Final day of the Lords Committee stage of the Identity Cards Bill 2005
Spy.blog reports on the final day of the Committee Stage of the ID cards bill in the House of Lords, and comments once again on the draconian Clause 31 on “Tampering with the Register”.
We repeat – If you work as an IT professional or as a Civil Servant, do not touch any contracts to do with the National Identity Register.
As currently worded, and unamended by the House of Commons and now by the House of Lords, you could be facing up to 10 years in prison and/or a fine, for accidents or software errors or hardware failures entirely beyond your control, or through acts of ommission
This clumsy clause attempts to cover “Denial of Service” attacks, but ends up potentially criminalising innocent people and companies.
The “good faith” defence in subsection (6) only a defence for authorised Civil Service or IT staff doing their day to day jobs as ordered to and apparently given permission to by their superiors. It does not apply to the unknown effects of say a duly authorised third party software upgrade, such as the disasterous Microsoft XP upgrade error which brought down 60,000 Department for Work and Pensions desktop PCs which took almost a week to recover from.
Clause 31 applies to everywhere in the entire world, whether you are a British Citizen, or not!
March 8th, 2006 at 20:11
As a present open university student in maths and computing, I am now in my 4th year, I can see a lot of dangers in this id card scheme.
One major danger is companies planting clerical staff inside the department which runs the data base and then attempting to use data mining software to check on people’s movements.
What I mean by this is that imagine that the database has been up and running for a few years and as clarke hopes people have lost their fear of the snooper ability and let us suppose that cards are then used to register how many times you rent a van for your holidays. It then notices that this year you have not used your credit card to pay for a holiday but curiously you have paid for a van. What might you be doing in a van going nowhere.
But, people who travel in vans use flasks or flashlights. Hence, data mining for marketing purposes. And, that is just a small use. People who travel a lot use dvd and cassette.
I wouldn’t be too surprised if people in IT companies who sell data mining expertise are on to this angle already.
Perhaps the government itself will sell this information and use it instead of the national census. That is to say sell the data mining realtions and possibly the addresses. makes sense to them I suppse.
Bye for now.