Manchester journo gets first ID card - late A Manchester Evening News hack claims to be the first member of the public to get an ID card in the government's pilot, despite her application almost being scuppered by an accident with a roast potato. Angela Epstein was offered the first appointment at the City's ID central office, after covering the scheme in her column in …
It is quite beautiful that in this day and age someone can remain as trusting and believing in the British government being a force for good in the land.
Especialy in the face of evidence that whenever they are given the chance to show themselves as guardians of your nations privacy they prove themselves to be cack handed incompetants.
I have known so few like you. I attended ones memorial service and anothers inquest already. My experience of the meek is they inherit the earth in 6 foot long plots.
Thank you for letting us know the NIR is now up and running with live data (and not just of some politician), with live connections into it. There are many people in faraway places who are keen to know this. Perhaps in time you will get to know of them.
That the new system jumps to the LAST page of comments (what a FUCKING brilliant idea!) you will just get used to clicking on the "1" to go back to the first page before commencing reading, much better than the old system of having all the comments on one page.
I only figured it out after wondering why the "can I be the first to......." comments always seemed to be the very last posts i got to read!
Dont get me started on the retarded thinking behind the idea of not allowing me to copy text (links to other stuff) off the comments page. or taking me to another page just because I want to "Upvote" a comment (WTF does that mean anyway! OK I know what it means but is it a perfectly cromulent word?) Is this the El Reg nanny state!!!!
Fail for the fucked up comments section, not the original post
"Basically if you're a law abiding citizen you've got nothing to hide"
That is just simply one of the most retarded statements I've read. Where is the journalist in this woman? Where is the need to know, to enquire, to question, provoke and inform?
This stupid woman has not only allowed the state to gather and index all her personal information for the rest of her life, she has apparently done so without questioning or it seems even attempting to understand how the data will be used.
Like the title says : Idiot.
ms Epstein, are you Jewish?
If your not then your ignorance of IBM Germany's behaviour is excusable.
If you are then you are a *very* poor researcher.
You should know that IBM (the same IBM who is a major contractor in the UK ID card system) was a key contractor of the 1933 German census.
This included profiling down to the individual (rather than the household) level and introducing special features of the processing hardware (they were called tabulators. No one had a computer yet) to select certain specific groups of records for "special treatment."
We now know what that special treatment was.
Maybe you trust this Labour government will not misuse the information you have given (and which you will have to update for the rest of your life) to do any harm.
But what about their successor? The one after that, and so on.
It's no longer about what *you* think you are safe to tell the government. It's about what they *want* to know. And what they conceive as being an illegal.
Perhaps you believe that nothing bad will (or can) come from the UK's ID card system.
Lenin would have described you as one of the "Willing fools."
I hope he was wrong.
so how do these new cards work to identify me?
"well we give you a list of 20 trivia questions to fill out, you know, in case you lose all your fingers and your face at the same time and you need to prove who you are to get into hospital, they can just ask you who your uncle is and Bob's your uncle they'll run a cross reference and let you through in about 15 to 20 minutes"
lol
Well, we have ID cards over here in Hong Kong, and everyone has to have one, and to keep things consistent, I don't have any curtains in my apartment. On the negative side this means that my girlfriend keeps inadvertently flashing the people in the apartment opposite. On the (possibly) positive side, the guy down the street has taken to watering his windowsill plants in the nude, so there's some quid pro quo here. You see, you have ID cards and you get this happy, open, sharing society that everyone enjoys... fostered at least in part by members of the police installing some foxy filesharing software on their computers that keeps leaking confidential details out to anyone who wants to see them.
We should be able to work out quite a few answers to likely questions for her.
For example:
Favourite subject at school:
One of the first results on Google is an article about her on the Manchester High School for Girls website saying how she always wanted to be a journalist and wrote for the school annual as well as having articles published in Just Seventeen and Mizz magazines.
She did english language and literature at uni followed by a post graduate diploma in Journalism.
I'd guess at English, but that's just a guess.
A software developer friend of mine told me that he's currently working at various Post Offices around the country. Very soon you will be able to go in to your local Post Office, have your photo taken etc and receive your photo driving licence there and then.
Phase two of the programme will enable you to have your fingerprints scanned.
ID cards are still happening despite what the government may say. It's being introduced by subterfuge.
The old "nothing to hide" argument bubbles out again. Just keep telling yourself that, then switch to "no place like home" and click your heels when the shit hits the fan and the definitions of what it is you "have to hide" start getting changed out of proportion.
I could pull out the similarly old opposing arguments of wise sayings by Benjamin Franklin, the wearing of yellow stars, samizdats and all that stuff, but I'm as tired of having to make those point as I am listening to that fuzzy-minded overly optimistic hubris.
The going rate for a record should be pretty good.
I seem to recall the rate for CC details was about $5 a time. The NIR is smaller but the pickings will be *so* much juicer.
IT contractors. I think having staff details put on the database one of the conditions to win the contract.
Government Ministers (Al Johnson says he has one and I'm sure his collegues won't want to
be without this *very* exclusive bit of plastic for long)
MP's in general. As many MP's are former lawyers they tend to be pretty well healed.
Journalists. Well at least one. Judging by her level of trust she won't be checking her CC statements too deeply. She'ss probably got a published email address so likely got for visit from the LfL.
Civil Servants.
Although the most valuable senior ones are probably smart enough to keep off it. Still plenty of lower hanging fruit to be plucked.
We have gone from The only effective way to stop terrorism to it will ensure your right to get served alcohol in 4 years.
I don't have anything to hide, I just don't like sharing.
Weird that this is trotted out and on the other side of the world The Google Guy is saying exactly the same thing. I bet the Chinese are loving it, it will be the only two news stories allowed in through The Great Firewall.
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