ID cards: Slippery plastic


According to the Guardian leader-writer:

The single greatest threat of the new ID infrastructure is to personal privacy, and it is barely touched by the headline row about whether cards should be issued or not. The danger is that individuals will get chewed up in – or, worse, randomly regurgitated by – a monster database. The amount of information stored on Britain’s wartime ID cards quadrupled in a few short years. The bureaucracy’s natural hunger for ever more data will only be encouraged this time by the fact the scheme lacks a single clearly defined purpose, and because of the potential for automatic updates each time the card is used. The devil lurks in the detail of regulations stipulating which information can be held and when it can be shared. Politicians need pressing even harder on these obscure rules than on whether to issue the cards.