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Australia Scraps National ID Plan
IPU = Imaginary Property Unicorn writes "The proposed Australian 'Access Card', a universal ID that would be required for any Australian wishing to use Medicare, Centrelink, the Child Support Agency, or Veterans' Affairs, has been scrapped by the incoming Rudd Labor Government. The card would have contained an RFID tag with the person's name, date of birth, gender, address, signature, card number, card expiration date, and Medicare number, but there were also provisions to add more personal data later on. It seems that Rudd Labor is not eager to copy the American REAL ID Act."
I always did prefer anonymity.
I distinctly remember that John Howard actively campaigned against the National ID Card with Bob Hawke was in power. Then he was for it. Bloody hypocrite, I'm so glad he's gone.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
A request for the rest of the world:
DO NOT COPY US. It will take years to undo the damage this administration has done to the US, and most of the damage will likely never be completely undone. Point and mock if you must, but PLEASE learn from our mistakes.
That was always the way with John Howard, slippery bastard. He said one thing and then did the other. Thoroughly untrustworthy. How he stayed in power so long, heavens only knows.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Hmmm..
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
What exactly is the problem with having some reliable method of identifying a particular person?
Too convenient, less intrusive and far less paperwork for the bureaucrats to shuffle when compared to the existing 100 points of ID check ;-). Seriously though, a card with RFID deserved to be killed dead: highly dodgy for anyone to be able to scan your ID from a distance (and potentially steal it).
ID cards and government database sharing are useful to governments for clubbing individuals who've messed up their paperwork. An ID card which works in our favour by reducing the red tape and paperwork we must deal with by auto-filling in the data they already have... now that would be a winner.
Check out the following for more in-depth information to this national ID system.
http://www.privacy.org.au/Campaigns/ID_cards/HSAC.html
I am pleased to see Rudd taking responsibility and listening to Australians, something Howard refused to do which ultimately lead to his demise.
The usual answer is that people protect their privacy by revealing select information to different entities. For example, you'll tell your bank some stuff, the health system some other stuff, the welfare agency some other stuff, the stores where you have an account some other stuff and so on. In no case is there one entity that has all your personal information. This means two things. First, it means that if one of them is compromised (as has happened in Britain), the information about you that will be compromised is far from complete. Second, it means that any agency or company that has your personal information only has fragments of it and so has less power over you. Knowledge is power, and the ability to selectively reveal information about yourself to differing persons is necessary for the preservation of privacy.
There's a really good SF novel called "Shield" by Poul Anderson that explores this idea. Unlike a lot of SF novels, it actually has something profound to say.
"by that I mean people who don't sit on slashdot all day wondering why everyone else isn't building robots" DECS
An RFID card that can be read can fill in all that data for you, but is also intrusive. Can't have the best of both worlds.
Of course you can. It's currently called the magnetic strip. Can't be read from a distance, just with a reader. Go high tech with the basic principle and you'll use NVRAM or a DVD-RW optical stripe. Go high tech/low tech and you can have the data written in highly miniaturized bar codes, too small for the naked eye but, again, visible to readers.
Government will know what it wants to know know about you. That fight was lost decades ago. The questions remaining are: (1) whether that right is annoying at the day to day level, (2) whether we can at least benefit in lower paperwork from it (rather than being punished for clerical errors), and, (3) whether we can stop everyone else stealing our details in the process, given most governments are managed at the bureaucratic level by incompetent baboons.
In short, when it comes to the government having information about you the best policy is "deny unless explicitly allowed." Now, if they just wanted to put a (secure) rfid chip in your driver's license that says the same thing the license says, fine.
But whenever this comes up it involves all of your identifying information being on one chip that can be read by any government agency's scanner. It also tends to involve a similar centralized database that's just begging to be abused. Remember: If supporters of a law, when confronted about possible abuses that it would permit, angrily deny that such will occur then you have discovered exactly what the law will be used for as soon and often as possible.
What exactly is the problem with having some reliable method of identifying a particular person?
I suspect you're trolling, since a similar question comes up every time the ID card debate is raised.
Nevertheless, I'll bite.
You're asking the wrong question. When a government wants something, the correct question is "what benefit does this offer to me as a citizen?" and measure it up against the costs. This is because government exists for the benefit of the citizens.
As soon as you start saying "I don't see why not", you're essentially accepting that you should do something for the benefit of the government. While this isn't in and of itself dangerous, it has a lot of potential to be. For instance, the UK government is currently making noises about ID cards - yet in the last month there have been no fewer than 3 major instances of personal data being lost by UK government departments. (Google for Revenue Child Benefit data loss, DVLA data loss and NHS data loss if you don't believe me).
Over 26 million records have gone missing and for most of those records there was more than enough data to carry out fraud. And we're supposed to trust this government with a single database which contains all of this and more?
Most of Europe has ID cards, and nobody ever heard it's police states.
...), where you don't need an ID card, there aren't ID cards. ...) and it is disallowed by the law (for anyone, including the state), to make a database that references all those id numbers.
The thing is to emit cards, you need a database. So the card becomes a key to your entry in the ID database. So far, so good.
Now, if you use it also to pay your taxes, the same card has become a key to your tax records and earnings. The same if you use it for your medical insurance, and so on.
Here's the privacy breach: the "one card does all" scheme is really very bad, because it allows easily to retrieve personal data from different databases.
Take France. There is one of the most advanced computer-related privacy law (IT and Freedom Act):
- there is a "national" ID card, that is connected to nothing, except maybe the passports database
- there is a medical state insurance ID card (Vitale card), that is connected to nothing, except other medical insurances, and your record at your doctor's
- for the rest (taxes,
All the systems have different unique identification numbers ("national" ID card number, medical state insurance number, tax payer number,
So where's the problem there ? (except that it's for sure more expensive that having a "one card does all", but privacy has its price).