UK.gov's love affair with ID cards: Curse or farce?

Having had a long and interesting conversation with the Junior Home Office Minister who was running the debacle for Labour at the time I can tell you that not all of the Labour party were on board with the scheme (including the Junior Minister) but most had eventually accepted it based on the time honoured system of 'you let this slide and we'll back something of yours we're not too keen on' next time.

It was also quite an eye-opener as to how ignorant of the issues around ID cards many senior Labour figures were at the time of the policy's introducation. In fact their whole rationale was the old maxim 'if you have nothing to hide what's the problem?'

Northern Ireland

I remember one of the (many) cock ups they made when planning the cards was they forgot that people in Northern Ireland under the Good Friday Agreement can have British. Irish or even both at the same time if they like citizenship. So basically they couldn't legally enforce ID cards there.

Better idea.

Give everyone a ball and chain with the Queens face painted on one side and the wearers face on the other. No ball and chain - no ID.

Justification for beer: We quote the great, oft overlooked philosopher 'Billy' - 'because we want to.'

ID cards - good, database - bad

I have no objection to a standalone ID card that would carry a number of security features that DO NOT depend on a back-end database or the biometrics of the holder - only the card itself. In my mind the danger to liberty is in both the database holding copies of everything - because it suddenly becomes the data and the person is now just an instance of that data - and the ability of of others to legally demand presentation of such a card to receive services that otherwise the holder is entitled to. We have already given up on travel without ID so there's not much point fighting for that one.

Will be forced on us

Back on a visit back to the UK I was asked to go to our bank because it has recently been bought out and had to redo 'know your customer'.

They wanted two forms of photo ID in order to satisfy the requirement. I had my UK passport, but I don't have any other photo ID from the UK. My drivers licence is the old paper type, and apart from that, I had nothing.

In the end, they accepted my UAE ID card, because foreign ID cards are acceptable.

But it seems to me that this is forcing the issue of ID cards by the back door - by requiring banks and other private organizations to require more than just a passport. My passport gets me in and out of the country and onto aeroplanes without having to show secondary ID, but I can't open a bank account? Something doesn't smell right about that.

Problem

My problem with ID cards is that I already have 3 of them! Driving license, passport, NI number. I don't want to be forced to pay for a 4th! I could at least conceptually (but not ideologically) agree with an ID card if it was to merge all of those services into a single card. But creating an additional card and forcing people to pay over the odds for it is pure fockery.

Whilst I'm on the subject, I wish passports didn't have your address printed on it. Where you live is such a transient thing these days so if our elected idiots want accurate residence information they need to make it free and easy to update, not asking people to pay for a revised driving license/passport. As I, like most people, never bother to update it.

I would never trust civil servants or members of parliament with the money that is be required to actually implement something like a merged services ID card so it's in everyones' best interests that they don't bother and just stick to having G&Ts on the terraces at Parliament. MPs are safer and cheaper for the tax payer that way.

How about we take care of the essentials first? Like making sure we can guarantee that future generations will be healthy and well-educated. Or maybe I'm just living in the wrong country (I already know the answer to that)!

"Politicians are not born, they are excreted"

- Marcus Tullius Cicero

Not necessarily a bad idea

The thing with ID cards is that they are not necessarily a bad idea, especially if implemented under the restrictions currently enforced under current (i.e. post-World War 2) Germany. Under these restrictions, a very strict separation in records between government departments is enforced, and race, religion and ethnicity questions are forbidden. So, to get a German ID card involves a lot of running about between different ministry's buildings with paperwork; inefficient but actually designed to be this way.

The document thus produced is mostly standalone; the card its self is the ID, not the back-end database which mostly does not exist. This is the correct way to produce effective ID documents; it limits the information the government holds on the citizens to only what is absolutely necessary for each department, and it absolutely prohibits sharing of information. The end result is a useful bit of plastic which says that this person is quite probably who they say they are.

The UK Labour version, by contrast, aimed to create one back-end database that was an accurate picture of who everyone in the country was, right down to (varyingly useless) forms of biometrics. It was an Orwellian nightmare as designed, and a fraudster's charter given the many ways it could have been abused with the cooperation of the Authorities. For instance, foreign passports were acceptable ID, so if faked properly these could be used to enrol a new citizen into the system, together with carefully forged fake biometrics.

With a bit of luck and a complicit employer one high-paid worker could morph into several part-timers, each with their own separate tax records and separate tax allowances. No longer would failed politicians need to get their wives to take speeding points; an alternate identity could be set up to take the rap, and so on, ad nauseam.

As the original poster put it, democracy usually ends up with correct solutions; the problem is that it gets there by visiting almost every wrong answer along the way.

Driving licences

These are the ones that bug me - I used to just have a piece of paper with a signature on it. Then I moved house and had to send them a verified photograph so they could send me back a credit card sized thing with my photo, signature and date of birth on it - which is easier to carry and is accepted almost everywhere as a form of id, except for driving, where I'm required to also produce the A4 piece of paper, which duplicates most of the information from the card, except the picture, and has a large space to show whether or not I've been a naughty boy. It is also easier to misplace or lose one or other part of the pair, costing me more money to replace them in order to remain a good little compliant citizen...

And lets not forget the audit trail to see whose been looking at your NIR ID file.

I'm joking of course.

The UK plans were to have no such trail (after all it generates a lot of file writes on a population of 66million and rising).

OTOH Estonia (Charles Clarke was very keen on their system) does have.

But then again Estonia has less than 5 million people and seems to have started with a more or less clean sheet in government IT systems when the former soviet union packed up.

Like the Snoopers Charter. No need to ask, no need to know.

Now f**k off.

The big difference is this

All the identifying documents I have at the moment are things that enable me to prove who I am, that I can drive, that I have a line of credit, that I shop at Tesco, that anyone who messes with me is going to hear from Her Britannic Majesty's Secretary of State, etc. I have them because I think the loss of anonymity is worth the benefit (or in the case of Tesco, I don't because I don't).

The ID card, on the other hand, was going to be something we were all required by law to own and to carry.

Google

Google will do it. They'll do a deal with Osborne who'll write off their alleged tax debt in exchange for the ID card system to end all ID card systems. It won't even be a card - you'll have an iris scan next time you pop in to buy a banned substance (ciggies, booze, fizzy pop etc) and you won't even notice. Google will not only ID you, they'll even track you on behalf of the Government. Google will not only get off allegedly not paying tax, they'll also make gazillions selling your anonymised data to advertising partners.

The problem with the Gestapo asking to see your papers is the Gestapo not the papers. Does anyone in their right mind believe that the British Government is going act like Nazis or that the British Police will act like the Gestapo?