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."

Comments

I don't get it

[Jurily]

What's all the uproar about ID cards? It's not like you don't use photo ID (and credit cards) everywhere already. This looks like it just standardizes the process.

Re:I don't get it

[corsec67]

When they aren't required, it is harder for the police to force you to show them. In the US, if you aren't driving a car, then you don't need to carry anything showing who you are.

I am currently living in Japan, so I have an ID that has my identity, and I am required to carry that (or my passport) on my person at all times. This means that if a police officer stops me, they can require my producing identification documents.

Having a standard format for an ID maybe be useful, but then the next step is to require people to carry it, and then making it a crime to not present that to a police officer when requested.

Re:I don't get it

[ledow]

I'm from the UK, just to clarify things.

I can't remember the last time my photo ID was *required*, except possibly to put on my driver's license (so, by a government-only department that already had all the information about me it required), and my driving license has *never* been requested or required for anything. I don't have *anything* else with my photo on, at all. I'm pretty sure the only other "photo ID" I've ever had was a student card, because it got me student discounts. Even that was optional.

Additionally, credit/debits cards are *not* as big over here as over countries and a lot of people only "trust" cash. Cheques have only just stopped being accepted in most stores (as in, the last year or two). Although, inevitably, their use will increase over time.

Also, the problem with ID cards *isn't* either of the above. The problem with ID cards is that we were going to be required to pay for them, that they would "link" several disparate databases together and that there was *no* demonstrated need for them at all. There was also going to be a legal requirement to carry them (such a requirement doesn't exist in the UK at all and is, in fact, very alien to us... the nearest equivalent we have is that we have to produce a driving license at a police station of our choice within 48 hours if a policeman so demands it in connection with a driving offence) and therefore a requirement to HAVE them. It was a £100 "compulsory-voluntary" stealth tax to make us carry a card we would never use unless "needs" were created for it (anti-terrorism crap, basically). It was never required before and nobody could justify why it was required after (terrorists normally have valid or plausible ID, for example).

The stink wasn't about "ID Cards" so much as the pathetically poor method of introduction: Hey, you. I want you to carry a card around for the rest of your life for no reason, and I'm going to "invent" excuses to make you need to have it on you. And now you owe me £100 and a day filling out forms in order for me to give you that card. Cough up.

Re:I don't get it

[infolation]

Anyone applying for a UK passport from 2011 onwards will have their information stored on the National ID database.

If you don't keep your address and personal information up to date you have committed a criminal offence and you can be fined GBP1,000.

80% of the UK population own passports. In essence, anyone who wants to leave the UK must register with the ID database.

The ID database is primarily a scheme that enables the government to identify you, and that is made clear in a dubious little paper called Safeguarding Identity, produced by the Home Office last week, which describes how the ID database and the transformational government scheme mesh together in one glorious structure where data about the individual passes between departments. That is the prize and why they will use any argument and spend any amount to achieve it.

Re:I don't get it

[Ginger Unicorn]

yeah but all those database are separate entities and there is practically impenetrable firewall of bureaucracy and privacy laws stopping them being cross referenced.

Re:I don't get it

[vlm]

Now your whole life is tracked.

But you forget the equally annoying problem, similar to the phenomenon of "Universal Default"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_default

Basically, universal default means if you're having "a problem" with one financial institution, all other financial institutions are legally allowed to pile onto you and attack you along with the problem institution. Currently our financial lives are a gang fight, you fight one you better be ready to fight them all at the same time.

Anyway, I suspect something similar to universal default, but larger, is a major purpose of a national database. In theory, currently if you don't register for the draft and keep your address current, you can't get college financial aid. This kind of "reasoning" can easily be expanded with a national ID system.

If you have a late library book, your garbage man will not be legally allowed to haul away your trash. Also you'll be unable to buy anything at any retail establishment until your account is cleared up at the library. Basically any establishment will be able to very publicly subject you to a society-wide "consumer death penalty". Like wearing a big scarlet "A", or one of those yellow stars, except it'll be an id card in your pocket so that's OK.

Customer service dispute with one gas station? Blacklisted, No gas station will sell you gas under any circumstances, even on a cash and carry basis. Being blacklisted for the duration of the memory of the bouncers at one bar is bad. Being blacklisted from all bars forever based on the arbitrary decision of one individual, is quite a harsh penalty, especially when you might be targeted for nefarious reasons (dating some bar bouncer's ex-girlfriend, or made a fool out of someone more powerful, etc).

Late return of a rental DVD? No library books for you! Bought alcohol? No medical services for you. A a "service death penalty" if you ever did something politically incorrect. Shop at the adult toy store (and I don't mean the local computer store)? That means no entrance to church (except maybe confessional session)! Once bought a gas guzzler car? Random targeted punishment for the rest of your life.

Bought "Budweiser" beer at the quickie mart? No admittance to "Miller Park" stadium for you! A very strange merger of private activity and corporate owned public spaces is about to arrive.

Basically what used to be individual problems between you and one entity, while you and the rest of the world were all good, will soon be punished as you against the entire freaking world.

Re:I don't get it

[RivieraKid]

I have a passport, driving license, bank account, I pay my taxes, I pay my council tax direct to the local government, I'm registered to vote, I have multiple phone lines, I have utilities supplied to my home, I use public transport, so they know where I go, the list goes on. Point is, the government already knows who I am, where I live, where I work - a national ID will give them significant oppressive power over me, and will give me absolutely nothing, except for a £100 bill every few years when I'm forced to renew the card. The national ID card gives me nothing, and the government everything.

I'll adapt a little phrase you might have heard: When freedom is outlawed, only criminals will be free.

Re:I don't get it

[RivieraKid]

The ID card won't - as you say, they already have a huge amount of information on me anyway.

The problem, is that the UK government wants to link each and every database that has information on me together. It is that seemingly innocuous act that makes so much difference. With it, the ID cards goes from a single method of identification to the single way that the government gains all of that power over you. Take for example, the governments use of anti-terror laws to press criminal charges against citizens who put plastic bottles in the normal trash instead of the recycle bin. Or the fact that they used anti-terror laws to sieze the assets of Icelandic banks when their economy collapsed. Precisely how long do you think it's going to be before they start opressing the rest of us once they gain the ability to track every last piece of information about us at the click of a button, in realtime (or at least, near-realtime)? The problem isn't that they can get at the information, the problem is that if they get their way, instead of having to go through due process, and have to track you, they will know exactly where you are going to be and when. The problem is that for all the public condemnation of various communist and dictatorial states, that is precisely where they would love to be - with complete control over the populace. The problem is that they are so dishonest about what they want. They claim it will save us from the boogey man - well, I call shenanigans. Smoking kills more people than Bin Laden. Alcohol kills more. Cars kill more. Cancer kills more. The problem is that the national identity register, and the national ID card programs, are a solution looking for a problem. They will do absolutely nothing for the general public that we don't already have. However, the danger to the public is immense, even assuming we give the government the benefit of the doubt, and trust that there are proper auditing, accounting, and restitution procedures in place to prevent abuse, take the example of the national child register. A huge database of the personal information (including name, date of birth, address, school.....) of every child in Britain. It was put in place to "protect" the children. Again, a threat that is so insignificant compared to other less glamorous threats. This was created at great cost, and the entire database was promptly left on a train, unencrypted on CD that anyone could pop into a computer and read. They couldn't even manage to protect a database of extremely vulnerable people with a fraction of the complexity of what they are proposing - they have no chance at all of protecting the rest of us, even if they have purely altruistic goals, which history has shown is simply not the case.

BNP has interesting side effects

[geegel]

I somewhat doubt that convenience had anything to do with it. The recent elections and the beating Labour took are probably the reason behind this move. Democracy at work fellas! And it's a really beautiful sight

Re:BNP has interesting side effects

[geegel]

The ascendance of BNP from a fringe party to a main stage party is in my opinion a good thing. I don't agree with their agenda, but they are the voice of a segment which didn't have a voice before. The "solutions" they propose are as sharp as a brick, but the problems they raise are real. This step forward will highlight these problems and as the less extremist parties propose more reasonable solutions, the support for BNP will wane. I know that the first instinct is to remind everybody of Hitler and his rise, but a better equivalent is I think France. Jean-Marie Le Pen and the National Front had a similar path to that of BNP and they are nowhere to be found nowadays precisely because the main parties found a way to solve these problems.

It's a trap!

[Jagen]

No really, they are publicly scrapping the ID card compulsion, but they are still planning to build and populate the back end database which was the real bad idea behind the ID cards anyway. I imagine they will make it a requirement of new passports or renewals that you have to give the same information they would have requested for the ID cards, they're just hoping enough people fall for the con that because they don't have to have an ID card anymore the problem has gone away.

Re:VICTORY!

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

VICTORY for those ignorant enough to think that this would lead to a 1982 orwellien dystopia or some other BS

Do you know what irony is?

Test your liberties every day

[Opportunist]

A bit offtopic, but allow me to use the (halfway topical) reason to post something.

I spent some time in the US, and wherever I went, I took my passport with me. Mind you, this was in the days before 9/11, when the land of the free actually was a lot more free than it is today (in today's climate, I'd take my passport and my visa EVERYWHERE as a foreigner, just to be sure...).

Asked why I stared blankly. In my country, you're required to carry means to identify yourself (passport, ID card, driver's license or someone who can identify you and can produce said papers for himself) with you all the time. Essentially, any police man can stop you for no reason and ask you for your ID card, and arrest you 'til he can find out who you are if you can't produce any.

I never questioned it. Only when I took a moment to think about it, I wondered why we simply accepted it as fact. I guess when you're used to something from the moment you were born, when something has become the norm, you simply accept it as given.

Not so fast! What about passports?

[mdwh2]

Whilst this is a great step forward, one of the big problems with this scheme is that over the last few years, the Government has been basically turning the British passport into the ID card (the plan was that anyone getting a passport would have a "combined" passport and ID card).

So my fear is that we'll still end up with the same problems for anyone who wants a passport:

* Being put on the National Identity Register database (which is actually what the ID card criticism is mainly about - it's not about the physical "card" as such), along with regulations such as being fined £1,000 for failing to notify authorities of change of address.
* Biometric passports. TFA says these have "cross-part support" - it's unclear if this means fingerprints (currently we already have "biometrics" in the sense of digital photos, which I don't have a problem with, but fingerprints are another issue).
* The cost. Passports have risen from around £30 to £72 in recent years, much of this is due to basically turning the passport into the ID card. This is expected to rise to at least £93.

Even though a passport is not compulsory for everyone, for those of us who want to travel to another country (and remember, the UK isn't a big place like the US - most of the population have passports, and a lot of us like to travel), so my fear is that unless you are giving up your ability to travel, it will still be a compulsory ID card in everything but the name.

Does anyone have more info as to whether the National Identity Register itself will be shelved, or is it simply stepping back the plans on who will have to have one?

Re:Not so fast! What about passports?

[notseamus]

The Guardian is reporting:

British citizens who apply for or renew their passport will be automatically registered on the national identity card database under regulations to be approved by MPs in the next few weeks.

The decision to press ahead with the main elements of the national identity card scheme follows a review by the home secretary, Alan Johnson, of the £4.9bn project. Although Johnson said the cards would not be compulsory, critics say the passport measures amount to an attempt to introduce the system by the backdoor.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jun/30/passport-details-id-card-database

I wrote to my local MP, but he's a useless cunt, and didn't even bother writing back.

From further down that article:
He also denied that there were any significant public spending savings to be made by cancelling the project saying: "This scheme pays for itself. If you cancel all you will get is diddly squat."

This is a reference to the self-financing nature of the project under which it is to be paid for through increased charges for passports and the £60 cost of a biometric identity card.

I had hoped that the new Home Sec would at least have a bit of sense not to emulate his predecessors, but it seems that was misguided. Did Labour even look at the last election results? They have no council mandate, little popular support, they've lost Scotland, and are losing the north, yet they still press on with misguided schemes like ID Cards that are universally unpopular. They've lost all touch with reality.

I remember hearing that Jacqui Smith said that people had approached her saying that they couldn't wait to get ID cards. Even worse, in the long term they've brought back unpopular people like Mandelson, in the hope that nobody would notice or remember how insidious he was.

Sad thing is that I have no faith in the Tories to do any better. No wonder people are voting for UKIP and BNP. If Nigel Farage is seen as more honest than Labour, things are grim for them indeed.

Re:VICTORY!

[Big Hairy Ian]

Do you know what irony is?

Isn't it like Goldy & Leady

/baldrick

Just time to boil the frog more carefully...

[MindKata]

"UK.gov ineptitude when it comes to anything IT"

Its a shame their deviousness isn't as inept as their technical knowledge, but then they are more interested in manipulation and power games than they are in specific details of technology.

They are still bring in ID cards. This move isn't stopping the cards. But now they are bring them in more slower over a long time scale, at first voluntary. Its bring them in by exploiting feature creep. It starts off as its voluntary for this and its voluntary for that. Then it becomes it helps this and it helps that. Then it becomes its important to this and its important to that. Then it becomes its required for this and its required for that. Then finally it becomes its mandatory for this and its mandatory for that and then eventually you can't do anything without the ID cards. Then finally they get what they aimed to do all along.

They know ID cards are very unpopular and so now they are starting to tread more carefully. They know their ever present power grabbing nature is very unpopular, (in this case power grabbing via information grabbing on people for their own gain (after all, information is power)) and so they are now treading more carefully.

So now they are just boiling the frog more carefully. Yet now many people are initially fooled into believing its not going to happen. Exactly what the control freaks want, as it means over time they will now face less resistance to them bring them in more slowly.

Re:VICTORY!

[Sockatume]

1982: Because a totalitarian state always seems 2 years away.