ID cards - 2 comments
Tom Watson's running a rough Yes/No poll on attitudes to ID cards and it reads like a rollcall of the great and the good of the UK political blogging world (for what that's worth). Anyway, I've added my No vote.
To be honest there's not much 'new' evidence, we're just restating our positions. The cost estimates continue to fluctuate, though anyone with project management experience will know how incredibly difficult it is to put any price on such a scheme, especially as nobody can even be sure when (if ever) it will be put into practice.
No doubt a nuclear strike on London would throw the figures out a touch - would certainly bump up the "worst case scenario" figure.
I continue to be mystified as to why, despite the possibilities for ID cards to empower people, giving them (at least) the ability to see the data stored about them, and eliminate vast numbers of duplicate cards, certificates, and mindless form-filling, the Government hasn't taken even a second to play up the potential positive aspects of ID cards, aside from those which relate to not being blown up.
Perhaps ID cards really are just an instrument of oppression. Perhaps the Government really does despise us...
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2 comments so far...
I don't see why you need to introduce an ID card to let people see the data that is stored on them. What factors are preventing people doing this right now that an ID card would actually address?
As for the elimination of cards, this is done at the expense of creating a single point of failure. I.e. you put all your eggs in one basket. Where all of the previous cards would need to be compromised to get at all of the assets they're linked to, only one would need to be compromised.
I also regard the extra convenience that you posit here, from using a single card or from reducing form filling, as a poor return for allowing the government to issue a licence to live and allowing it to record detailed information about what services (private and public) you use in your daily life in a unified database made available to the high-level plods of SOCA and the spooks.
Making all that info and capability available to people would seem like a useful bonus: perhaps it would make a positive difference to people and the civil liberties argument would look less important? You can't rule that out, but we'll never know as these benefits aren't on the table.
I'm not worried about single points of failure in general - any e-commerce site faces the same issue. The benefits of eliminating waste are so great that it would be a useful problem to solve. Obviously the consequences of stolen/corrupted ID data would be tremendous - as soon as the system is launched, all other databases and paper systems become redundant, which is why that much more effort and care is required in handling the security issues. Anyway, I'm not at all convinced the government is either capable of or motivated to do a proper job. Whether the system is run by the government or by a private company, there ought to be controls over what can actually be stored. Perhaps even if a home ID card reader couldn't display information under every section, it ought at least to say what all the sections are.
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