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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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An urgent call to action!
The No2ID campaign has established an e-petition aimed at 10 Downing Street demanding the end to plans for imposing mandatory ID cards and pervasive state databases recording a vast range of what you do in your life.
The No2ID campaigners have taken the line of principled objection, given that the government seem to have decided that there is no longer any room for public debate and refuses to engage with serious – and growing – civil liberty and privacy concerns with the scheme. The Home Office have not met once with civil liberties organisations yet say their concerns have been addressed whilst at the same time avoiding public meetings but at the same time having private briefing with technology partners for introducing the schemes.
Take a stand and make your voice heard while you still can at www.no2id-petition.net. Time is fast running out.
The state is not your friend.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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All hail privacy of information. Long time viewer first time poster here. I found this other site I think everyone hear might like its called Geek Out. Check it out at http://darktips.typepad.com(Link)
can someone elucidate for me the danger in a glorified drivers license?
How touchingly trusting, someone who thinks there is nothing wrong with an ID card backed by databases with vast CENTRALIZED data to which agents of the state can get easy access. Jesus, how naive and blind are people?
Quite some driver’s licence, that.
Schmuck.
what do i have to hide?
I got news for you pal. They’ve already got your information. The question now, is whether they handle it and use it responsibly, or whether they run it as shabilly as they run health care, social welfare and defense procurement.
Mr. Andrea Lewis wrote:
If your American, post your Social Security number here, so that everybody can look up your financial information. After all, you’ve got nothing to hide, right?
Andrea
The No2IDcampaign briefly sums it up. For me there is the also the simple but all important principle that unless reasonable suspicion exists the State has no business requiring me to identify, explain or justify myself. At all times the State should do so to me.
Mr. Andrea: “can someone elucidate for me the danger in a glorified drivers license?”
No, there is nothing wrong with a glorified drivers licence. If that was all there was to it.
But it isn’t.
At the moment the police have the right to suspect you of a crime, they can arrest you for that crime, then produce the evidence of that crime before the courts.
After the introduction of the identity card, you will not be able to walk the streets without one, having committed the crime the police can arrest you, without further evidence. Indeed, just not identifying your self in the approved manner – producing the identity card, will be sufficient evidence of a crime having been committed.
Do the people in a democracy have ownership of the Government, in which case (in my opinion) we should not have to suffer the indignity of being dragged off the streets simply because one wishes to remain anonymous.
Or, does the Government own the people, in which case we are niether in a democracy not do you (Andrea) have anything to hide, since everything that is currently yours, your body, your privicy, your possessions actually belong to the State. I thought the battle against slavery had been won years ago, obviously not!
If you’ve got nothing to hide, then you won’t have any problem in asking your bank to send you statements in postcard form, right? And, since you have nothing to hide, why don’t you put a scan of your payslip up on the Internet? If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ll have no problem with having a toilet CCTV camera?
You’ve still got nothing to hide?
Even if you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve still got everything to fear.
“If you’ve got nothing to hide, then you won’t have any problem in asking your bank to send you statements in postcard form, right?”
“If your American, post your Social Security number here, so that everybody can look up your financial information. ”
-asking someone to divulge their social security number and bank numbers online is illogical. implausible. fallacious. though this means that one has to stretch their minds into realms of fiction to generate the fear which governs their lives.
i restate, i have nothing that is not already in the public domain to hide. the government already knows that other information i was asked to reveal by the kind responders above.
Why are identity cards a bad idea?
In no particular order:
Introduction of single ID number akin to SS in US. And the number will be available to anyone who asks for your ID card.
Creation of a single repository with large amounts of sensitive information. Anyone working in health, local government, main government, their contractors, and anyone who can bribe any of the above will have access to this information.
Cost to state: The state has a record of failing in IT projects. In addition, every hospital, school, doctor’s practice, local government office, central government office etc. will need to access the system.
Most of this will be funded by additional taxation or charges for the card.
Cost personally:
Card is projected to cost between £45 and £75 before budget over-runs. It will need to be renewed every 5 years.
In addition, you’ll have to visit a recording centre for your biometrics to be recorded. As someone paid by the day, this is a significant cost to me.
Potential for Harassment(1):
Anyone I deal with is likely to ask for this, and ask personal questions about info in the central database.
Potential for Harassment(2):
If I lose my card, I’ll essentially be a “non-person” till I can get it replaced.
Reframing of Relationship between state and citizen:
My rights as a citizen are switched off when I don’t have my ID card. Instead of “all men are created equal”, it will be “all men are equal provided they have their ID card, and there is no complaint in the database against them”.
An ID card won’t solve any real problems:
Any crook will usually have a valid ID card.
Soon, forged cards will be issued, since they are valuable.
Problem of Database errors(1): If there is an error about me in the government database, the cost of rectifying it will fall on me.
Problem of Database errors(2): Crooks will pay to get troublesome information about them changed.
Social Problems:
Would your daughter want her mother-in-law to know she had had an abortion?
Would your son want his wife to know that he had had treatment for an STD? This info would likely be in the database. Think of anything else sensitive you’d not want to broadcast.
What happens if a fraudster steals your identity and commits crimes in your name?
You’ll be red-flagged everywhere you go, since to go anywhere requires the card.
The point some people don’t get their head around is that the probability of this causing any one of those problems in a given year is small, the probability of at least one problem in the course of a life is close to certainty.
Is that enough to get started with?
Anybody who actually believes that the innocent have nothing to fear from the police cannot possibly know anybody in the police forces. My father and sister were both in the Met and left me under no illusions regarding this subject.
ID cards are a waste of time and resources and a huge hammer blow to personal liberty.
And I’m thought of as being a statist? Geezz.
Andrea Lewis
Was your erectile dysfunction temporary, or is it a permanent condition?
Did your wife leave you after you hit her?
Have you paid off the taxes the Treasury says you owe?
How do I know? Oh I’m just a civil cervant who decided to access your central file to find out a few things about you.
All fiction of course (well, maybe not but I certainly made it up) but would you like this reality?
Andrea restates: “ i have nothing that is not already in the public domain to hide. the government already knows that other information i was asked to reveal by the kind responders above.”
Good, fine and dandy.
You have been asked by the government to provide some information to it in return for some ‘good or service’. You wanted those ‘goods or services’ more than you wanted the privicy. That trade is your decision. It is at the moment a voluntary transaction. That is fine too.
What you appear to be saying (this time!) is, you cannot see the difference between a transaction freely agreed, where you trade something (in this case a little bit of your privacy) for something you want: perhaps a passport*, or social security, or free health care, for example. And, being compelled to give up your privacy; because, well why? Since all the things you say an Identity card will enable you to have, can be had already without one!
Ultimately, you don’t mind an Identity card, I do. At the moment by all means volunteer for one. I don’t mind if you want one, when I was thirteen I spent a lot of time with my Dads typewriter, some sellotape and a pair of scissors. No end of fun, then I was in a hurry to grow up, now I know better.
Have you considered, by the way, everything the government says an Identity card will permit you to have, you as a tax payer, have paid for already?
*Passports introduced at the turn of the 20th century, by the government. Previously we had managed with out.
Free health care is a misnomer. It is not free, and coming to be recognised as less and less healthy nor caring.
To Mr Andrea Lewis:
The moral objection to ID cards is twofold – first, it means that if you lose or forget it, you become a criminal simply by setting foot outside your own home. Secondly, I am not harming anyone by not carrying identify papers around with me in public, and it is immoral to use force against someone who is not harming anyone or infringing on their rights.
Whether you have anything to hide or not is irrelevant. A person with nothing to hide is still placed under house arrest or made a criminal the moment they lose or forget their ID card, and they are subject to arrest and prosecution for simply walking in public.
P.S. In my opinion the petition is fundamentally flawed. Nowhere does it voice the objection that being able to travel in public without ID papers is a fundamental human right, or that not identifying yourself randomly on demand is not in any way wrong , thus making punishment of such behaviour a deeply immoral act. Instead it just has some wishy-washy utilitarian platitudes.
This is the same mistake the UK gun lobby made. Utilitarian arguments can be defeated, or at least undermined, by other utilitarian arguments. They are the scourge of political discourse. Defend your beliefs based on inalienable rights and fundamental moral principles, and you will have a much stronger position.
However, I will sign the petition anyway as its end goal is laudable.
We are already but cyphers in a world-wide web of databases: passports; birth and marriage registrations; medical records; welfare etc records; driver’s, shooter’s, fisherman’s, pilot’s licenses; credit-ratings and cards; banks; tax files; club memberships – do a search on your own name…
Your ID will eventually be a chip implanted at birth – they’re already doing it with animals.
When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns. So you really have nothing to hide anyway.
What? Did I slam the door on the discussion? Does nobody have a refutation?
Come on fellow Cyphers, gopher it! Tell me how wrong I am about Big Bro being more, much much more than commercial-TV voyeurism! The fact is, governments and their spy-bots have been recording our most intimate details for years.
After all, what is man but a highly intelligent and precisely (ISO-9000) educated machine for converting the finest products of the culinary arts to toxic waste.