Two recommendations. First, a general recommendation for this news site. It is the work of a law firm, and there is a definite bias in the direction of news stories about internet law, intellectual property matters, and such like. You will not get relentless civil liberties based complaint about the way things are going, the way you do here, but you will, if you tune in regularly, learn quite a lot about the legal facts around which such arguments rage.
If there is a general message, it is: It’s complicated! Call us before you do anything! Fair enough. Here is yet another example of how to do Internet business. They ‘advertise’ themselves and their services, not by having silly adverts saying, e.g.: “It’s complicated! Call us before you do anything!”, but by giving away helpful and informative content where that is only one of the subtexts.
And second, a particular recommendation for this article from last week, which explains what the ID card argument is all about. First two paragraphs:
Information published by Government Departments since February shows that the database which underpins the ID Card is central to the Government’s aim to deliver efficient and effective public services in general. This purpose, which is far wider than the narrow objective of establishing identity in order to access public services, has not been mentioned so far in the current General Election campaign. For example, the Labour Party Manifesto refers to ID Cards in the context of immigration, identity theft, illegal working, fraudulent use of public services and terrorism.
Also absent from the General Election debate is any commitment concerning the wider use of the database of registrable facts which will support the ID Card. It is this database, which will contain up to 50 classes of personal information held on each individual, which has alarmed the Parliamentary Committees dealing with the Constitution and Human Rights.
And this paragraph shows how the government intends to gather all this information:
New developments show that the ID Card has become integral to the success of the Government’s e-strategy. Published in March 2005, Connecting the UK: the Digital Strategy aims to tackle the persistent digital divide and low uptake of e-government services by UK citizens. In relation to the ID Card, the e-strategy states that “the Home Office will ensure that ID Cards are developed in such a way as that they add value to the whole range of digital transactions”. This means that e-transactions could be reflected in a record in the ID Card database, e.g. if the database was accessed to check identity of the sender of the digital transaction.
They will “add value”. In other words, if you prefer the old by-hand methods, the methods that make this national database so much more tiresome to construct, not doing things electronically will subtract value. We will, in short, be bribed to be part of it, and fined if we try to keep out of it.
The Conservatives have heckled the idea of ID cards, intermittently. But at no point have they challenged the principle of the government constructing a national electronic database such as this one. This is because the Conservatives have thoroughly accepted the principle that the government is there to help everybody, by supplying all manner of goods and services, benefits and emoluments, depending on the age, youth, poverty, infirmity or legality of the particular citizen. That being so, it is hardly unreasonable for the government to want to keep tabs on everyone, and to want to make use of the latest electronic methods of doing so, and of supplying the relevant services.
In a better world with a much more skeletal and stand-offish sort of government, the citizen would not be of any concern to the government unless the citizen did something evil or aggressive. But in the world we inhabit now, in which the average citizen expects all manner of benefits and protections and pensions from the government – to have things done for him – the citizen must expect also to have things like this updated version of the Domesday Book done to him.
If and when the government starts leaking this information to third parties in ways that upset the voters, the voters will no doubt grumble, and the debate that the writer of the article I have quoted from wants will duly happen. The promises that he thinks the government should now give will then be given, and some of these promises may even be kept.
Meanwhile, the voters are content.
I just love this line:
…low uptake of e-government services by UK citizens.
Maybe that ought to give them the first clue. 🙂
“… the principle that the government is there to help everybody, by supplying all manner of goods and services, benefits and emoluments, depending on the age, youth, poverty, infirmity or legality of the particular citizen…. ”
Of course.
That is what governments do. All of them. Everybody agrees that that is the main task of Government, and most people beleive that it does not do enough – i.e. does not hand out enough money.
Only a small fringe of loonies like we beleive otherwise.
Now, since gov pays out money to people, it needs to know whom it pays to, and how much each person is entitled to receive. Hence the ID data base. There is no way to prevent gov from having a data base. The ID card, that piece of cardboard, does not really matter.
And by strange coincidence, the Scottish Parliament having resolved a few weeks back that the threatened UK ID card and National Identity Register would not be used to manage public services in Scotland, the Scottish Executive (prop: T.Blair) has suddenly revived plans for a Scottish “entitlement” smartcard and accompanying database.
Though this:
Now, since gov pays out money to people, it needs to know whom it pays to, and how much each person is entitled to receive. Hence the ID data base.
Is actually not true. A proper payment has to go to a person entitled to it, and the government needs to know how much it may expect to have to find (i.e. seize from the populace). But there’s no need for the government to have centralised data on individuals to maintain the system. It would however be convenient to extend government power in this way.
Recently got some equities in a company that does some sort of technological thing for use in ID cards.
Certainly one of the better performing stocks in my portfolio.
Thing is I don’t even live in the UK so I get the best of both worlds: no id card hassels; but make a nice little earner out of the poor suckers stuck there.
Clark could do more methinks.
Given how much slush fund money the companies promoting ID cards have offered think-tanks and individual politicians, does anyone know if Michael Howard got put on the payroll after 1997?
The Liberal Democrats, the UKIP and the Green Party all oppose biometric identity cards.
Clearly a protest vote for any of these parties by significant numbers of Labour or Conservative voters would make a point.
Sadly in the UK, there is not a culture of treating abstention as a protest, and we can’t write-in “Sean Gabb” or “Brian Micklethwait” on our ballot papers.