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UK Government Passes ID Card Bill
cowbutt writes "The two houses of the UK government, the elected House of Commons and the House of Lords have agreed a compromise on Labour's ID cards bill, after Conservative peers accepted a Labour amendment. Under the new amendment, anyone renewing a designated document (e.g. passport) will be able to opt-out of getting a card until 2010, but will still have their details put on the National ID Register immediately."
Get stuffed number 6.
Great Britain, meet Totalitarian State.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
How, exactly, is any of that supposed to help against crime / terrorism / illegal immigration / whatever?
This is going to cost the government some money. That money comes from taxes and fees. What is the British citizen getting for that expense?
Britons never, never, never will be slaves!
Except to their own government!
You get waht you pay (or vote) for.
Born on a mountain, Raised in a cave!
Living in Northern Ireland, with dual nationality I'll be going for an Irish passport, instead of a British one. If a British Driving license is a "designated document", I might just have to shenanigan enough to be able to get an Irish Driving license too, come renewal time.
"Never 'clear the air'. Instead, investigate all the subtle nuances of the word 'fester'." - R. Candappa
When I'm at the airport, I want to have the following T-shirt:
FRONT TEXT: I'm carrying a picture of myself.
BACK TEXT: Do you feel safer yet?
"Proper" ID (that is, rigorously checked, hard to fake, and accurate), for all of the good civil liberty arguments against it, might actually prevent certain types of crime. Them's the breaks.
Would it deter people who don't mind dying in order to obtain a religo-political goal? Well, it didn't deter the September 11 hijackers, at least not all of them.
The only way to travel free of possible terrorism is if everyone agrees to be schlepped around nude, drugged, and packed in Jello. Including the terrorists.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
What data will ID cards store?
Fears have been raised by opponents of identity cards about the amount of information which could be stored on the database. Here is the full list of the 49 types of information which the Identity Cards Bill says should be on the register.
Personal information
* full name
* other names by which person is or has been known
* date of birth
* place of birth
* gender
* address of principal place of residence in the United Kingdom
* the address of every other place in the United Kingdom where person has a place of residence.
Identifying information
* a photograph of head and shoulders
* signature
* fingerprints
* other biometric information
Residential status
* nationality
* entitlement to remain in the United Kingdom where that entitlement derives from a grant of leave to enter or remain in the United Kingdom, the terms and conditions of that leave
Personal reference numbers
* National Identity Registration Number
* the number of any ID card issued
* allocated national insurance number
* the number of any relevant immigration document
* the number of their United Kingdom passport
* the number of any passport issued to the individual by or on behalf of the authorities of a country or territory outside the United Kingdom or by or on behalf of an international organisation
* the number of any document that can be used by them (in some or all circumstances) instead of a passport;
* the number of any identity card issued to him/her by the authorities of a country or territory outside the United Kingdom
* any reference number allocated to him/her by the secretary of state in connection with an application made by him for permission to enter or to remain in the United Kingdom
* the number of any work permit relating to him/her;
* any driver number given to him/her by a driving licence;
* the number of any designated document which is held by him/her and is a document the number of which does not fall within any of the preceding sub-paragraphs
* the date of expiry or period of validity of a document the number of which is recorded by virtue of this paragraph.
Record history
* information falling within the preceding paragraphs that has previously been recorded about him/her in the Register
* particulars of changes affecting that information and of changes made to his/her entry in the Register
* date of death.
Registration and ID card history
* the date of every application for registration made by him/her
* the date of every application by him/her for a modification of the contents of his entry
* the date of every application by him/her confirming the contents of his entry (with or without changes)
* the reason for any omission from the information recorded in his/her entry
* particulars (in addition to its number) of every ID card issued to him/her
* whether each such card is in force and, if not, why not
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
To fight terrorism effectively, what the UK needs is mandatory RFID implants in all existing residents and newborn babies, where the RFID chip sends back a key into a central database containing fingerprints, nuclear and mitochondrial DNA sequences, 3-D facial image and iris scans. RFID scanners monitoring movements of all people would need to be installed on every street, in every shop, home and workplace.
Next, mandatory RFID chips in all banknotes, and a law that cash cannot be handed from one person to another without registering the transfer (which can be done conveniently at government-installed ATM-like or EFTPOS-like machines on every street and in every shop) which scan the cash and the ID cards of giver and receiver and register the transfer.
Yep, that'll stop the terrorists. Sure.
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
Papers please.
(Not to be confused with the East German version)
Shh.
So I have to pay £90 for one of these things next time my passport runs out? And not forgetting the family, for what exactly? I have a new style driving licence with the photo of me on it, just like the Euro one, the only difference is that if I need to use the licence as ID I have to bring the paper part WITHOUT my photo. So, my driving licence isn't good enough ID, my passport isn't good enough (so why do the US accept it) and I have to have a new form of ID; which I have to pay for. I for one hope that I will be working on a gov. contract when my passport expires and I have to have a new passport (and so ID card) and I can flat refuse until somebody else parts with their hard earned cash. An absolute waste of time and money. And while I am at it, £90 covers the setup, design, production and other admin/gov costs - I am almost sure they will be simple to copy...
Yes, we'll still have Bush, but if we can a Democrat majority in Congress, especially a democrat majority with a fucking spine, Bush and them will spend the next two years fighting until we can hopefully replace all of them in '08 and start the long path of recovery...
You are joking, right? I am no Republican supporter, but you realize that Clinton and the Democrats proposed a National ID Card in the 1990s, and it was the Republicans who opposed it? And the National ID in the UK was pushed by the Labor Party, who would be far-left by U.S. standards.
Seriously, how twisted by your own propoganda do you have to be to think that Democrats are not rabid supporters of the police state? The Democrats and the Left love the idea of a police state just as much as the right.
Perhaps if the Libertarians, or the Greens, or someone else got into congress, we could begin reversing the trend. But don't try to pretend for a second that your party doesn't 100% support Totalitarianism, without reservations.
>
>Yes, we'll still have Bush, but if we can a Democrat majority in Congress, especially a democrat majority with a fucking spine, Bush and them will spend the next two years fighting until we can hopefully replace all of them in '08 and start the long path of recovery...
Pop Quiz: On January 20, 2009, the leader of Democratic wing of the party, having retaken the House and Senate in '06, and the Presidency in 2008, will take a look at the powers available to it, and say:
a) "Look at all this power we just had dropped into our laps! Just in case we're ever tempted to use it, we'd better pass laws to prevent us from using it."
b) "Thank you very much, Republicans! It's just what we always wanted. Let us know what additional powers you'd like in place for 2016 when it's your turn."
It doesn't matter whether you work for the Democratic wing or the Republican wing. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake.
"V for Vendetta" is making millions at the box office, what a cute little coincidence.
Ex nihilo nihil fit.
Here's a Guardian link with every article and editorial they have on the issue. Lots of good stuff here.
t ml
http://www.guardian.co.uk/idcards/0,,1373591,00.h
Since your UID is smaller than mine, I can only conclude that you're trolling. -s20451 (410424)
...the gunpowder treason and plot. I know of now reason why the gunpowder treason should ever be forgot.
Next time I'm sure will be much more successful.
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
"everyone's getting so worked up about this 'big brother state', but what are you *honestly* doing that's gonna cause any serious concern/suspicion on the part of the ruling authorities?"
And that my friend is exactly why so many jews ended up in crematoriums.
1. "Okay the don't like us but we can still work, this is as far as they'll go"
2. "Okay we have to register and wear these stars, be we can still own our business. this is as far as they'll go"
3. "Okay, our property has been siezed, and we cant get a permit to leave. but they'd be crazy to go any farther...."
Right now it's a nebulous group. Next it becomes people who don't have "acceptable" viewpoints. Here in the US both the FBI and pentagon have been caught spying on quakers for gods sake.
Every time any government tries to increase its power, the citizens should always ask themselves "would I want (insert your least favorite politician or political group here) to have this power?"
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
No2ID is the main opposition to the ID Cards scheme. These guys are truly wonderful people though currently somewhat gutted that the Tories sold them out & didn't even have the decency to warn them.
What is the British citizen getting for that expense?
First a correction: we're not citizens of our country, we're subjects of the Queen. In theory she can send us to the mines on a whim, although in practice our royalty are pretty nice folks that just want to be left alone.
Not being citizens is not the problem though. The real problem is that we're just slaves of our politicians, who are all total scum.
We didn't vote for any ID cards or biometrics on passports, since it wasn't put to the vote. The scum in power want more power though, so it was bound to come without a public vote.
No of course it doesn't help anyone, except Bush of course, who uses Blair as a policy support bitch all the time. In this case the War on Drugs was getting a bit flat, so the War on Terror had to be fed the blood of virgins, or of the innocent public in this case since these measures do nothing against terrorists.
It's a sad world, especially this corner of it. Britain will be the first totalitarian police state among the G8, no doubt about that. We're already tracked in our vehicles, monitored on CCTV, recorded at our phones, and spied on at our ISPs. And now we're going to be fingerprinted and retina-scanned.
It's clearly 1983. Not long for 1984 now.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
My passport says quite clearly "BRITISH CITIZEN".
I think the human rights act would stop the queen from sending people to the mines pretty quickly aswell (and yes, it's law) so no, the queen can't send people to the mines on a whim. Even royalty has to abide by the law (although the queen *can* step in to parliament business).
Silly rabbit
That's what I thought about government when I was younger and more naive. You've nothing to fear with nothing to hide, they told me. That's fine, as long as no-one in government ever makes an honest mistake. Yeah, like that would ever happen, right?
One day, a low-level civil servant working in a tax office mistyped a National Insurance number, probably one of hundreds he entered into the system during that working day alone. Unfortunately for me, he fluked typing mine instead. My tax records instantly got tied to someone else's, I lost all my allowances without warning, and it took me countless hours ringing around countless tax offices over the next few months to get it put right.
In other words, for several months, my paycheque turned up hundreds of pounds short, without any notice, and with absolutely nothing I could do about it.
That was one number out of probably thousands typed by one government staffer out of thousands that week. Moreover, since the system now said things like I was working two full-time jobs on opposite sides of the country at the same time, it was pretty obviously screwed up when I finally did get the right person to check it. What happens when it's not just a tax allowance, but your entire life that's in the database, and the mistake isn't that your job changed, it's that you're no longer entitled to NHS medical care, or you lose state benefits you rely on to buy food, or you fail a CRB check and lose your job? And those are the nicer possibilities.
Tell that to Jean Charles de Menezes. Oh, wait, you can't, because he was shot dead by government agents after a tracking exercise went wrong and he was incorrectly identified as a terrorist.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
If you live in the UK and have ever received a fine (citation) from a speed camera (everywhere in the UK) or even from a minimum wage automaton (virtually all traffic wardens in the UK are minorities) you will know that no matter how well meaning a person you are, your professional reputation or that you were only 5 mph over the limit, or simply rushing around trying to find some lose change for the ticket machine while the parking fine was issues, when you attempt to challenge 'the system', it is time consuming, stressfull and of course, if you fail in your protest, expensive. Like the introduction of iD cards, all of this simply profits the government, local authorities and the manufacturers of the technology. This is all the realisation of the distopian nightmare of having freedom, the right to make mistakes and the right to revolt ('wither revolution?' taken away from us by a corporate sponsored government who keeps tabs on it's citizens using technology. I'm British and find this far more abhorant than any terrorist threat and prey the people of the freedom loving USA reject the lot of it. The best way to fight terrorism and other crime is for us all to keep a fair eye on suspicious activity. We have souls so can judge accordingly.
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
Firstly getting rid of legal handguns was to stop 'sports' shooters like Hamilton and Ryan killing people with legally held weapons. That has been spectacularly successful.
On the 500,000 illegal guns there is absolutly no evidence for this whatsoever. Indeed during the campaign to get rid of handguns in 1996 the UK shooting bodies and there affiliates used to pick a figure out of the air at random on a weekly basis - one prominent number was at one point seriously citing 5 million illegal handguns in circulation and challenging the Polic to prove him wrong. Most people draw their own conclusions from this about the mental stability of 'sports' shooters.
In fact the best guess that the police could come up with on the basis of actual crime was there was under 10,000 illegal guns available to criminals. The rest, if they existed, were old war trophies in attics.
1. Vaguely true in the UK. More accurately true in the US.
You know, I doubt many people outside the US remember that Bush stole TWO elections.
2. Definitely true in the US, the UK played along...
Much the same I think. One can understand paranoia better if 9/11 happens in your country. The UK has been fighting terrorists forever. Did you know Blair is refusing independent scrutiny of what happened on 7/7?
3. HAHAHAHA!
I can't believe they're both still there. Bush at least was a bit more honest than Blair. How's the plan to impeach Bush going?
4. Yes, true for the UK. Since when has Bush needed a mandate from the people for anything?
Now we're getting to why the US is better off than the UK: your constitution. We have lost pretty much every right that we had in the last 2 years.
5. At least the UK has some controls!!
No, it really doesn't. Even though we know Blair lied over the invasion, we can't impeach him. He is only accountable in the sense that Brown might one day grow a pair and challenge him.
6. and how many people are there in the US who DONT have a driving license?
True. Hope you guys don't get anything like we're getting. And at least you have your guns... ;)
Difference between British subject and British citizen
The Queen is not allowed to send you to the mines on a whim (even in theory). This is the difference between monarchy and dictatorship.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
"Now say I'm a terrorist- I hack into the ID system to look for alternate identities"
Or simply hack the system and insert some new records containing whatever you want, or alter the biometric data and photos in existing records. Terrorist groups _will_ get access to equipment that is capable of generating the correct biometric data, and they _will_ have people with IT skills several orders of magnitude higher than the bozos who are tasked with implementing the database, and they _will_ be able to manufacture fake ID cards complete with holograms, etc. All the above will also be true of organised criminal gangs who spot a golden opportunity to make money by charging other criminals, illegal immigrants, etc, a large amount of dosh for a fake ID that is indistinguishable from the real thing.
Make no mistake: this system is going to be a massive national embarrassment that will end up facilitating identity fraud instead of preventing it. Even if it is properly implemented from an IT perspective (which of course it won't be), the fact that there will be both idiots and just plain dishonest people in every link of the chain means that ordinary citizens will end up being massively inconvenienced, while crooks and terrorists actually have an easier time of things because a "valid" ID card will allow them to bypass any checks that those without one would be subject to.
Prediction: the process of applying for these things will be slow and long-winded because (a) the biometric scanning equipment will be finicky, so people will have to spend ages messing around; and (b) the computer systems that said data resides on will not be capable of handling the load in real-time. Of course, once you get your new ID card, you will discover that the person who typed in the accompanying text spelt your surname wrong, and mistook your age of 19 for 90 because of all the noise of those shouting about resenting having spent 9 hours standing in the pissing rain to do something that used to involve grabbing a form from the Post Office. As all Brits know, this wil be _your fault_, so you will have to go through the whole process again, after which the National Database will contain both sets of records, and stubbornly cough up the wrong one ever time you need to be "validated".
Prediction: there will be countless false positives that result in innocent people being mistaken for "undesirables" until they can prove who they actually are. This will, in typical British fashion, involve navigating through a hierarchy of "jobsworths", all of whom believe you are a crook, terrorist, or both.
Prediction: identity theft by people changing the biometric data associated with other ID information (e.g. names and addresses) will result in lots of people being told that they are not themselves, and therefore being denied access to bank accounts, credit cards, etc., all of which will be open to crooks because "biometric data removes the need for passwords and other traditional security measures". ("Yes, I know you claim to be Alice Higgins of 19 The Cuttings, Eastleigh, and a widow whose husband won a VC in "the war", but according to the photo in our database, you should be a swarthy gentleman with a Kalashnikov in one hand and an American's head in the other. Please madam, there's no need to shout. Our detention ship at an undisclosed location in the Pacific is both spacious and comfortable, and you'll only have to wait there until this mess is cleared up. Yes, I'm afraid the handcuffs are necessary, but only until you reach the ship").
Prediction: large amounts of unencrypted personal data will find its way onto expensive, high-end laptops that get stolen due to being left in cars in full view of any passing tealeaf.
Prediction: massive chaos will regularly be caused due to the database being offline because of system crashes, data lines being down, equipment failures in the biometric scanners and ID card readers, etc. This will mean that airports, banks, and similar will have to either close for business, or let
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
I guess the next revolution is one step closer.
It's instructive to watch history repeat itself, because it allows me to see just how Hitler and the Third Reich were able to achieve what they did without people stopping them. It's one thing to learn about it in school, when you seldom understand the full spectrum of what is being taught.
I can now safely say that it's not that people didn't know back then. Just as now, the people just DID NOT CARE enough to do something about it. So in sixty years we have learnt exactly.... nothing.
It's just sad that so many new people will have to die needlessly before we realise our error yet again. As an "intelligent" race we really don't deserve our place at the top of the food chain, because intelligence denotes reason and so far I don't see any.
I won't weep for our destruction, because we deserve it.
Visceral Psyche Films