For ID cards; Against the database state
Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems famously said “You have no privacy. Get over it!” however as this interview in Computerworld shows, his views are subtler and more privacy-friendly than that.
McNealy:
“The national database is where the privacy advocates get all bent out of shape when I’m talking about an ID card. Identifying yourself is way different from creating a database on you. And I have no problem with it being illegal for the government to create a database on anybody. But you can get wiretap authority; you could also get the same authority to agree to build a database on [an individual]. And because we have an audit trail of you at your bank, at your airline, and your Internet service provider and all the rest of it, if we think you are a potential terrorist and we’ve gone to the courts and shown enough evidence, the government should be able to quickly build a national database on you for just that instance, for that particular issue.”
So we have leading advocate of secure government-mandated ID saying: “Identifying yourself is way different from creating a database on you.” He suggests even doing so should be ad hoc only and require a warrant. In every way this is the reverse of the Blunkett-Blair-Home Office permanent, universal, always-on, surveillance.
