous, and totally undemocratic…sometimes changing your mind is OK.
Saturday, 16 February 2008
Strong support for NO2ID in East Kent
Thanet NO2ID and Canterbury NO2ID campaigned outdoors today and walked straight into a groundswell of support. In Margate high street a surprising number of people were aghast at the governments ID card scheme and eagerly signed the NO2ID petition. Meanwhile, in Canterbury the local NO2ID group once more gathered donations and signatures aplenty.
Of the people we spoke to perhaps one in ten thought that “Identity” was a good idea. But what they meant by this was hard to say. I think most of them meant that the introduction of mandatory identity cards will help solve problems a, b, c, and d. But as we noted in a previous post, identity cards are not going to help solve problems a, b, c, and d. Therefore, the minority who view identity cards positively are basically seem to be uninformed rather than truly convinced.
But the overwhelming response to NO2ID’s argument was extremely positive and numerous ordinary people expressed disgust at fingerprinting and the government’s willy-nilly sharing of data. One member of the public actually spontaneously joined in with our campaigning!
In addition to gathering a healthy number of signatures for the petition, we also put a lot of leaflets into the hands of passers by, some of whom will hopefully contact us at a later date. Certainly today’s activities greatly raised NO2ID’s visibility locally, and we will continue to run stalls for direct contact with the public.
Campaigning works and today we proved that NO2ID means business.
Of the people we spoke to perhaps one in ten thought that “Identity” was a good idea. But what they meant by this was hard to say. I think most of them meant that the introduction of mandatory identity cards will help solve problems a, b, c, and d. But as we noted in a previous post, identity cards are not going to help solve problems a, b, c, and d. Therefore, the minority who view identity cards positively are basically seem to be uninformed rather than truly convinced.
But the overwhelming response to NO2ID’s argument was extremely positive and numerous ordinary people expressed disgust at fingerprinting and the government’s willy-nilly sharing of data. One member of the public actually spontaneously joined in with our campaigning!
In addition to gathering a healthy number of signatures for the petition, we also put a lot of leaflets into the hands of passers by, some of whom will hopefully contact us at a later date. Certainly today’s activities greatly raised NO2ID’s visibility locally, and we will continue to run stalls for direct contact with the public.
Campaigning works and today we proved that NO2ID means business.
Saturday, 9 February 2008
Thanet NO2ID meets Stephen Ladyman, Thanet South MP
Thanet NO2ID recently had the pleasure of meeting Stephen Ladyman, Labour Member of Parliament representing Thanet South since 1997. Until the end of last year, Dr Ladyman held the Minister of Transport portfolio in the government. He is now Vice Chair of the Labour Party with special responsibilities in the southeast. He has been an active proponent of the British Identity Card and has voted for the introduction of the ID-database scheme all the way down the line. In short, Dr Ladyman is someone we had to meet.
In the brief time available to us it was not really possible to work through all the complex issues involved with the ID scheme. However, Thanet NO2ID made its dissatisfaction with the scheme known to Dr Ladyman. As we pointed out, the British constitution is very delicately balanced and the ID-database scheme threatens that balance by allowing government to define our identities and gain ownership over our privacy. Dr Ladyman is a patient listener, but he was not impressed with this argument. He countered that the scheme was voluntary and provided a foolproof means of establishing a person’s identity.
To suggest that the government’s ID scheme is “voluntary” is disingenuous to say the least. It is currently voluntary be default—the government does not have the capability to introduce compulsory identity cards for everyone overnight. It is the clear intention of the government to make identity cards mandatory in the future, however, and everything is being geared up with this long-term goal in mind. The roll-out is effectively a giant trial. Interestingly, Dr Ladyman did suggest the scheme might be scrapped if it did not work. That was politic of him, and a tacit admission that identity cards for all is not inevitable.
Dr Ladyman, who has a scientific background and previoulsy worked as a computer systems designer, did not seem too worried about the ID scheme’s security challenges. We did not mention the three million car learners’ records that went missing under his watch, but did the former minister not foresee the inevitability of catastrophic security breaches from centralising so much data on the National Identity Register? The Labour MP’s response was that the database was already in existence, and so much information about us can be found online already. Oh, brilliant. So we should just add to and link-up all that information and put all the records in one place then?
Thanet NO2ID noted that the government’s mishandling and loss of data, overbearing Identity scheme and other related concerns will be a major issue at the next election. NO2ID does not tell people how to vote, but we feel that Dr Ladyman has wrongly bought into the ID scheme and this will have an adverse affect on his and the Labour Party’s fortunes at the next general election. The MP did not agree with this assessment.
Thanet NO2ID applauds the Labour MPs who refused to support the undemocratic and dangerous Identity Cards Act 2006. We continue to seek a dialogue with the Labour movement and also with Dr Ladyman who may yet come to see that the disadvantages of the ID scheme far outweigh any benefits, as seen narrowly, it may afford.
In the brief time available to us it was not really possible to work through all the complex issues involved with the ID scheme. However, Thanet NO2ID made its dissatisfaction with the scheme known to Dr Ladyman. As we pointed out, the British constitution is very delicately balanced and the ID-database scheme threatens that balance by allowing government to define our identities and gain ownership over our privacy. Dr Ladyman is a patient listener, but he was not impressed with this argument. He countered that the scheme was voluntary and provided a foolproof means of establishing a person’s identity.
To suggest that the government’s ID scheme is “voluntary” is disingenuous to say the least. It is currently voluntary be default—the government does not have the capability to introduce compulsory identity cards for everyone overnight. It is the clear intention of the government to make identity cards mandatory in the future, however, and everything is being geared up with this long-term goal in mind. The roll-out is effectively a giant trial. Interestingly, Dr Ladyman did suggest the scheme might be scrapped if it did not work. That was politic of him, and a tacit admission that identity cards for all is not inevitable.
Dr Ladyman, who has a scientific background and previoulsy worked as a computer systems designer, did not seem too worried about the ID scheme’s security challenges. We did not mention the three million car learners’ records that went missing under his watch, but did the former minister not foresee the inevitability of catastrophic security breaches from centralising so much data on the National Identity Register? The Labour MP’s response was that the database was already in existence, and so much information about us can be found online already. Oh, brilliant. So we should just add to and link-up all that information and put all the records in one place then?
Thanet NO2ID noted that the government’s mishandling and loss of data, overbearing Identity scheme and other related concerns will be a major issue at the next election. NO2ID does not tell people how to vote, but we feel that Dr Ladyman has wrongly bought into the ID scheme and this will have an adverse affect on his and the Labour Party’s fortunes at the next general election. The MP did not agree with this assessment.
Thanet NO2ID applauds the Labour MPs who refused to support the undemocratic and dangerous Identity Cards Act 2006. We continue to seek a dialogue with the Labour movement and also with Dr Ladyman who may yet come to see that the disadvantages of the ID scheme far outweigh any benefits, as seen narrowly, it may afford.
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