Surveillance Passports
The Government has won the ‘ID cards by stealth’ vote, meaning that in the next two years, if you want to renew your passport (y’know, to get out of the country), you will be required to get a biometric ID card along with it. Which will cost a bomb, by the way.
Can I ask, aside from the civil liberties issues associated with requiring citizens in a modern democracy to carry identification at all times, what exactly is the point of a non-mandatory ID card scheme? Surely the terrorists (for that is who we are allegedly protecting against with this tomfoolery) will just, well, not renew their passports.
I’ve yet to hear a compelling reason why ID cards are necessary - surely Blair’s defence today that ID cards
could not just help us to disrupt terrorists and criminals travelling on foreign and stolen identities, but more fundamentally protect each citizen’s identity and prevent it being forged or stolen
is nonsense - I barely trust the government to keep my tax records safe, never mind every other bit of my personally identifying information in one place. And do I really want that one place to be in my wallet?
I don’t think so.
Consider this.
It’s summer 2012. You’re having a few beers in Soho after having come from watching a bit of the long-jumping at the new Millenium Dome indoor athletics arena. You leave the bar you’re in with your friends and head to the cashpoint to get some dough. Unbeknownst to you, while you’re fumbling in your wallet for your bank card, you drop your ID card, which goes spinning away into the gutter.
With cash in your pocket, you head back to the pub. Or so you think. You’re walking along the road, trip and stumble into the side of a police car. ‘Oops,’ you think as you stand upright again. You nod and smile at the two policemen inside, as if to say sorry, then off you trot to the pub.
You feel a stern hand on your shoulder.
‘ID please’.
You look for it. You can’t find it. It’s been two years since ID cards were made compulsory, and you always carry it. You’re a good citizen. But it’s not there.
You’re arrested, taken into Soho Police Station and charged. You spend a night in the cells. You receive a hundred pound fine for not carrying an ID card.
That night, someone finds your card, cracks it with freeware that first appeared on the internet a month after ID cards went public, finds your address, robs your house, empties your bank accounts and disappears into the night laughing themselves sick.
The next day, terrorists attack London. They’re shot and killed by the police. They are all alienated young men from the North of England with no previous criminal records, and are all carrying ID cards.
What, may I ask, is the crime that you have committed?
And why don’t we take the billions of pounds that would be needed to make a system like this even half-way usable, and try investing it in some of the most deprived areas of our country, where even now social alienation, racism and poverty are making the very idea of an external threat almost laughable.
You can’t fight terrorism with bits of plastic and a culture of fear, repression and surveillance, but you might be able to fight it with reconciliation, trust and a willingness to look beyond the next election term.
Update - The ever-readable Chicken Yoghurt weighs in (again) on this issue - if you want to educate yourself about this issue, I suggest you read his archives.
Originally posted at Happy Dave.
