Unauthorized use of my driver's license lets people open a bank account
and ruin my credit rating (driver's license in the US = ID card in the UK),
among many other things.
You cannot open a bank account with just a driving license. I know, I've
tried several times. Even if you could, it's the bank's responsibility
to sort out the mess.
Frankly, no-one sensible would do this anyway. It's an obvious way to
get caught.
I wish you were, but you are not. You are, instead, wasting time with something
that gets you a lot of press coverage but actually makes the situation worse.
Makes the situation worse how?
Mass surveillance and data retention are already here, without national
ID cards. But if people are going to retain data on my life, at least I would
like to make it harder for other people to impersonate me.
Suggest you read the 20 or so posts here talking about the primary key and
National Identity Number. Again, why would anyone want to impersonate
you?
To be fair to Labour (and I never felt the need before), New Labour is nothing like them.
New Labour is pretty much a clone of Bush's Neo-Conservative government, only with much more power over the electorate and a incredible talent for spin.
Both parties distrust the electorate and believe it's perfectly reasonable to lie to them. They believe in empire building. They believe in gaining control over their citizens.
Blair obviously cares about his place in history - I'm not sure Bush does. And Blair is less pro-business than Bush.
Other than that, I struggle to see the difference.
What I find silly is that a group whose purpose it is to lobby in defence
of privacy does not consider the privacy of those signing the petition as being
of paramount importance.
You are dead wrong that No2ID does not consider your privacy. However,
we are a tiny group with no money who are fighting the Government, the European
Commission, the ICAO, BBC bias, the computer consultancies etc etc.
We sent 10,000+ signatures to the Government. They ignored it.
Our strategy for beating them is constantly changing. This petition came
from nowhere - you probably knew about it before I did.
I don't want to "join" an organisation based upon one policy;
I am not willing to lend my name in support of a groups currently undeclared
tactics. I _AM_ willing to sign a closed petition where I agree 100% with the
declaration.
This petition does not join you to No2ID, it says nothing about your support
for No2ID and No2ID will never claim you do. What they would like to do
though is keep you informed about other petitions, local groups, what the government
is up to etc.
For example, even if we block the Bill, Blair has promised to introduce the
same database via the "royal prerogative" that covers e-passports.
Does this mean we'll need to petition the Queen? Who knows.
Finally, it baffles me how people are so nervous about a stupid piece of
paper or plastic.
See above.
On the No2ID site I read taurinities like it would cause racial discrimination,
See, the Government said it would be a scheme to combat illegal immigration.
That can only happen if the police constantly pester ethnic minorities to prove
their identity. So either the government was lying or it would cause racial
discrimination.
fingerprint people like criminals (I have been taken fingerprints only
once in my life, at the military draft visit)
Then you obviously know very little about what we're facing. We will
be fingerprinted upon application for the card as well as every use of public
services in the future.
and will be useless against crime. Never mind there are heaps of experience
in continental Europe of criminals caught because they provided a not-good-enough
fake ID (one I remember was mafia boss Madonia).
The claim that identity theft would not be affected is simply ludicrous:
the very term "identity theft" is exclusive to the anglosaxon world,
as identity theft is impossible with an ID-card system; in continental Europe,
we don't even talk of it.
Identity theft is a buzzword meaning transactions using someone else's financial
identity - our Government has been talking about the £1.3 billion cost
even though ID
Cards can only prevent a mere £35 million of it.
And last but not least, how can be that people are worried about ID cards
when living in countries where the government has been given insane powers to
detain people without trial and rights, like in Guantanamo?
You can't be worried about 2 things at the same time? Most British people
don't know about this Database, they don't know they can be locked up without
trial and they don't know that the
government can rewrite our entire set of laws at whim. The media seems
reluctant to report these things.
I wrote to my MP twice about control orders. You have to realise that
our democracy is non-existent and unless the media takes an interest, Blair
can do whatever he wants. Even when the media took an interest for the
last 9 years, Blair had nearly 2/3rds of the votes.
Wrote to my first MP twice on ID Cards & twice on Control Orders.
She did sweet FA so I campaigned to get her out. The new MP is fully on board.
I also run the local No2ID group, have appeared on local TV 3x and went all the way to London to question Blair live on Question Time, only for my question to get ignored (would have nailed him on Iraq too if half the audience didn't have their hands up).
If the Bill goes through, New Zealand & Costa Rica are top of my list. Didn't you guys know Canada is even colder than Britain?
Perhaps you should suggest to your neighbour that he and all other police
officers be fitted with webcam/microphone/3G phone combos so that the public
can monitor them via the Web as they perform their duties. Of course, as a paragon
of virtue with nothing to hide, he could have no objection.
Indeed, a camera in my living room would be nothing compared to my ISP records
being linked via my Unique Identity Number to my tax records, medical records,
Pay As You Drive records...
I wouldn't expect anyone to be watching that camera, but being able to search
my ISP records would give a full account of my political affiliations &
campaigns, online banking transactions, sexual preferences...
The No2ID campaign is a fast moving campaign. We don't want people to feel that signing a petition along with a 9,999 others is enough to stop a government intent on creating a surveillance state.
The newsletter comes out once a month at most. It is an excellent newsletter and simply tells you what you might want to do to keep your privacy and freedom.
We've gone past the point where "only guilty people have to worry", and
are approaching "innocent people have to worry too."
So true. Vigilance is the price of freedom.
You guys need to organise. In Britain, No2ID
have taken 9 months to build up to a significant membership, and that's under
great leadership and the threat of an Orwellian Database that we're voting on
in a fortnight.
This threat is global. It is well funded and supported by Blair, Bush and
God knows who else behind the scenes.
The Card itself is a distraction. I object to officials having unchecked rights to harrass me for my card but that's minor compared to the Database.
The main difference is what is recorded centrally. In the case of passports, the passport office gets to record whatever information you send them when you apply. Not a lot IIRC.
ID Cards, OTOH, are merely a front for this Database which issues us with unique numbers designed to accumulate data on us.
Initially, the 20+ government databases will use the same number, thereby creating one giant virtual database of everything from our tax records to our medical problems.
Then the corporations will start to use it (or the government will insist they do). So then who you speak to, or what you write over the internet becomes something to be suspicious of.
In the case of British ID Cards, this data will be available to government, officials, police, secret services (including the CIA).
And that's just the initial legislation that we're voting on next month.
We have passports, birth certificates, National Insurance Numbers as well as the voting register.
Maybe you're happy being some spiv's whipping boy but I shouldn't have to remind you of your War of Independence and the reason you created a constitution.
RotS is actually the first time he showed signs of being a light-side jedi. Of course, he was still arrogant and impatient. I can't generate much sympathy when a bad kid turns into a bad adult.
One of the sympathy generating scenes was Palpatine ordering Anakin to kill Dooku.
I would much rather have seen Anakin be a shining example of goodness. Always out to do the right thing. A kid with great potential who was always eager to learn. Then you have him start learning from Palpatine, who teaches that right and wrong are not clear-cut. He finds himself doing bad things thinking that the end justifies the means, and soon he has no more compassion. That's a fall.
Would have been better but predictable unless you did it from Obi-Wan & Padme's point of view and filled in the Palpatine scenes afterwards.
Part of the problem was how Sidious' face changed. The the audience knew what that meant but Anakin didn't. If Anakin had showed a strong sympathetic response, that would have helped. Instead just "What have I done?" and you're trying to figure out why Jedis with their discipline training are much easier to 'turn' than your average chimp.
I remember having to obliterate my memory of what I just saw to prevent it spoiling the rest of the movie for me.
Palpatine's dialogue sucked too. They should have got Alastair Campbell to write it. Even I could make a more convincing case for the Dark Side.
I'd simply get rid of all the younglings references. Hacking up a few separatists seems mild in comparison.
In case this post annoys any Lucas fanboys, I'll say that apart from a few other unexplained plot elements (how exactly does Sidious know about Padme? how does Order 66 work?), the film was fantastic and had a lasting effect on me. One of the consequences of Anakin remaining good until the conversion is that he's a lot more of a sympathetic character (whereas I didn't care one bit in Ep 2).
In my limited knowledge, most of the big scientific breakthroughs have been made by those scientists not prepared to settle with what we already knew.
Now, it seems that acupuncture is actually more than a placebo effect. If that's the case, you've got to wonder how little we know about how the mind & body work.
In the UK, we have no guns, no constitution, just a barely elected government pushing through far more draconian legislation than yours without even consulting Parliament.
Hmm, I was talking about modelling instincts in software but the same principle applies.
My contention is that scientists don't know everything. Yet they often think that if some well-known mechanism plausibly explains a phenomenon, that mechanism MUST be the only one involved.
It's the kind of logical error that makes it surprising that things like quantum mechanics were ever discovered.
Slashdot Mirror
Unauthorized use of my driver's license lets people open a bank account and ruin my credit rating (driver's license in the US = ID card in the UK), among many other things.
You cannot open a bank account with just a driving license. I know, I've tried several times. Even if you could, it's the bank's responsibility to sort out the mess.
Frankly, no-one sensible would do this anyway. It's an obvious way to get caught.
I wish you were, but you are not. You are, instead, wasting time with something that gets you a lot of press coverage but actually makes the situation worse.
Makes the situation worse how?
Mass surveillance and data retention are already here, without national ID cards. But if people are going to retain data on my life, at least I would like to make it harder for other people to impersonate me.
Suggest you read the 20 or so posts here talking about the primary key and National Identity Number. Again, why would anyone want to impersonate you?
To be fair to Labour (and I never felt the need before), New Labour is nothing like them.
New Labour is pretty much a clone of Bush's Neo-Conservative government, only with much more power over the electorate and a incredible talent for spin.
Both parties distrust the electorate and believe it's perfectly reasonable to lie to them.
They believe in empire building.
They believe in gaining control over their citizens.
Blair obviously cares about his place in history - I'm not sure Bush does. And Blair is less pro-business than Bush.
Other than that, I struggle to see the difference.
What I find silly is that a group whose purpose it is to lobby in defence of privacy does not consider the privacy of those signing the petition as being of paramount importance.
You are dead wrong that No2ID does not consider your privacy. However, we are a tiny group with no money who are fighting the Government, the European Commission, the ICAO, BBC bias, the computer consultancies etc etc.
We sent 10,000+ signatures to the Government. They ignored it. Our strategy for beating them is constantly changing. This petition came from nowhere - you probably knew about it before I did.
I don't want to "join" an organisation based upon one policy; I am not willing to lend my name in support of a groups currently undeclared tactics. I _AM_ willing to sign a closed petition where I agree 100% with the declaration.
This petition does not join you to No2ID, it says nothing about your support for No2ID and No2ID will never claim you do. What they would like to do though is keep you informed about other petitions, local groups, what the government is up to etc.
For example, even if we block the Bill, Blair has promised to introduce the same database via the "royal prerogative" that covers e-passports. Does this mean we'll need to petition the Queen? Who knows.
- National Identity Registration Number;
Otherwise known as the Primary Key for the Mother Of All Databases.
I'm quite impressed at how the anglosaxon world reacts to ID cards. They are present in most countries, and are a far cry from a fascist tool.
First off, this isn't about ID Cards. Sure, I'm not happy at the prospect of being bullied by police for exercising my freedom of speech (mostly against ID Cards), but we're having the world's biggest database built to spy on us.
Finally, it baffles me how people are so nervous about a stupid piece of paper or plastic.
See above.
On the No2ID site I read taurinities like it would cause racial discrimination,
See, the Government said it would be a scheme to combat illegal immigration. That can only happen if the police constantly pester ethnic minorities to prove their identity. So either the government was lying or it would cause racial discrimination.
fingerprint people like criminals (I have been taken fingerprints only once in my life, at the military draft visit)
Then you obviously know very little about what we're facing. We will be fingerprinted upon application for the card as well as every use of public services in the future.
and will be useless against crime. Never mind there are heaps of experience in continental Europe of criminals caught because they provided a not-good-enough fake ID (one I remember was mafia boss Madonia).
According to Time, he was caught by a phone tap.
The claim that identity theft would not be affected is simply ludicrous: the very term "identity theft" is exclusive to the anglosaxon world, as identity theft is impossible with an ID-card system; in continental Europe, we don't even talk of it.
Identity theft is a buzzword meaning transactions using someone else's financial identity - our Government has been talking about the £1.3 billion cost even though ID Cards can only prevent a mere £35 million of it.
And last but not least, how can be that people are worried about ID cards when living in countries where the government has been given insane powers to detain people without trial and rights, like in Guantanamo?
You can't be worried about 2 things at the same time? Most British people don't know about this Database, they don't know they can be locked up without trial and they don't know that the government can rewrite our entire set of laws at whim. The media seems reluctant to report these things.
I wrote to my MP twice about control orders. You have to realise that our democracy is non-existent and unless the media takes an interest, Blair can do whatever he wants. Even when the media took an interest for the last 9 years, Blair had nearly 2/3rds of the votes.
Wrote to my first MP twice on ID Cards & twice on Control Orders.
She did sweet FA so I campaigned to get her out. The new MP is fully on board.
I also run the local No2ID group, have appeared on local TV 3x and went all the way to London to question Blair live on Question Time, only for my question to get ignored (would have nailed him on Iraq too if half the audience didn't have their hands up).
If the Bill goes through, New Zealand & Costa Rica are top of my list. Didn't you guys know Canada is even colder than Britain?
Perhaps you should suggest to your neighbour that he and all other police officers be fitted with webcam/microphone/3G phone combos so that the public can monitor them via the Web as they perform their duties. Of course, as a paragon of virtue with nothing to hide, he could have no objection.
Indeed, a camera in my living room would be nothing compared to my ISP records being linked via my Unique Identity Number to my tax records, medical records, Pay As You Drive records...
I wouldn't expect anyone to be watching that camera, but being able to search my ISP records would give a full account of my political affiliations & campaigns, online banking transactions, sexual preferences...
The No2ID campaign is a fast moving campaign. We don't want people to feel that signing a petition along with a 9,999 others is enough to stop a government intent on creating a surveillance state.
The newsletter comes out once a month at most. It is an excellent newsletter and simply tells you what you might want to do to keep your privacy and freedom.
I didn't make the policy but I do agree with it.
1. Go to a crime seen
2. Collect biometric evidence
3. compare against the national database
4. Job done
I appreciate the irony, just want to explain why this is nonsense.
The law as proposed would prevent police from searching the database until all leads have been exhausted.
We're then talking about matching a criminal's partial fingerprint with the ~50 million on the database which only has a 81% positive match rate for a full print.
Well that should leave only 10+ million suspects to arrest.
You want biometric credit cards, speak to your bank. What is somebody going to do with your driver's license? Run old ladies over?
Sorry dude, you totally missed the point of the campaign. We're blocking New Labour's plans for mass surveillance and data retention, 1984 style.
We've gone past the point where "only guilty people have to worry", and are approaching "innocent people have to worry too."
So true. Vigilance is the price of freedom.
You guys need to organise. In Britain, No2ID have taken 9 months to build up to a significant membership, and that's under great leadership and the threat of an Orwellian Database that we're voting on in a fortnight.
This threat is global. It is well funded and supported by Blair, Bush and God knows who else behind the scenes.
The Card itself is a distraction. I object to officials having unchecked rights to harrass me for my card but that's minor compared to the Database.
The main difference is what is recorded centrally. In the case of passports, the passport office gets to record whatever information you send them when you apply. Not a lot IIRC.
ID Cards, OTOH, are merely a front for this Database which issues us with unique numbers designed to accumulate data on us.
Initially, the 20+ government databases will use the same number, thereby creating one giant virtual database of everything from our tax records to our medical problems.
Then the corporations will start to use it (or the government will insist they do). So then who you speak to, or what you write over the internet becomes something to be suspicious of.
In the case of British ID Cards, this data will be available to government, officials, police, secret services (including the CIA).
And that's just the initial legislation that we're voting on next month.
We have passports, birth certificates, National Insurance Numbers as well as the voting register.
Maybe you're happy being some spiv's whipping boy but I shouldn't have to remind you of your War of Independence and the reason you created a constitution.
Your example points to why a driver's license is necessary. An ID Card isn't.
Secondly, you could make an ID Card useful without needing to hold centralised data on everyone, simply by storing all the relevant info on the card.
I'm less clear on the Real ID scheme, but the British version is truly scary:
http://www.newstatesman.com/Ideas/200505300020
RotS is actually the first time he showed signs of being a light-side jedi. Of course, he was still arrogant and impatient. I can't generate much sympathy when a bad kid turns into a bad adult.
One of the sympathy generating scenes was Palpatine ordering Anakin to kill Dooku.
I would much rather have seen Anakin be a shining example of goodness. Always out to do the right thing. A kid with great potential who was always eager to learn. Then you have him start learning from Palpatine, who teaches that right and wrong are not clear-cut. He finds himself doing bad things thinking that the end justifies the means, and soon he has no more compassion. That's a fall.
Would have been better but predictable unless you did it from Obi-Wan & Padme's point of view and filled in the Palpatine scenes afterwards.
Simply agree with everything else you wrote.
My guess is as good as yours.
However, needing to guess leaves most of us unsatisfied. The art of film-making requires that the viewer is given clues, preferably ahead of time.
The annoying thing is that these are amateur mistakes.
Look at your Real ID bill.
There is a global initiative to spy on citizens. This is starting to look like a "lockdown" on individual freedoms.
Oh God, it was awful wasn't it.
The whole audience went "Huh?!"
Part of the problem was how Sidious' face changed. The the audience knew what that meant but Anakin didn't. If Anakin had showed a strong sympathetic response, that would have helped. Instead just "What have I done?" and you're trying to figure out why Jedis with their discipline training are much easier to 'turn' than your average chimp.
I remember having to obliterate my memory of what I just saw to prevent it spoiling the rest of the movie for me.
Palpatine's dialogue sucked too. They should have got Alastair Campbell to write it. Even I could make a more convincing case for the Dark Side.
I'd simply get rid of all the younglings references. Hacking up a few separatists seems mild in comparison.
In case this post annoys any Lucas fanboys, I'll say that apart from a few other unexplained plot elements (how exactly does Sidious know about Padme? how does Order 66 work?), the film was fantastic and had a lasting effect on me. One of the consequences of Anakin remaining good until the conversion is that he's a lot more of a sympathetic character (whereas I didn't care one bit in Ep 2).
A more convincing case could be made by studying people without brain damage in an fMRI scanner.
Since I don't trust a mobile anywhere near my head, I'd suggest a Bluetooth headset and combine everything else on the phone/PDA.
In my limited knowledge, most of the big scientific breakthroughs have been made by those scientists not prepared to settle with what we already knew.
Now, it seems that acupuncture is actually more than a placebo effect. If that's the case, you've got to wonder how little we know about how the mind & body work.
This is why you kept your guns.
0 5_manifesto/
In the UK, we have no guns, no constitution, just a barely elected government pushing through far more draconian legislation than yours without even consulting Parliament.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/14/labour_20
Hmm, I was talking about modelling instincts in software but the same principle applies.
My contention is that scientists don't know everything. Yet they often think that if some well-known mechanism plausibly explains a phenomenon, that mechanism MUST be the only one involved.
It's the kind of logical error that makes it surprising that things like quantum mechanics were ever discovered.
I never ask you to prove a universal negative. You're just too embarrassed to admit that you have no argument.
Once again, I do agree with you, haven't said anything to the contrary and you still haven't answered my question.