Details of the meeting, including the list of speakers, can be found at no2id.net. Many of these points came from the speakers. Some came from the floor. Some are mine.
Anne Campbell MP was conspicuously absent.
Identity is not defined by the state.
If you have nothing to hide then please take off your clothes.
Access to health care will be denied to those without ID cards or those with invalid IDs.
The error rate on the proposed biometrics is around 17%.
Though many departments say that ID cards will be useful, no government department is willing to give up any of its budget to fund them.
ID cards turn ordinary administrative staff into law enforcers. People will summarily be denied access.
In the UK the police are forced to apply a rational process to verify ID, rather than brainlessly relying on technology.
ID cards won't be compulsory at first. Except for foreigners. So guess who'll be asked to show their ID? Foreign-looking people. What will this do for race discrimination?
The government promised a full racial equality review of the bill. They have not provided it.
In other countries the (irrational) fear of fingerprinting has reduced welfare claims.
We're going from a country where a policeman has to show you his warrant card to a country where you have to show your ID card to the police.
A database state is a step towards total law enforcement. The laws weren't written with total enforcement in mind.
People who make trouble for the government will be up against someone with total access to embarrassing information about them.
Knowledge is power. Power corrupts. Absolute knowledge corrupts absolutely.
The ID database system will strip privacy. The UK has no privacy protection in place to balance it. In Germany it's an offence to note down the ID number of someone's card, and the number changes when a new card is issued: it's not the person's number.
Write to newspapers and MPs. You will probably be ignored, but you will be counted.
The database will be extremely valuable and therefore organized crime will spend a great deal of money to get at it.
All your personal information will be accessible by millions of people.
The government may well already have access to all the information that will be in the database, but it takes time and it costs money. If it can be called up in seconds there will be a qualitative difference.
Labour cancelled a benefits entitlement scheme costing £20M saying it was unworkable within the budget. Now they're proposing a much broader scheme saying it will cost only £60M.
The ID database will be an excellent tool for organized crime enforcers.
Anyone's medical records can be bought for £150 currently. This will get cheaper.
Laws won't stop abuse of the data. Well partitioned data will stop abuse.
The commissioner who will review the system won't report to parliament, but to the secretary of state, who can edit and censor his report before parliament sees it.
The secretary of state will be able to expand the scope of the ID card scheme without further debate.
The thing now is to delay the bill until after the general election. Perhaps then people will take the time to read and debate the issues rather than being rushed by the government.
In Australia general support for ID cards became massive opposition once people understood what was being done.
History shows that governments can't be trusted with ID data. Do we really trust them with this much power over us?
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- Chard (
chard) wrote,