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UK's Blair Dismisses Online Anti ID-Card Petition
An anonymous reader writes "Prime Minister Tony Blair has responded personally via email to 28,000 online petitioners opposing the UK's planned identity card scheme, and has closed the online petition. The email reads: 'We live in a world in which people, money and information are more mobile than ever before. Terrorists and international criminal gangs increasingly exploit this to move undetected across borders and to disappear within countries. Terrorists routinely use multiple identities — up to 50 at a time... ID cards which contain biometric recognition details and which are linked to a National Identity Register will make this much more difficult.'"
Slaves,
When your masters gives you something, you take it. I'm giving you a nice
new collar so you can't hide or run away. The global plantation has
grown to such a size we just have to have smart chains and collars.
"The petition calling for the Government to abandon plans for a National ID Scheme attracted almost 28,000 signatures - one of the largest responses since this e-petition service was set up. So I thought I would reply personally to those who signed up, to explain why the Government believes National ID cards, and the National Identity Register needed to make them effective, will help make Britain a safer place." Translation: "Sod the petition. We're not listening to you. You are all wrong." No need to read any further really. I didn't really need to read the rest.
The point of the petition was that we don't care that the 'Terrorists' COULD POSSIBLY use our ID details to accomplish their nefarious schemes. However, we do object to the DEFINATE invasion of our privacy in order to prevent something that MIGHT happen.
Note the difference.
Ninjas use italics.
No one ever questioned if this could be useful for the governments.
Just like no one ever questioned if DNA registers could at least theoretically be useful.
This is not what the petition is about. It's about the fact that all registers can and will be mis-used "for the better".
And that's an awful lot of lets-be-afraid-of-terrorists mumbo-jumbo. I'd say, let's understand what makes terrorists do what they do. Let's analyze and talk about that. Perhaps is it linked with the gigantic abuse of poor people in poor countries led by todays imperialistic crusades.
We don't need you to patrinise us by attempting to explain why we are wrong My Blair. What many of us are trying to say to you is that we fully understand your viewpoint so you can stop explaining it to us. What we are saying to you is that you are wrong. Wrong because you don't have a very good understanding of security. Wrong because you have no ability to clearly judge the value this scheme will give us. Wrong because you have the terror threat out of proportion. Wrong because you are wasting our money on something we don't want or need.
Your job is to represent our views, not to decide what is best for your self and explain to us why you think it is right.
Honestly, I don't think you have the understanding of security issues to grasp why biometriecs are a very bad choice for personal security, nor do I think you have the imagination to forsee the abuses that could come of this. Combine these two things with your governments record on large scale IT projects and anyone can see that we are heading for disaster.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
Tony Blair is exceptionally intelligent man with absolute faith in his beliefs. He believes in the identity card system. He also believed that Afghanistan was now Taliban free and invading Iraq was a good idea to solve terrorism.
He seems to ignore the frequency with which the existing Police National Computer system is abused by both civillians and force members. He also seems to ignore the existing government success rate with major IT projects. Lastly he seems to ignore the problems with biometric ID card systems.
Absolute conviction in your own beliefs is extremely dangerous in a politician. It makes you blind to better counsel.