Look Who’s Listening
“O’Brien’s face was as inscrutable as everybody else’s” -(obligatory) Orwell quote
“Thee haughty tyrants ne’er shall tame,
All their attempts to bend thee down
Will but arouse thy generous flame;
But work their woe, and thy renown.” from ‘Rule Brittania’
Something that has been unnervingly absent from the national news recently, yet is still an important topic to discuss and debate is the subject of ID cards.
When an ex-Head of Mi5 says they could be “absolutely useless” and a minister’s main counter argument to that is to say that they’d be “almost impossible to forge” (note the “almost”!) then I think it’s high time that people started being more proactive in speaking out against them, or at least in considering all the facts.
Personally I’m against the planned scheme (although I’d be interested to hear any convincing arguments in its favour) for more than a couple of reasons;
Firstly, it seems to me that having a whole lot of information in one place will quite probably make id forgery and theft EASIER not harder. This is argued because criminals would only have to gain access to the one database in order to have more than enough info than they would need for id fraud and theft. I have also heard it suggested that it could be easy for people to register for multiple cards (and hence identities!) if/when the scheme was in it’s initial stages. A number of articles that I have read suggest that it could certainly be possible for the system to be accessed unlawfully by anyone experienced and skilled enough. In fact the implication is that it would be quite likely given enough time, and once some computer wiz had cracked the system it’d be open to others to steal and tamper with information.
Perhaps this wouldn’t be so bad if it was just our addresses or similar on the system - as they can always be changed, however inconvenient. If someone ’stole your identity’ in the uk at the moment you may even be forced to the extremes of moving and changing your name! but at least you’d have that option. With the proposed database in place, if someone accessed your details they’d be all in the same place, including biometric data, and you’d be pretty hard pushed to change your fingerprints! “Successful identity theft of a person’s biometric data would mean that their fingerprints or iris scans are permanently in the hands of criminals, with little hope of revoking them.” (from the BBC website, LSE report). Basically if someone did manage to access the system, whoever’s info they chose to usurp would be pretty much screwed. How likely is this? Well, from what I’ve read it would only be a matter of time before such a thing happened IF the system was introduced. In response to home affairs committee questions on the subject ‘Liberty’ the human rights organisation pointed out that “The leading US [biometrics] system was cracked by a group of Japanese graduate students within a term in 2003″;
add to this the obvious civil liberties issues of personal information collection, storage, control and access, and what it could end up being used for;
add to that the cost (estimates from the London School of Economics are between £10.6 and £19.2 billion! which could be over £200 per taxpayer, and add onto that a possible £85 for a card. plus as these are only estimates, costs could rise even higher);
add to that the poor record of governmnt computer/record sytems in the past, thus the likelyhood of errors, record mix-ups, information loss, crashes..etc.
Plus of course, no-one’s actually explained how this huge database of
personal information could actually and realistically help and protect the country and be beneficial, accept in the most general of terms, which I don’t think would stand up to informed debate and sytems trials. What EXACTLY is the problem that ID cards are supposed to have the magic answer to?;
If you’re still not convinced, how about the ’slippery slope’ argument? - if these cards get accepted there’s no knowing how far they’d take it - gradually adding more and more ’security’ measures to the system - everything you buy, every time you take public transport, everyone you talk to on the phone or email, your religion, your reading habits, your bank balance..etc could eventually be recorded and kept on file, along with your biometric data. Leading on from this, something else that is important to consider is the possibility of discrimination against individuals through having this kind of information on them, as it would be easier to bracket and categorise people in terms of race, income, religion?etc. Consider as well the potential misuse and manipulation of information by authorities, and the potential purchase of information by big companies and availability of information to employers. It may sound dramatic and perhaps far-fetched, but I don’t think these things would actually be unlikely at some point in the future, if the scheme goes ahead as planned. Who knows what kind of government we could have in five or ten years, and once a bill has been passed, then it’s a lot harder to reverse it.
Don’t be swayed either by the argument that the scheme will be ‘voluntary’ initially. If you look at the details, those purporting this myth seem to have a funny idea of what the word ‘voluntary’ means.
Basically the card is just the tip of the iceberg. Its implications are fairly daunting. If you want to find out more specifics I suggest you visit some of the sites listed at the bottom of this article, even if it’s just to satisfy your curiosity, it’s better than burying your head in the sand. Be more than just a number! (note the cunning cult TV show reference)
So what can we do about it?
I have asked myself if I am ready to pledge to not have an id card. In some ways I find myself struggling to answer this question, although I am currently leaning towards doing so. On the one hand I certainly do not want to be forced into handing over personal details such as biometric info to be stored and accessed by anonymous authorities, considering the issues that I outlined above, and be charged for the privilege. I really do not want to do this. I also do not want to face hefty fines or potential prosecution, although I actually would be willing to pay to NOT have the card and to NOT be on the database. It does make me wonder how many others are in a similar quandry, and if all of us acted together instead of speculating, what affect might we have? I am still weighing up the pros and cons of pledging, but meanwhile I decided to do something proactive and write this article!
Another possible (slightly ‘tongue in cheek’) solution that I have only recently thought up, and haven’t heard touted anywhere else is the following?We set up a new religion with the basic premise that followers are allowed to hold whatever beliefs they want and follow any other religion, with the freedoms that are allowed us at present. The only religious ‘commandment’ or suggestion would be a prohibition of conforming (providing details..etc) as required for the proposed id/database system, and/or the belief that the system or similar systems are morally wrong! Pledgebank/no2id have already had over 12,000 people pledging to not accept a card. Does anyone know how many followers are needed to define a movement as a religion? If it’s around the 12000 mark then perhaps it is a feasible plan, and as people aren’t supposed to be discriminated against because of their religion and because there are probably laws in place to stop new laws being passed that alienate or discriminate against individuals of a particular faith, then it might just work.
Assuming that we don’t get to form a new religion based on this, what can we do realistically? Perhaps pledge your support for the cause - either pledging not to have the proposed card (and not provide details for the database), or pledging money to go towards a legal fund to help those who pledge not to have the card?etc. There is also an online petition. Or you can write to your MP. These are possible options. One thing that is even easier to do is to find out more about the proposed scheme and speak to other people about it, in person or via email or whatever. Find out public opinion by chatting to people, direct people to the no2id website, and generally make people more aware. Perhaps if we can encourage more people to see what nonsense the idea is, then we can actually affect whether the bills get through. You don’t know who’s listening.
Some Resources used to write this article, and to look at for further info -
New Scientist Magazine (10/10/05)
On the radio the other day I heard that the police are compiling a huge database of people who haven’t paid their parking and traffic fines. A little later I heard that the cost of passports is rising by about £50 to pay for “improved” information storage. I walked home and saw one of those TV licensing billboard adverts that basically say “you can’t hide from us, we’ll catch you wherever you are.” It was very similar to the benefit fraud warnings they put up a while ago that say (I paraphrase) “we know everything about you, who you are, what you are and who you work for, you cannot possibly escape us.”
Individually, these things may not look like such a very big deal. But if you look at all of this together - and I’m not even mentioning the ID card issue - it’s pretty clear that it is part of a pattern towards ever-greater governmental control. We are witnessing an alarming trend. Our government is becoming increasingly obsessed with information and with control. There seems to be an almost compulsive aspect to what they are doing. Just look at the amount of CCTV cameras on our streets, the speed cameras on the roads, the sheer amount of information being compiled on us.
Is it necessary? We are constantly told that all these things are being implemented for our “security” - that the world would be a more dangerous place without the benevolent eye of authority incessantly looking down on us. Myself, I am getting increasingly worried about what this control-trend adds up to. Our movements are recorded on camera. Our financial information is recorded and shared between banks, councils, police and the government. In supermarkets, our spending patterns and consumer preferences are recorded on loyalty cards. And now we are told that our biometric data - without meaning to sound overly-romantic, the essence of our individuality - is being recorded, along with everything else about us, on ID cards which we will essentially be forced into carrying.
There was a Vim Venders film called The End Of Violence that came out about seven or eight years ago (I went to see it because I like his soundtracks and it had a song by a band called Spain on it that I loved) and at the time I thought it was a bit shit but recently I find myself thinking about it quite a lot so maybe it was really good and I was just a bit shit.
It was a dystopian take on a world that was every-inch monitored by cameras on sattelites in space. Which is all very disturbing. I think that many of the governments of the world in our insane modern age are focussed on finding cures for our social ills rather than analysing possible preventions. It reeks of paranoia and fear.
I was paranoid and fearful on a train late last night as I sat cross legged reading Hamlet in some very colourful trousers on a train that rode through suburbs where such trousers are rarely seen. I assumed that a couple of young guys dressed in Oz-Chav were going to give me a shit time for my garb but we somehow found ourselves instead engaged in an interesting conversation about fashion, prejudice and violence. They accepted me and I accepted them, vastly different though we were.
I’ve perhaps derailed this conversation but I’m sure there was a point that I wanted to make about opening relations up and trusting one another being a better option than being paranoid and fearful.