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It is my belief that unless we demonstrate that ID cards are not only complex, unnecessary, difficult to implement and expensive but also above all detrimental to the objective they are trying to achieve e.g. security, we will not capture the imagination of those who can’t think off-hand why Big Blunkett should not have his way with ID cards. After all, we have nothing to hide and we all use driving licenses, credit cards, store and loyalty cards etc, etc.
We need to spell out more often just what kind of danger an ID card and similar attempts by states to hoard and tag its citizens pose to the individual.
Darren Andrews of Freedom-Central.Net does just that in a structured and erudite manner. He looks at the liberties that will be lost if a government ID card system is introduced:
Principle 1: Governments receive their just powers from the governed
Principle 2: The Right to the Presumption of Innocence
Principle 3: The Right to Anonymity and Privacy
Principle 4: The Right to Free Speech
This sentence should resound throughout the debate:
Freedom is not about opinion, it is about principle because there is an unchanging commonality in people that regards neither time nor place, and there are unalterable laws that govern human life and all who are a part of it.
Read the whole thing…
A free public meeting is being held in London next week to discuss the Government’s Identity Card plans. A number of high profile figures will be speaking at this important meeting, so if you’re in London try to get along. Let’s show Big Blunkett and the media that there is massive public resistance to this scheme.
More details and registration information at:
Mistaken Identity
The Independent reports that Blair is planning a short autumn session of Parliament. This is to allow a clear run to next year’s General Election.
In the limited time available, Blair has reportedly asked Ministers to prioritise two Bills: The Europe Bill and Big Blunkett’s discredited ID Card Bill.
So expect every political trick in the book to be used to get the Bill through both Houses with a minimum of reasoned debate.
It is often said that rushed legislation is bad legislation. When legislation starts out as badly as Blunkett’s ID Card scheme and is then rushed it can only get worse.
The imposition of ID Cards on innocent British citizens is a major constitutional change for which the Government has no mandate. Any vote on such a controversial issue must be a free vote.
To rush it through Parliament in this way would be an insult not just to the British public but also to democracy.
Cross-posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe
Long eyelashes and watery eyes could thwart iris scanning technology used for the government’s ID card trial. An MP who volunteered to take part in the trial at the UK Passport Service headquarters in London complained the scanning was uncomfortable.
Home Affairs Select Committee member Bob Russell, who suffers from an eye complaint, said his eyes watered and staff were unable to scan his iris. Project director Roland Sables told MPs:
The pundits tell us that we should expect 7% across the board to fail with iris recognition, mainly due to positioning in front of the camera. Others are due to eye malformations, watery eyes and long eyelashes in a small percentage.
Hard contact lenses could also prove problematic. Mr Russell expressed concern about the scanning after his experience.
I think this is going to cause serious problems for people who suffer with bright lights and people with epilepsy. I think it will be necessary at every machine to have at least one member of staff who is a qualified first aider to a high level. I can see people keeling over with epileptic fits.
People with faint fingerprints would also be unable to register on the system, as would manual labourers, particularly those who work with cement or shuffle paper regularly, Mr Sables told the MPs.
The Plan is that by 2013, 80% of the population are expected to have a biometric passport or driving licence, at which point the government will decide whether to make the ID cards compulsory. The remaining 20% are presumably construction workers with long eyelashes, wearing hard contact lenses and suffering from epileptic fits…
CNET News.com reports technical problems have delayed the British government’s trials for biometric ID cards by three months. The failure of fingerprint and iris-recognition equipment caused the delay, Home Secretary David Blunkett told members of Parliament this week.
The trial, involving the registration of 10,000 volunteers to record and test biometric ID data, was originally due to launch in February but did not begin until last week. As a result, the length of the project has been cut from six months to three months.
Note how the trial is shortened as a solution to the delay…
A representative for the Home Office told Silicon.com that the problems have now been rectified.
We have to make sure it is correctly configured before launching it. It’s essential we get the first installation right before it is rolled out across the country. We’ll learn our lessons from this. There were issues of failure in the equipment, but those have been rectified and the technical problems have been ironed out.
Hopefully, famous last words…
Well, no prizes for having seen this one coming. From the Sunday Times headline: When you’re £30,000 down, ID cards look good. So says Sara Smith, a victim of identity theft.
Of course, nowhere in the article does the journalist, Rachel Cooke, make even a halfhearted attempt to explain the reality of ID card technology. Instead, she writes, “For [Sara Smith], a national ID card cannot arrive too soon.” Yes, a national ID card, any national ID card — don’t tell us if it can actually do what it says on the tin, just introduce one and make us feel a bit more falsely secure, please.
Cooke’s article does reveal, though not in so many words, exactly why it was so easy for Sara Smith’s identity to be used without her consent: Sara Smith let it happen.
Smith’s troubles began when she moved home. She arranged for her post to be redirected but, for reasons that are still uncertain, this was never done: her post continued to arrive at her old home, which was why she did not notice when her new Harrods store card failed to materialise. “If only I had,” she says. “That little piece of plastic was the start of it all.”
Some weeks later Smith received a telephone call. On the line was a man who purported to be from Harrods. “We are upgrading your card,” he told her. “Would you mind answering a few security questions?”
At first Smith protested, saying she had no need of more credit. However, she found herself telling him her date of birth and her mother’s maiden name.
Oh, it’s happened to us all. You know how it is — a stranger rings up, you get chatting about the weather, the snooker, or the state of your credit, and the next thing you know, you find yourself giving your most vital security information, for no reason you can really discern.
It’s not that I have no sympathy for Sara Smith; I certainly do. But when you consider her amazing new way of managing her most confidential business — not automatically trusting anyone who calls up asking for personal details, keeping a vigilant eye out for financial documents that fail to arrive in the post, actually looking at the statements for her “few accounts” — is really the way she should have been doing things all along, it does drive home the point that a bit of common sense is the best protection we all have against identity theft. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and when it comes to ID cards, the “cure” is flawed both inherently and practically.
From this weekend, the adoption of RFID tags in the retailing industry has become a matter of time. At a recent conference, organised by the RFID non profit standards organisation, EPCglobal, both Walmart and Tesco warned their suppliers that they expected takeup of this technology. By forcing the adoption of RFID technology through their purchasing power, RFID will soon become ubiquitous in retail, over the next two years.
Colin Cobain, UK IT director for Tesco, advised suppliers to get involved and take a considered view of the new technology. “Some manufacturers are going down the route of slap-and-ship – I urge you not to do that… If you start of slapping-and-shipping, you’ll get a bad name in your organisation.” He added that the question about RFID was not “whether or not it will make a huge difference in the world: the question is, will you be ready?”
Simon Langford, manager of RFID strategy for Wal-Mart and Asda, said “start engaging in RFID today… don’t sit back and wait for it to happen.” Wal-Mart, remember, were so enthusiastic about the technology that they issued a mandate telling their top suppliers to get the tags in their supply chain by 1 January, 2005, or else.
WalMart began their testing of RFID tags in the supply chain on Friday in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. Their links with EPCglobal are also clear:
EPCglobal is a joint venture of EAN International and the Uniform Code Council. It is the organisation chosen by industry to develop standards for RFID technology in the global supply chain based on user needs and business requirements.
As a charter member of EPCglobal, Wal-Mart fully adheres to its core principles related to privacy issues, including consumer notice, consumer education and consumer choice. Wal-Mart’s Linda Dillman and HP’s Dick Lampman serve on the board of directors of EPCglobal.
To follow the work of EPCglobal, the website setting standards for electronic product codes can be found here, including details of their membership and policies.
The new Wired has an article about a survey by MORI that found out that about 80 per cent of 1,000 British adults want a biometric identification card, citing concerns about illegal immigration and identity theft.
Though the survey shows that most Britons back national identity cards, there’s a wrinkle: Half said they won’t pay for it, and few were very familiar with the cards. Contrast that with the government’s plan to charge 35 pounds for an identity card good for 10 years, or 77 pounds for a card including passport, for every family member 16 to 80 years old.
Concerns about Big Brother? Try “bumbling brother,” with 58 percent of surveyed Britons predicting the government won’t be able to roll out new ID cards smoothly, and one-third saying their stored information won’t be safe. Still, most support such cards, principally to tackle illegal immigration and identity theft. The latter costs the United Kingdom 1.3 billion pounds per year.
In the United States, popular opinion and embarrassing biometric-test failures have blunted overt national ID card efforts, though U.S. passports and some states’ driver’s licenses will store biometric information soon, leading privacy activists to warn the IDs could become de facto national IDs.
A letter to the editor of the Daily Telegraph, from Dr Chris Williams, European Centre for the Study of Policing, Open University, Milton Keynes:
One problem with the proposal for a national ID card (News, Apr 27) is the security of the information in its “clean” database.
Although police all sign the Official Secrets Act, and are well paid, well supervised and largely trustworthy, at least one policeman has been sent to prison for selling the information on the Police National Computer to the highest bidder – in this case, credit reference agencies. HM Inspectorate of Constabulary recorded their concern over this practice in 1999 and recommended measures to stop it, yet the Police Complaints Commission admitted in 2002 that “there will always be a few officers willing to risk their careers by obtaining data improperly”.
So we can’t trust the police to keep a sensitive database watertight. Can we trust other state institutions or outsourcing companies such as Capita? To be usable, an ID card database has to be accessible by hundreds of thousands of people. And the security has to be permanent.
In 1938, the Gestapo took over the files of Interpol’s predecessor when they entered Vienna. If we put all our data eggs in one basket, we need to be certain that a DVD with all our details on it never gets to al-Qa’eda, the IRA or the unknown evils that the future doubtless holds.
James Hammerton’s Blog has a sound fisking of two pro-ID card articles published in the Times yesterday.
Michael Gove, author of one of the Times articles argues that given the changed circumstances of the 21st century we may need to reexamine this prejudice [prejudice against the state exercising arbitrary authority] where, in the west at least, the main threat to individuals comes not from state power as it did in the 20th century, but from terrorists who have the will and may get the means to carry out slaughter on a horrendous scale.
James spots the consistency in the Home Secretary’s policies:
To take the last part of that first, I’d respond that Blunkett has not merely “rethought” civil liberites, he (and Straw before him and Howard before him) has set out to dismantle them plain and simple. A “rethinking” would not have attacked every single protection across the board. The right to a jury trial, the presumption of innocence, the right to security of property, freedom of expression, freedom of association, doctor-patient confidentiality, lawyer-client confidentiality, freedom from arbitrary surveillance, the right to protest, all of these have been sytematically eroded. Every year since 1999 (before 9/11!), the government has produced bills with swingeing attacks on civil liberties. Only a small proportion of them could possibly be justified on the grounds they may help protect us from terrorism. Even where such measures can protect us from terrorism they’ve often been applied broadly weakening protections when the authorities are investigating crime in general rather than just terrorism.
He concludes with the point that cannot be repeated laudly and often enough:
Thus the state incompetence or inability to actually control would be terrorists and criminals and the odd clever civil libertarian via the system does not transfer to the state’s ability to control the law abiding majority with the system. The cynical might suggest that controlling the majority is the whole point, whilst crime fighting and dealing with terrorism are just the sales packaging.
Read the whole thing, as they say…
Says government’s partner for passport trials…
Silicon.com reports that the company behind the biometric technology being used by the UK passport office says biometric IDs will happen – and they will happen with the blessing of the majority of UK citizens.
NEC technology is being used by the UK government in the roll-out of biometric IDs and, having already been involved in similar schemes worldwide, the company is confident that the UK implementation will be a success despite vocal opposition from “a noisy minority”.
The roll-out won’t be without problems, according to Gohringer, but he anticipates that the problems will owe far more to the complicated logistics of getting everybody signed up than to the issue of end-user opposition.
People need to realise this is not going to harm them – if anything it is going to be beneficial to them.
However, Gohringer believes that those opposed to the systems are actually a very vocal minority, making enough noise to get themselves noticed. He cited recent research – supported by that conducted by silicon.com – which shows strong support for biometric identification.
Mr Gohringer just does not get it. In his world the state is probably just doing its job and those who do not see that are just so… unreasonable. And in any case, they should be silenced by all the civilised and sensible people, you know, the majority. As we are so fond of saying here, the state is not your friend and anything that looks like infringment of your freedom, most definitely is. Despite the purported ‘benefits’ that the measure should bring. The government should be justifying its existence to you on a daily basis, not you proving your identity to the government.
Our worthy commenters yesterday mentioned the Big Blunkett’s nasty pre-emptive move against those who might object against ID cards by refusing to have one. The Guardian has more details.
People who refuse to register or cooperate with the proposed compulsory national identity card scheme will face a “civil financial penalty” of up to £2,500, according to the draft legislation published by the government yesterday. But the home secretary, David Blunkett, insisted that nobody would face imprisonment or criminal court action for failing to pay, because he had no desire to create ID card “martyrs”.
The draft legislation confirms that Cabinet sceptics have secured an assurance that while the scheme remains voluntary ID cards cannot be used as a condition of access to any public service currently provided free of charge, such as the NHS, or to receive social security benefits.
I want to know how long it will take before I will not be able to withdraw my money from a bank without an ID cards or sign-up for broadband, utilities and other everyday tasks…
The state is not your friend.
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