Beware Charlie the Safety Elephant
In an aside in a Times article on the Home Office’s record on (not) protecting civil liberties, Tim Worstall notes:
On the subject of identity cards [David Blunkett] once said: “No one should fear correct identification.” Those words always remind me of one the more distressing details of the Eichmann trial: how he told his executioner that the fate of those killed in the Holocaust was sealed by their answers to the 1939 census on religious background recorded on paper for a Hollerith machine, an early mechanical computer. Quite literally, their cards were marked.
