On 13 January 2005, just over 7 weeks after it was submitted, 10 Downing Street responded to our e-petition. It appears that in attempting to justify its plans, the Government is now even willing to try to redefine the very concept of civil liberties.
Riddled with revisionism, outrageous assertion and pure misinformation, the response insults the intelligence of those who signed and reveals the low regard in which this Government holds its citizens. The following is our paragraph-by-paragraph rebuttal:
Proposals for a national compulsory identity cards scheme, to strengthen national security and protect people's identity, were set out on 29 November 2004 when the Government published the Identity Cards Bill. Our decision to introduce identity cards has been taken following a wide ranging debate, starting with the announcement in February 2002 of the original consultation and continuing with the consultation on the draft legislation.
The Government fails to mention the National Identity Register, the 30-odd new powers awarded to the Home Secretary and the punitive fines that form the bulk of the Bill. If these things were genuinely going to protect our identities, then surely the "80%" (ha ha) of us that want them would be queuing up to have them without the 'encouragement' of £1000 and £2500 pound fines?
The debate has been almost non-existent with, for example, no Government or Home Office representative at Mistaken Identity, nor even at some less threatening invitation-only affairs. For people who are so utterly convinced that what they are doing is right, they seem remarkably reluctant to defend, or even make, their case in public.
The decision to proceed is based in part on the fact that we will have to introduce more secure personal identifiers (biometrics) into our passports and other existing documents in line with international requirements. If our citizens are to continue to enjoy the benefits of international travel, as increasing numbers of them are doing, we cannot be left behind.
This is completely disingenuous. Adding biometric identifiers to passports need involve nothing more expensive or intrusive than putting a digital photo onto a chip - the UK are the only country taking this as an excuse to compulsorily register all its citizens and put them on a massively intrusive privacy-busting database. Are they saying that without ID cards, UK citizens will no longer be able to travel abroad?
If so, they are lying.
The international standards for machine-readable travel documents may require fingerprints in addition to a digitised facial image, but it is our Government and our Government alone who have decided to scan everyone's eyes as well and put all this - and lots more - information into a central database. The reason why the Home Office seperated the ID card from the passport is that they had overloaded the specification so heavily that our passports may no longer have been compliant with international standards.
Identity cards will provide every person in this country with an easy and secure way of proving their identity, of demonstrating their right to be here and of asserting their place in the community. Our liberties will be strengthened if our identity is protected from theft; if we are guaranteed access to the services to which we are entitled; and if our community is better protected from terrorists and organised criminals, and from those who seek to abuse the immigration rules and public services.
I do not need a card to 'assert my place in the community' - and I definitely do not need a license to exist from the Government. It presents ID cards in such a way as to appeal to xenophobia and play to people's fears, yet has consistently failed to show exactly how they will significantly address any of the problems mentioned. This is about being seen to be doing something, not about actually tackling a number of complex and largely unrelated problems.
We are already entitled to the public services for which we pay and adding in a massively complex and unproven technocratic barrier to access is no way to guarantee anything. What we really have to fear in a world of State-issued 'entitlement' cards is denial of service through administrative error, network failure, computer crashes - problems that occur with every large Government IT project, or wherever technology is blindly used to replace trust.
A short civics lesson for Mssrs Blair, Clarke et al. - civil liberties are what protect us from the arbitrary exercise of power by the state.
They cannot be sacrificed for the convenience of bureaucrats or politicians seeking re-election. It is fraudulent to assert that our liberties are being curtailed by fraudsters, criminals, illegal immigrants or terrorists when it is, in fact, the Government doing this itself.
ID fraud is a growing crime, costing the country more than £1.3 billion per year. Multiple or false identities are used in more than a third of terrorist related activity and in organised crime and money laundering.
It is crucial that we are able to confirm and verify our own and others' identities quickly and easily. Consequently, we believe that there are clear benefits to be gained from biometric identity cards.
Centralising all our information and issuing everyone with identity numbers is likely to lead to an increase in identity fraud - i.e. the Government's proposed solution would make the problem worse. This has been the experience in the US and Australia, where one State-assigned number could be used to connect all sorts of information about a person.
The vast majority of what the Government calls ID fraud is 'card not present' credit card and internet-related (e.g. phishing) fraud that ID cards can do nothing to stop. The figure quoted is a two year old guesstimate - for more detail see Spy Blog's commentary on this.
If the Government is going to spend billions on a measure that it portrays as tackling serious crime and terrorism it should explain precisely what ID cards are going to do to stop or deter the two thirds of terrorists who, by its own figures, use their own identities and legal identity documents. ID cards have been sold as the answer to a whole host of problems - but, in reality, it appears that they will be AT BEST nothing more than a partial solution for the most serious of them, and offer no deterrent at all.
The Government imply that biometrics will make ID cards more secure and convenient. Home Office representatives have used words like 'unforgeable' and 'infallible' but biometric technologies are all fallible and, as applied in the proposed ID scheme, will potentially discriminate against hundreds of thousands of British citizens. Biometric enrollment alone will be deeply inconvenient for the fifth of the population who live in rural locations.
The Government's proposals are designed to safeguard, not erode, civil liberties by protecting people's true identity against fraud and by enabling them to prove their identity more easily when accessing public or private services.
If the proposals are designed to safeguard civil liberties, then why is every single civil liberties group up in arms about them? No Government will ever have our 'true' identities, though it may assign registered ones. The Home Office can protect nothing if, for example, they are not held fully accountable for the correctness and use of the data in the Register and on the cards. The Bill has been criticised on this basis time and again - including by the Home Affairs Select Committee.
Linking ID cards to a national database and tracking every use of the card constructs the architecture of a surveillance state, something that the Government's own Information Commissioner warns us of - and it can give no guarantees about how this might be used in 10 years time, in 20, in 50...
If the Government's proposals were truly beneficial or convenient, it would not be resorting to criminalising people's identity in order to force them onto the system.
The Government cannot simply redefine civil liberties to suit its own agenda. Despite changing tack so many times, it has failed to prove the case for ID cards for any given purpose - and refuses to talk openly about the massive database and surveillance infrastructure required to administer its proposed scheme.
We note that 10 Downing Street chose to avoid any mention of costs, these having risen from the original £1.3 - 3.1 billion to £5.5 billion on the publication of the Regulatory Impact Assessment with the Bill. They may have decided to ignore principled objections to their plans but are going to find it a great deal harder to get away with what is, in reality, nothing less than an Identity Tax.
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