I know that ID cards will help me to prove more easily who I am
– Rt Hon Jacqui Smith MP, the Home Secretary, proving to us what she is.
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The fact that she will probably never have to do so is something she is unaware of, obviously. Whereas the rest of us will be required to produce our cards for every jobsworth with a uniform who demands it.
this statement only goes to demonstrate how disconnected from reality the political classes are.
They must have “Dick” written through them like Blackpool rock.
So she has to be told by the State who she is. The terrifying thing is, she is probably sincere. Thick people frequently are.
And she has a problem doing this at the moment?
Fucked up as my life is, it is clearly better organised than is hers.
She needs a nanny.
If she doesn’t know who she is then it’s a step in the right direction…………
Well, just to sip the Devil’s advocaat here, I’m going to say that she’s actually right. Opposed as I am to this scheme, there’s nothing wrong in principle or even in practise with a national ID scheme. It would make proving who you are easier; just try it if you don’t drive and don’t have a passport (indeed, being too skint to ever go anywhere, the only reason I have a passport is for ID purposes).
The problem with this scheme isn’t that it’s a national ID scheme; it’s because it isn’t a national ID scheme, it’s a national internal passport/citizen tracking system, and because the people implementing it are untrustworthy dictatocrats whose actions are entirely unrestrained.
An ID scheme would be extremely simple and safe for citizens. One way to do it would be simply an electronic card, with your name on it, and a PIN number. If you need to prove your ID, the card reader checks the card hasn’t been reported stolen, you enter your PIN to prove it’s you, and that’s it. It would just prove (to a reasonable degree) that the person holding the card was the person to whom it had been issued. It wouldn’t need biometric details, records, or for any of its times or locations of access to be stored in a database. It would operate like a credit card without any financial functions, or any functions at all. If you were really sci-fi and clever, you could make the cards function as readers too, so that two individuals could interlock their cards and each prove ID to the other. Neither would gain any private knowledge beyond the fact that the man you’re buying a used car off who claims to be Ian B is the same individual as the State thinks is Ian B when he interacts with the State. That would be it.
So that IMV is the problem. It’s not that ID cards are wrong, it’s that most of the things we call ID cards aren’t actually ID cards, they’re “tracking cards”.
“there’s nothing wrong in principle or even in practise with a national ID scheme. It would make proving who you are easier; just try it if you don’t drive and don’t have a passport”
Therein lies the central fallacy,I do not drive and currently do not have a passport,so what? The number of times I get asked to prove who I am is infinitesimal.
What will happen with the ID card and data base is that, every miserable little pox doctor’s clerk will demand proof of identity. Don’t believe it? Take a look at the history of the wheely bin.First they are issued,them we have to move them onto public property,then it is demanded that we do so at very specific times,also the contents are precisely specified,all under pain of punishment
Look at the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act,council prodnoses are having a field day. How long before your binny demands to see your ID to check if it matches the chip on your bin?
Yes Ron, I entirely agree, which was my point. This “ID” scheme is a tracking scheme, not a proof-of-person scheme.
An ID scheme would just be for those times you currently need your passport, a driving license, two recent utility bills and a letter from your mum to open a bank account etc. It would be cheap to implement, simple to run, and no risk to anybody. It would even be useful.
What you’re talking about entirely agree with; what it will actually be, which is another brick in the totalitarian wall. Which is why I’m utterly opposed to it. ID schemes do not need a tracking capability, and without that they’re useless to the totalitarians. I’m just making the point that this isn’t an ID scheme at all, although it has a minor ID component. So La Smith wasn’t wrong, just deliberately missing the point.
Maybe Ms Smith gets drunk regularly and needs a card to remember who she is……..
Ian B has a point.
I have myself proposed such a scheme in a ‘balloon debate’ at the Digital Identity Forum a couple of year back. In my model you can have an identity card guaranteed by any third-party who certifies that you are who you it says you are, and the state may be required – note you require the state, not the other way around – to be a guarantor for you, as a sort of lender of last resort.
For my scheme not to degenerate to state control requires an explicit right to determine or reinvent your own identity without fraud, and therefore the scrapping of state-mandated identity checks… which are the main cause of demands for “ID”, closely followed by age restricted goods.
Ian B,
“An ID scheme would just be for those times you currently need your passport, a driving license, two recent utility bills and a letter from your mum to open a bank account etc. It would be cheap to implement, simple to run, and no risk to anybody. It would even be useful.”
I have found those instances to be amazingly few.Any ID scheme would soon have the busybodies buzzing round like flies.Mission creep,”Just add this,just add that”
BTW what size cup is Jacqi? We should be told.
The estimable Guy Herbert wrote:
The two are, of course, effectively the same thing.
If she has trouble remembering who she is, perhaps Jacqui Smith could get her mum to sew her name on her blouse. That’s £20 billion saved. I never knew government was so easy.
If an ID is to guarantee that I am the person I claim to be, fine.
It is when the ID takes on the role of requiring that I be only that person, and nobody else, that it becomes the essential enabler for completion of the totalitarian state.
Is it not the case that anybody can abuse any ID scheme? The way I see it, the only real problem with a national ID system is mandatory enrollment – you can’t opt out.
Besides, your identity is (or should be) based on objective reality, of which there is only one.
I think a better way to implement national ID would be to establish a… call it an NGO clearinghouse, and restrict external transactional and database access to ZERO right from the start. Have every party who wants access submit a brief, and hold open hearings, and basically run it like a trial. With representatives from the infosec/IAM industries, the EFF, your Joe Average all chipping in their 2 cents worth.
That might work. Slowly, but it might work. But then, the question would be who funds such a clearinghouse, or does it charge for access to the database?
I’m sure that ChoicePoint would be glad to bear the burdens involved. You’ll understand if I pass.
Every time this comes up, I ask myself if any entity could possibly do a worse job than, say, the (insert midwestern state here) DMV that issued my first driver’s license. Unfortunately, pretty much every contestant could get it even more wrong, even in the absence of actual malice or recklessness motivated by greed.
I’ve got three photo ID’s of various sorts. One is to prove that I’m allowed to operate cars and passenger vans and motorcycles on public roads. (Note: no license required on exclusively private property, in this state anyway. IMHO, that’s exactly as it should be.) One is to prove that yes, I am allowed to carry firearms and serve criminal process and do other things that I do at work. And one is to prove, actually, I’m not positive what a passport is supposed to prove. Probably that the Secretary of State wants foreign governments to be nice to me when I travel, if I remember correctly.
In the absence of those three things, hell, I already know perfectly well who I am. If Jacqui Smith doesn’t, maybe her dad called her ‘Jacqui’ and her mom called her ‘Leeroy Jenkins’ when she was an ankle biter? I feel for her, but most of us get over our identity issues before we turn 20.
But I don’t see why the rest of us should give up our privacy because the Home Secretary is fucked up from the neck up, if you’ll pardon my language.
Sunfish,
Your passport used to be for the purpose you think. However, a (couple of?) cases have established that a passport can be withheld by administrative process.
The particular case I’m thinking of was upheld in an appellate court in California, IIRC. A woman with a highly improbable name that slips my mind at the moment had not payed child support. When she applied for a passport for a business trip to Mexico, it was denied.
This appalling case has fundamentally changed the status of citizens of the United States of America. Prior to this, as you suggest, the passport was proof of identity for US citizens traveling abroad. This case has established now that a passport is in fact permission granted to leave the United States. It has turned the passport from an identification document into a permitative document. It has redefined liberty from a right recognized by the government to a privilege at the discretion of the government. It has redefined the sovereign territory of the US as a minimum security prison which can only be left by permission.
Gregory’s comment regarding ID is amusing. What it means is ‘Make it criminal to have multiple identities, that way only criminals will have multiple identities.’
He goes on to make a case that since our bodies are only capable of being in one place at a time, we must prohibit technologies that give us the capacity to be in multiple places at one time from being used ways that may interfere with government control. That would be a gigantic step backwards. Even as I sit here, one of my identities is sitting in my living room, one of my identities is watching some eBay auctions, one is posting comments on a blog with a blue screen, and quite possibly I have other identities doing something that has slipped my mind at the moment. These identities all have different names and histories. It is already possible to set these identities up to behave in a particular way. Perhaps without my knowledge. For example, I tell eBay what I am willing to bid and my eBay identity raises the bid against others until it reaches my limit. This is identical to how I behave at a ‘real’ auction when I have a helper. Many’s the time I gave my dad my bidder’s number (my identity) and a limit while I went off to examine other lots coming up for sale. In a single identity world, he who not be permitted to assume my identity or any other.
Some advocates for mandatory identification schemes say ‘oh, it will only be for certain things.’ Riiight. Like my social security number. (eye roll)
The idea that ‘since the body can’t naturally do it, we must prohibit it’ is a lot like saying since hands cannot shoot lead at high velocity, we must prohibit guns. Which takes us back to the ‘if it is criminal to . . .’
Some people make the claim that if we permit multiple identities, it will make law enforcement much more difficult. To which I observe that we have gun prohibitions making law enforcement much easier in Chicago and DC at the moment. How’s that working out? Truth be said, criminals will always have false identities. They are strange that way and don’t seem to mind committing the necessary frauds to create them.
What so many people forget is that single identity is a new thing. Before the days of income tax, identities were vague and amorphous things based on reputation. O’Henry wrote a wonderful story about a safe cracker who had created a new identity for himself. A law abiding one. And then he had to expose his previous identity or possibly let some children die to keep it secret. Interesting is that O’Henry didn’t find the second identity worthy of a story but rather the conflict between the old and new identities.
Here’s an idea:
Since there are myriad business related reasons for people to be able to easily identify themselves, perhaps some private business could create and market a personal ID scheme. After all, credit cards serve this purpose in cases of providing easy, secure access to one’s finances; a personal ID scheme could be developed as an extension of that system, for use in other business affairs. Like credit cards, the system would be voluntary, and would not be subject to “mission creep” since businesses, being accountable to their customers, cannot allow their missions to creep with impunity as governments do.
Oh, but n005, have you not heard from Midwesterner that we must have the freedom to maintain multiple identities, no doubt for each of our multiple personalities.
Look, I do not have problems with pseudonyms. Or with building up different aspects of your profile.
But never mind. Which part of my post did you equate with my outlawing multiple identities? I already live under a national ID scheme, as do quite a largish number of people. You think the Australian TFN isn’t a de facto ID number? Please. I’m just trying to figure out the most free way of doing this, assuming that it’s already done. And don’t be a wiseass and say that it shouldn’t be done at all. I’m already under it! And so are many others! Maybe you have a choice to implement or not; I certainly don’t. But I may be able to influence how it works.
Our identities are integral to us. I am a son, a brother, an employee, a taxpayer, a traveller, a blog commenter, etc etc etc. I’m doing a conference on exactly this topic of IdM, at the academic, government and enterprise level. The very idea of OpenID is to federate your identity; to verify and authenticate yourself as you.
I don’t have a problem with people maintaining four, five or a million identities. The guys who have to keep track of it all might be pissed off, because of all the additional work and resources in preserving separate records for each, but hey, not my problem.
I maintain several identities; right now I have a valid Aussie driving licence as well as a Malaysian one, for instance. So, when I’m nabbed in Australia, I flash my Malaysian licence, and vice versa. No points on either! Entirely legal, and I see no problems there.
I do have a problem with people pretending to be other people. If you want to proxy, then do it properly!
Why? Feel free to call me a ‘wiseass’, but I don’t want to make government meddling more efficient. I want to reverse it. I recently got into an argument with a local politician that wants to reduce local government. But she said “we are paying for this police department, the least they can do is go looking for ordinance violations.” She lost me with that comment. I don’t want government to work ‘better’, I want it to do less.
Why does anybody need to keep track of them?
Your assumptions are that all of one’s identities must be tied together to a single root. Since you concede (“Is it not the case that anybody can abuse any ID scheme?”) that identity schemes will only be followed by law abiding citizens, what is the use of them? You even give an example of how you personally use multiple identities to evade driving laws.
The only way to stop behavior like yours will be to either to tie all people of the world together in one identity data base (which you propose) or change the reciprocity between, for example Malaysia and Australia, so that they only recognize ID that they have issued. Then, no matter how you drive in Malaysia, you will have an Australia-only driving identity.*
Your entire proposal is based on building a perfect data base and then protecting it from abuse with strict rules. And you are proposing that governments should do this through an NGO. This particular paragraph is why I found your comment amusing. For some reason I hear ‘Capita’ echoing from the walls when I read this. No matter how many times I read this paragraph, I can’t help but smile. It is the sort of thing some of our commenters write in parody.
*I actually think this would be a good thing since someone like me, who is an excellent driver under US highways and laws, may be absolutely a threat to public safety if I tried to drive in Malaysia. I would not want my US reputation effected by my mishaps in Malaysia and would probably deserve whatever reputation I acquired in Malaysia.
By “go looking for ordinance violations,” did she mean “go looking for the kinds of things that generate ticket revenue for the city”?
I don’t want government to do better or worse or more or less. I want it to do those things that are actually its job, and stay the hell out of everything else.
As far as multiple identities and multiple driver’s licenses: let’s say Gregory gets stopped here in Colorado for speeding, oh, 49 in a 25 zone. That’s six points. He shows his Australian license. As his driving privilege is not under restraint in Colorado, his foreign driver’s license is valid here. Gregory the fair dinkum ozzie is now halfway to being suspended for points in Colo. We don’t report violations to non-US licensing authorities. However, if he gets 12 in a year/18 in two years, he’s suspended in CO and subject to arrest for driving while suspended, regardless of what happens with either his Australian or Malaysian licenses.
I don’t know what would happen if, after getting suspended in CO, he takes his next US vacation to Utah and gets stopped there. In theory the states largely honor each other’s penalties and suspensions, but in practice it’s one hell of a tangled mess. Uncle Sucker got involved too after 9-11, and was about as helpful as he usually is. So it’s illegal and difficult to get a license in one state once you’ve had it taken away in another, but a non-US licensee has an easier time getting around it.
It’s really only a large-scale problem with drivers not legally in the US, from one particular country which borders us. (F***ing Quebecois!) Australians with Malaysian licenses frankly just get lost in the noise.
Okay, sure, one world-wide standard with everybody forced into a single identity would make my work a little easier. I could almost care. Police exist for the safety of society. Society does not exist for the convenience of its police.
In the US, I drive very conservatively, never speed even a little and full stops at every single stop sign, that sort of thing. I tried to drive in Australia once. That the trip from Sydney to Cairns did not look like the last 15 minutes of The Blues Brothers was entirely 100% luck.
Considering that the entire discussion was about the cost of maintaining a redundant police and court system that over laps and runs simultaneously with the much more effective, available, reliable and economical sheriff’s department, I think that was part of the sub-text. However, what she was specifically wanting them to to do was to drive around looking for too many cars in driveways and other municipal ordinance violation instances that nobody has complained about. My opinion on ‘nuisance’ ordinances is that they should be enforced on demand. My reasoning is that many neighbors tolerate each other’s foibles as a mutual exchange. And there are so many ordinance violations possible that when the government starts picking some for enforcement it quickly becomes political.
Morally, my belief is that neighbors are better qualified to determine what is a nuisance and what is not. The ordinance is there to establish the norm and so they have means to stop a nuisance if they personally decide they want to. When I was farming, I was a (legal) nuisance on occasion. It made me more inclined to tolerate some neighbor’s minor but none-the-less ticketable activities. I remember one poor neighbor lady frantically taking her white, still wet laundry back off of the clothes line when she realized the dust from my farming activities was headed her direction.
Regarding driver’s licenses, I think each jurisdiction should issue their own. They can then offer to each license holder the option of having their driving information, points etc relayed to any network(s) they choose. And as a separate process, each jurisdiction could determine which networks provided reliable enough data to warrant recognizing their members.
Personally, I like the idea of issuing a license to anybody that can qualify for, and has, driver’s insurance. Then let the insurance companies take care of qualifications, testing and record keeping on their customers.
I suspect I would achieve a similar effect.
Did she have an actual reason, or did she just believe that “no parked cars in one place for more than 24 hours” should be enforced for its own sake?
Occasionally, we get people who scream about wanting more enforcement of stupid little code issues for no reason other than “the law is the law and because it was passed by the commission it was dictated from a burning bush.” Thankfully, most of us know to write them off as chronic complainers.
It’s almost a balance of terror: If you make noise about me parking my motorcycle outside, I’ll point out that you have three dogs in your house and at least one of them isn’t fixed but doesn’t have an Intact Animal license[1].
There’s a way around that: zero-discretion “prosecute everybody for everything” enforcement like they do in the UK under their Ethical Crime Recording rules. How’s that working out for them again?
[1] My city doesn’t require those, but Denver does. I feel for the poor guy who gets assigned to inspect dog genitals for compliance.
“That fine Rottie in that kennel needs his gonads groped. No, no. Not that one. The other one that is drooling and making the strangled chainsaw noises. I’ll push him away from the gate with this cattle prod so you can get in there and check him out.”
Actually around here they have a form for certification of vaccinations that the vet also notes the dogs reproductive status.
re the local pol and ordinance violations, I think it was a combination of enforcement for its own sake and getting our investment back out of the police department. We are a rural community and somebody had too many cars for the level of zoning he was at. She thought the police should have noticed and acted on that. You can guess my response to that. First we create a unit of government, then we try to justify its existence by finding things for it to do. !!!!!
You may cringe and quake at this, but I think there should be zero-discretion for all politicians that vote for or avoid the opportunity to vote against a regulation. I kind of think there should be zero discretion for everybody employed by the government but that ain’t gonna happen. I’m originally from Chicago. In that city, the entry level job for a life of serious crime is ward politics. From their you can work your way up through the state senate to governor or even national senator. Of course, for the last half century the capo de capo (zonner, da mare) is hereditary.
Some vets do that on their own paperwork. All my city wants is an owner’s name and phone number and proof of vaccination, though. And the ten bucks. Can’t forget the money.
It must be something in the water when her brain was still developing. Most of the people who tell me what to do would probably ask if that was really the best possible use of my time. And they’d be exactly right IMHO. But I bought a day off once over that. Someone didn’t like being told that his problem wasn’t a police matter. Actually, he didn’t appreciate being asked “You…called…me…for…THIS?”
You’re right about me cringing about zero-discretion enforcement. Although abused discretion may be more of a problem in your area.
Actually, we were discussing something related at lunch: a guy gets loaded after his tour and then crashes into a parked car. The responding officer gave him a ride home and wrote an accident report for the other driver. That’s all.
Nobody here would have given him that break. Everyone would have charged him with drunk driving and seized his driver’s license, and the only real point of disagreement was whether he should have been jailed or taken to a detox center. (And before anyone mentions double standards, that sort of thing is something we do with members of the general public as well, circumstances permitting.)
Different regions do have different cultures and attitudes, though. Maybe that’s normal in some places.
A few of the blogs I read are actually kept by serving Chicago PD officers. If even a quarter of the stories are true, I’m impressed. I didn’t think it was even possible for a city to be that corrupt.
Oh, it’s possible. Here is just one small example of how opponents of the machine are treated. The way I heard it is that most of the users of the airport were enemies of ‘zzoner. So he forces everybody to enter the city through O’Hare and Midway and essentially bans private planes from landing anywhere in Chicago.
The money quote at the end of this article:
If ever there was an American city that needs to put its light poles to an additional use, its Chicago.
I heard about Meigs Field. I thought it was incompetence, or possibly a plot to sell off the land to his cousin. I didn’t know about the vindictive aspect to it.
Some of the Daley Crime Family behavior fits a classic pattern that I suspect our UK friends will recognize: take an existing crime problem. Eliminate the ability of individual people to effectively protect themselves. Make it virtually impossible for police to do anything useful: call it incompetent managers[1] and prosecutors, judges influenced by whatever, fear of lawsuits (that 7.7M payout last week? There’s a LOT to that story that got excluded from trial. Someone needs to look very carefully at the judge’s finances.) and a disciplinary system that does not punish false statements from arrestees who hope that filing a complaint will make their case go away. Cops are afraid for their pay/pensions to do anything proactive. Crime goes through the roof. And then demand more money and more power and more ability to intrude and give favors to special friends in order to fight the rising crime problem.
With a bunch of storefront reverends, who have the ear of Da Mare and the council, and who are more concerned about the gangbangers who haven’t set foot in a church in years than the parishoners who are afraid to leave their homes to go to church, and a compliant media that might as well be a part of the Daley Crime Family, there you go. When what’s left of Chicago’s middle class has finally had enough, it’s gonna be ugly.
And so we return to the topic of invasive and useless power grabs by public officials in response to a crime problem. Lot of that going around I guess.
Sorry to go on like this, but that city is an impressive case study in how to take a city of a few million people and some natural advantages and turn it into a central-Africa or South America-style kleptocracy. A “don’t do that” story that makes my love life look successful.
[1] The short version: about a third of every promotion class for sergeants, and most of the middle/upper management, actual competence or leadership is not even evaluated at all. And even among the folks who promote off of the test, there are clusters who get to be in exclusive study groups, which are also attended by the people who wrote the tests.