This ID project is even more sinister …
Henry Porter wrote a powerful piece in today’s Observer, higlighting the horrors of the proposed National Identity Register:
The real menace comes when the ID card scheme begins to track everyone’s movements and transactions, the details of which will kept on the database for as long as the Home Office desires.
Over the past few weeks, an anonymous email has been doing a very good job of enlightening people on how invasive the ID card will be. ‘Private businesses,’ says the writer, ‘are going to be given access to the national identity register database. If you want to apply for a job, you will have to present your card for a swipe. If you want to apply for a London underground Oystercard or supermarket loyalty card or driving licence, you will have to present your card.’
You will need the card when you receive prescription drugs, when you withdraw a relatively small amount of money from a bank, check into hospital, get your car unclamped, apply for a fishing licence, buy a round of drinks (if you need to prove you’re over 18), set up an internet account, fix a residents’ parking permit or take out insurance.
Every time that card is swiped, the central database logs the transaction so that an accurate plot of your life is drawn. The state will know everything that it needs to know; so will big corporations, the police, the Inland Revenue, HM Customs, MI5 and any damned official or commercial busybody that wants access to your life. The government and Home Office have presented this as an incidental benefit, but it is at the heart of their purpose.
The text of the email Porter references can be found at tinyurl.com/mtsho
March 20th, 2006 at 02:55
Henry Porter’s last paragraph:
Outside parliament, what needs to happen is the formation of the broadest possible front against these changes, a movement which deploys the most principled democratic minds in the country to argue with the lazy and stupid view that if you’ve got nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear from Labour’s attack on liberty. I believe that will happen.”
Does he not know about the NO2ID Campaign ?
March 20th, 2006 at 11:39
Only the blinkered and deliberately blind media, spoon-fed their ‘news’ by government flunkies, are still playing down the real threat to liberty that these cards and the database pose.
Why have newspaper sales plummeted? Because the public are not as blinkered and blind as the so-called ‘free press’. The papers are all giving away free DVD’s to try and sell their rubbish.
March 26th, 2006 at 07:28
That’s not how it works, Dave.
Newspaper sales are falling because fewer people are willing to make the effort to read them in an audiovisual world with other distractions.
Newspapers will do anything they can to attract an audience, which is why they give away DVDs. If the public were interested in ID, they would be full of it. What we need are hard news stories that the public might be interested in – then the press will take notice.
The other thing you need to understand is that newspapers are no longer very important, except as they feed broadcast media. Britain has more newspaper consumption than most western countries, yet most people *don’t* read a national newspaper, let alone a broadsheet. Total broadsheet sales amount to less than 10% of the population, and most of those readers are not much interested in abstract political stories.
March 27th, 2006 at 22:06
Guy: ‘The other thing you need to understand is that newspapers are no longer very important…’
You’re right about that, Guy. Especially since a lot of people have realised that most mainstream broadcasters and journalists have elected to withhold political truths from the general public while at the same time reporting everything the government says as if it’s all true – they do it all the time. How predictable and, therefore, how boring.
They would have to pay me to take a newspaper with a free Michael Caine DVD inside – and I like Michael Caine. On the other hand, if they started giving away free DVD players…