Slashdot Mirror
UK Compulsory ID Plan Shelved
e9th writes "Despite a bump or two along the way, it seemed that compulsory ID cards were a done deal in the UK. Now, the Financial Times is reporting that the scheme has been shelved. Unfortunately, it seems that this was more a matter of convenience than of concern for citizens' privacy."
Do you really think that MI5/6 don't already have the ability to do automated cross-referenced queries from those disparate databases using a single software interface? There are loads of pieces of data that could be munged into a primary key (National Insurance number, surname+DOB etc.). Even without that, they could query on name, address, date of birth, etc. and pull all of the info out in an automated fashion very quickly.
If Google can search the entire internet and give me search results in a fraction of a second, then I am not ready to believe that the British intelligence services would be so incompetent that they couldn't link several disparate databases to enable automated searches of members of the British public.