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A refreshingly straightforward opinion piece that I came across while searching the Telegraph’s site for their morsels on civil liberties and ID cards. It was written in December 2002 based on an interview with Matthias Kelly QC, new chairman of the Bar Council. It sounds as relevant now, if not more:
In David Blunkett, we have – in Mr Kelly’s words – a “profoundly illiberal” Home Secretary, but we also have a man who seems incapable of doing anything except talk tough. A good example of this is in the Government’s sudden adoption of the identity card, or “entitlement card” as it euphemistically calls the proposed £1.5 billion scheme.
Because this ministry would rather not reform or enforce the existing immigration laws, it has re-heated one of the worst ideas that was briefly considered and then abandoned by the Major government. Now the Home Office presents the discarded policy as an exciting “joined-up” piece of anti-crime thinking.
As we near the end of an unadvertised “consultation period”, the Government is hoping to spirit through an ID card scheme that will do almost nothing to help the police catch and convict criminals. The cards are an expensive stunt designed to give the impression that the Government is doing something to stop an Albanian jumping ahead of you in the queue for a hip operation.
As mentioned already, this was written in December 2002 and contains a reference to the end of an unadvertised consultation period. Is this the same one as the one that is nearing the end now? Is it another one in the spirit of we keep having ‘consultation periods’ until we get our way?
And the final words ring true to our finely tuned White Rose ears:
The ID card is practically undesirable, and as repugnant on civil liberty grounds as the assaults on jury trials and double jeopardy contained in the Criminal Justice Bill. Mr Kelly is to be congratulated for using his position at the Bar Council to sound the alarm about a government whose only toughness in the field of criminal justice is towards the presumption of innocence.
While it is pointless to even pretend that they are not enjoying every single second of this, we should bear in mind that Messrs.Blunkett & Co at the Home Office did not dream up this ID card malarkey all by their iddle-widdle selves. Let us not forget who is really giving the orders:
EU citizens will have their fingerprints stamped on their passports or undergo an iris scan as from next year, under proposals to be drawn up by the European Commission.
By putting two and two together (generally a rewarding activity) we can see why HMG is so grimly determined to see us all electronically tattooed. They have no choice in the matter. Mind you, the EUnuchs might argue that neither do they:
These measures partly stem due to a US law enacted in 2002, which will start demanding visas from EU citizens from 26 October 2004 if they do not have biometric information (fingerprints, iris scans or DNA) on their passports.
Only ‘partly’, though and it is an argument I would be reluctant to buy. Given the top-down nature of continental societies, I find it very hard to believe that the EU would not have been busily constructing some grand cattle-branding scheme without any prompting from Washington. If, as we are constantly being assured, the Euros were truly determined to establish themselves as ‘the alternative superpower to America’, they would, presumably, tell Uncle Sam to get stuffed.
Most instructive though, if rather disheartening, to actually watch the foundations of a global security state being hammered into place. The technology exists, you see.
Guardian argues that the key question about ID cards is not whether we have to carry them but what will be on the national database:
Now it is about how much information the government has on each of us, what the authorities want to do with it, and what rights are lost by those who don’t have what is, after all, officially being called an “entitlement” card. The real dangers now are over “function creep” and what will happen to a new cardless underclass who could be called the sans plastiques – a new British cousin for the French sans papiers.
Already function creep is beginning to surface, even though the cabinet is only now getting down to discussing the fine detail of the legislation to be introduced this autumn. In fact, as Blunkett’s white paper last July made clear, the proposal is really about setting up the first national central database of all people over 16, including foreign nationals, who are legally resident in Britain. It is this register, and not the bit of plastic in our wallet, that causes the real anxiety.
The white paper makes clear that one of the aims of the scheme is to “establish for official purposes a person’s identity so that there is one definitive record which all government departments can use if they wish”.
Some commenters have already complained about the bovine and passive nature of the British public, so this should just confirm their views:
The real problem is that we are only too willing to sell our privacy cheap. We will happily give a supermarket our entire personal lifestyle profile simply to get a plastic loyalty card. We are going to help the government create an immensely powerful personal database on each of us, not because of some damnable Whitehall conspiracy but because we couldn’t wait to get our hands on a new piece of plastic.
Also, an earlier Observer article calls for outright abandonment of the whole idea of identity cards:
The arguments against are clear and unchanging. Identity cards create new crimes and criminals while being blunt and ineffectual weapons against fraud and identity theft. They are expensive (Mr Blunkett bypasses Treasury objections only by suggesting we pay £25 for the privilege of holding records of our own fingerprints). Above all, a regime of ID cards, whether kept in a drawer or carried on our person, will create new tensions between police and ethnic minority communities, undoing much positive progress. The divisive ‘sus’ laws will be back with a vengeance.
The Home Secretary hopes to bring forward legislation after a general election. We hope the Cabinet will change his mind.
ZDNet has an update on the ID card situation.
The Home Office has disclosed that 4,856 people sent emails via Stand’s Web site that opposed the introduction of entitlement cards, but the final result of the consultation hasn’t yet been revealed. The government is still refusing to disclose the result of its public consultation on the introduction of entitlement cards, even though the process closed over five months ago, it has emerged.
The government has said that entitlement cards, which would include an individual’s personal details and possibly also biometric data, will help to prevent identity fraud and illegal workers. They are likely to cost upwards of £1.5bn to introduce — most of which would go to technology companies. Opponents, though, claim that they will actually work as ID cards.
Civil liberty groups Stand and Privacy International’s efforts resulted in almost 6,000 people taking part in the consultation through the organisations’ specially created Web site and phone lines.
Statements made by government ministers since the consultation closed had implied that these 6,000 responses might be bundled together into a single petition and not treated as individual views.
There’s a good piece in today’s Sunday Telegraph about the British government’s unceasing determination to introduce ID cards. This time it was yet another “consultation procedure”, the purpose of which was to demonstrate overwhelming public support for the idea:
But the Home Office had not counted on nine enterprising young people who work in the IT sector and who, in their spare time, run an unfunded website that encourages their peers to take part in such national debates. They posted a form on their site – www.stand.org.uk. This was not a petition, just a mechanism for readers to participate in the consultation procedure. They were gratified that more than 5,000 people used their service, of whom 4,856 were against the scheme.
The Home Office initially dismissed these responses, and stuck to the claim of overwhelming public support for ID cards. That all changed this week, when the Home Office Minister Beverley Hughes belatedly acknowledged in the Commons the existence of Stand’s response. Thus, the overwhelming public support has vanished, and, by the only measure that has been taken, ID cards can be deemed unpopular.
One of the many things this episode illustrates is the great power of quite small groups, whenever any politician claims that there is “overwhelming” support for anything. You can prove that wrong just by opening your mouths and mouthing off, and if they’re wrong about that, what else are they wrong about?
“Unanimous” support, which often takes the form of some ass in a suit saying that “nobody is saying” what you then proceed to say and prove that you’ve been saying for years, can be even more easily punctured.
A year ago, Simon Davies of Privacy International had an opinion piece in the Telegraph pointing out how vulnerable ID systems are. His arguments are as valid now as they were a year ago, however, the government has recently intensified its call for compulsory ID cards.
Corruption […] besets most official ID schemes from Australia to Thailand. High black-market demand and huge investment by criminals entices officials to bend or break the rules of eligibility. An ID card system is a gift for corrupt civil servants or contract staff in search of extra cash.
[…] the technology gap between governments and organised crime has now narrowed so much that within weeks of their introduction even the most secure ID cards can be available in the form of blanks onto which individual identity information can be incorporated.
What a gift this would be for criminals. Whereas before they might have carried a copy of a dead person’s birth certificate, and maybe a driver’s licence and a savings bank number – all of which could be checked – they would now possess the ultimate no-questions-asked ID. They would have penetrated the plastic wall of security. Once inside they are safe.
On the positive side, Simon Davies points out, this would keep the Home Secretary busy, as in due course he will be able to announce yet another one of his crackdowns – on ID card fraud.
In a Free Country update Telegraph shows how security imposed by the state, crowds out not only its citizens security awareness but that of its police force.
Would identity cards help police in Bradford, who are having difficulty finding a one-armed, hunchbacked dwarf with a limp and an Irish accent, in connection with a £10,000 jewellery raid?
If this useful combination of aural and visual clues is not enough to track him down, you might have thought a card would help. The history of ID cards shows the opposite – that police start to depend on them, as they have on security cameras, and give up on more traditional sleuthing tools such as, say, eyes and ears.
[…]
Police end up turning a blind eye to criminals, who develop an expertise for card fraud, and come down hard on absent-minded old ladies who leave them on the Tube. And one-armed, hunchbacked dwarves with limps and Irish accents find it easier and easier to blend into the crowd.
The Times (which we do not link to) has reported that Home Secretary, David Blunkett believes the public will back the introduction of identity cards if reassured that their privacy would not be violated.
Mr Blunkett indicated that, in conjunction with Cabinet colleagues, he will assess the desirability of introducing an ID card system by the end of the summer. Apparently, the Home Office has been conducting a consultation exercise on such schemes.
Any idea as to when, where and with whom?
Robert Matthews, a regular writer for QED column in the Sunday Telegraph, looks at the “wonders of technology” David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, decided it was time we should all benefit from.
Mr Blunkett appears to have fallen under the spell of biometric methods, which use characteristics ranging from fingerprints to handwriting to verify the identity of people. He seems to favour a particularly sophisticated version of the technology, which uses the unique iris patterns of the eye to check ID.
…there is still a stunning lack of awareness of a basic mathematical result that shows why we should all be very wary of any type of screening, biometric or otherwise.
In the case of screening – whether for breast cancer or membership of al-Qaeda – the [Bayes’s] theorem shows that the technology does not do what everyone from doctors to Home Secretaries seems to think it does.
To take a concrete example, suppose a biometric screening method is 99.9 per cent accurate: that is, it spots 99.9 per cent of imposters, and incorrectly accuses one in 1,000 bona fide people (in reality, these are very optimistic figures). Now suppose that every year a horde of 1,000 terrorists passes through Heathrow airport. What are the chances of the biometric system detecting any of them?
The obvious answer is 99.9 per cent. But, in fact, Bayes’s Theorem shows that the correct answer is about two per cent. That is, when the alarms go off and the armed response team turns up at passport control, it is 98 per cent likely to be a false alarm.
Why? Because not even the amazing accuracy of the biometric test can cope with the very low prior probability that any one of the 60 million passengers using Heathrow each year is a terrorist. Sure, it boosts the weight of evidence in favour of guilt 1,000-fold, but that is still not enough to overcome the initially very low probability of guilt.
So there you have it. You just need to calculate your probability of being one of the incorrectly accused one in 1,000 bona fide people and books your ticket accordingly.
Everyone in Britain will have to pay around £25 for a compulsory identity card under proposals being put to the cabinet by David Blunkett, the Home Secretary.
The “smart” card will identify the holder using iris-recognition technology. Failure to carry the card will not be an offence but police will be able to order people to present it at a police station.
So, you won’t need to carry the card with you at all time. How is that going to help the ‘fightagainstterrorism’? Ah, the terrorists will just report to a police station to show off their hi-tech faked ID cards…
The charge is aimed at overcoming resistance to the scheme from the Treasury. Until now Cabinet support for a national compulsory identity card has been outweighed by the Treasury, which has objected to footing the estimated £1.6 billion bill.
Notice how the main reason that ID cards have not been introduced is that the Treasury opposed the £1.6 billion bill. Concerns for privacy or individual rights? Blank stares around the Cabinet meeting table…
While forcing people to pay for the card could add to the anticipated objections from human rights campaigners, Mr Blunkett believes that concern about national security is sufficient to ensure that individuals will be prepared to bear the cost.
Damn, the one time Mr Blunkett uses the word individual is to charge him the cost of extending governments reach over the individual.
Senior figures in the Cabinet strongly support the plan for the card, which would use a microchip to hold details including age, place of birth, home address and a personal number to identify the holder. It is also hoped that the card could be used to entitle the holder to a range of state benefits, thereby cutting benefit fraud.
Mr Blunkett discussed his plan for a national ID card with Tom Ridge, the head of the US Department of Homeland Security, at a meeting in Washington earlier this month. Mr Blunkett agreed to develop a joint programme, using the same technology, with the US, which has already agreed a similar protocol with Canada.
US and Canada?! Anglosphere, help!
The European Central Bank (ECB) is in talks with Hitachi Ltd. about embedding radio tags in euro bank notes to prevent counterfeiting of euros.
The ECB is deeply concerned about counterfeiting and money laundering and is said to be looking at radio tag technology. Last year, Greek authorities were confronted with of 2,411 counterfeiting cases and seized 4,776 counterfeit bank notes while authorities in Poland nabbed a gang suspected of making and putting over a million fake euros into circulation.
To add to the problem, businesses also find it hard to judge a note’s authenticity as current equipment cannot tell between bogus currency and old notes with worn-out security marks. Among the security features in current euros are threads visible under ultraviolet light.
According to Prianka Chopra, an analyst with market research firm Frost and Sullivan the main objective is to determine the authenticity of money and to
stop counterfeits.
RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags also have the ability of recording information such as details of the transactions the paper note has been involved in. It would, therefore, also prevent money-laundering, make it possible to track illegal transactions and even prevent kidnappers demanding unmarked bills.
Besides acting as a digital watermark, the use of radio chips could speed up routine bank processes such as counting. With such tags, a stack of notes can be passed through a reader with the sum added in a split-second, similar to how inventory is tracked in an RFID-based system.
Hitachi is developing noncontact chips for use in bank notes and other paper documents, Kantaro Tanii, confirmed the company’s corporate communications manager for Europe. Hitachi’s Web site describes a 0.4-mm by 0.4-mm by 60-micron radio frequency identification chip, called the Mu Chip, that works in the 2.45-GHz frequency band and has a 128-bit ROM for storing its identity number. It was originally conceived as a bank-note-tracking device but could also be used in passports, driver’s licenses and other official documents.
A Telegraph opinion piece sums up the Home Office’s attempts to introduce compulsory ID cards in the UK:
Benefit fraud, illegal migration, the terrorist threat since September 11: all have been pulled out of the Government’s hat as reasons for introducing compulsory identity cards. The Home Office, which has long favoured them, is aware of the political charge they carry. It has, therefore, tried to deter accusations of seeking to curtail basic freedoms by the euphemism “a universal entitlement card scheme”, and by using whatever emotive issue is to hand as an argument for their introduction.
It is more than half a century since the wartime national registration card was abolished. An illiberal Home Secretary is now trying to use the age of terror and his failure to adopt sensible immigration and asylum policies as a means of setting up a system of national surveillance. The Cabinet should rebuff him without further ado.
Hear, hear… If you stay tuned, you will.
Note: Everyone over 16 would be required to register with a national citizens’ database and would be issued with a personal number. The card is expected to carry core information about the holder, and biometric details such as fingerprints or iris patterns. The cost would be met by adding about £25 to the fee for a driving licence and passport.
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