Of all the soulless enterprises I’ve ever come across in the online world one of the worst has to be the ‘Cap Movie Ministry’, a website which provide alternative film ratings for ‘Christian’ parents using its own ratings system which includes scores for ‘impudence/hate’ and ‘offense to god’ and even provides a handy list of scriptural reference to ‘counter’ the messages of particular films.

A perfect example of the sour-faced, tight-arsed attitudes to be found all over this site can be found in this review of Hayao Miyazaki’s materpiece ‘Spirited Away’ which it believes should have been rated a PG-13 under US ratings.

Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi) is quite simply the finest conventionally animated children’s film since the early and far less sanitised Disney full length features such as the classic interpretation of Pinnochio which, even today, remain one of the darkest childen’s films ever made. It deservedly won an Oscar for best animated featured and, more remarkably, the Golden Bear award for Best Picture at the Berlin Film Festival.

It’s a magicial adventure, a fairy tale in the grandest of traditions and one that all the more fascinating and beautiful for its cultural setting and grounding in the spiritual traditions of Shinto, yet the reviewer, as is ever the case with fundamentalist Christians, simply chooses to interpret the spiritual grounding of the film as mere ‘witchcraft and sorcery’ - I pity the reviewer’s kids for having a parent of so little imagination and so clear a sense of cultural fascism not least when the reviewer maks such a point of highlighting - as so many other reviews on the site do - the appearent ‘evils’ of the film in showing a child who ‘talks back’ to adults and has a mind of her own rather than being an unthinking, unfeeling and pathologically obedient automaton. Read enough of these reviews and you get the feeling that the people behind this site would have preferred Pinnochio to stay an inanimate puppet than to become a real boy.

Perhaps the clearest possible sign of the utter stupidity of this site, however, is its review of Mel Gibson’s ‘The Passion of the Christ’ the one wholly religious, unremitting Christian movie the site reviews - I mean how much more Christian can you get than a movie about the man himself based directly on the Biblical texts. Yet even this film loses points on CAP’s rating scale for causing ‘offense to God’, despite the reviewer clearly being a fan - “This is the first time I’ve seen a story of the Truth told truthfully” says the reviewer as his opening gambit.

And the offense itself? The little matter of depicting “attempts of Satan to tempt and control our Lord and events that would impede Him”…

…errr, I know its been a while, but isn’t that ACTUALLY IN THE FUCKING BIBLE?

And that’s ultimately the point which this website misses entirely, that for all occasional bits of pondering on the nature of the universe and man’s spiritual relationship with his presumed creator, most the the Bible is concerned with with the fact that the Israelites spent and awful lot of time either fucking or fighting - and mostly fighting.

The whole business of the earth being a mere 6,000 years old is based firmly on one long passage detailing the genealogy of Christ - a “Who Begat Who” - while the rest of book tells happily of little incidents like Samson laying waste of a whole army with an asses jawbone or kids taking the piss out of a prophet - Elijah, IIRC - for being a bit of slaphead only for them to be savaged by a bear a bit later on. Hell, who needs ASBOs when you have that kind of justice system for dealing with young offenders.

Apply CAPS rating system to the Bible itself and you’ll almost certain come out with a zero score - the same, incidentally, as American Psycho - thereby proving conclusively that the damn book is just not suitable for kids.

So much for morality, eh?

I’ll leave the last word on this to the late, great Bill Hicks - I’m currently reading the new edition of ‘Love All The People’ and if, like me, you believe in a world where people think for themselves then buy it, read it, and enjoy, I can’t recommend it highly enough:

“I don’t care what you believe, but you’ve got to admit beliefs are odd. You know what I mean? You have to admit that. A lot of Christians wear crosses around their necks. You think when Jesus comes back he eve wants to see a fucking cross? Kind of like going up to Jackie Onassis with a rifle pendant on, you know?”

Hat Tip to Bloggerheads for the reminder.

Its been a long accepted truism in the relationship we have with our former colonial cousins over on the other side of the Big Pond that of the key cultural difference between our two nations is that most Americans don’t ‘do’ irony.

There are exceptions of course, one thinks immediately of the late Bill Hicks - although even he had to the come to the UK to find a mainstream audience that would accept and even love his particular brand of humour - but, by an large, irony, especially when its deadpanned to perfection, is usually lost on Americans.

So imagine my horror on finding in the New York Times, of all places, that a small group of British doctors have published an editoral in the British Medical Journal that so staggering dumb that even the Yanks are able to take the piss - what the hell is the world coming to.

The article in question, by Drs. Emma Hern, Will Glazebrook and Mike Beckett of the West Middlesex University Hospital, notes that long pointy knives are - shock horror - dangerous and if stuck into people can cause serious injury and - da da daaaaaaaa - even death.

No shit, Sherlock.

Hey, but not to worry as our intrepid clinicians have the solution at hand…

… get knife manufacturer to make their knives less pointy by bringing in laws which only allow their sale if they have rounded tips.

What utter genius! Give these people another three-year research grant and may they’ll come up with yet another live saving measure - how about legislation to set statutory limits on fire, after all if it wasn’t quite so hot then maybe, just maybe, its wouldn’t burn things and so wouldn’t be quite so dangerous.

Best of all Dr Hern is quoted as saying:

“We came up with the idea and tossed it into the pot to get people talking about crime reduction… Whether it’s a sensible solution to this problem or not, I’m not sure.”

Big hint, Doc - NO IT FUCKING ISN’T!!!

Of course the real worry here is that you know, you just know that deep down in your bones that somewhere in a cupboard in Whitehall there’s going to be some no-personality Civil Servant sitting their pondering whether this really needs legislation or whether, perhaps, a voluntary manaufacturer’s code might be more acceptable to the cutlery industry and seem, well, a bit less nannying…

… before deciding - “What the hell, lets have a focus group and see if the idea flies”.

And in the meantime, over at the Home Office, another civil service drone is trying to figure out if there’s any possibity on having all knives stamped with the National Identity Registration Number of the purchaser in advance of next week’s press release claiming that ID cards will stamp out knife-related crime and wondering whether the law should stop just at knives or take in other pointy objects as well.

And before you know it, we’ll all be waking up to find, without even realising it, that we’ve all become citizens of the fucking Early Learning Centre under President Big Bird.

This edition of the BMJ has been brought to you by the letter I, D, the number 10 and the letter T.

One the options being discussed in a number of places is the possibility of civil disobedience should the Identity Cards Bill makes its way into law, the simplest form of which being a refusal to register for a card - after all, at this stage, they’re not compulsory… are they?

Trouble is - as I’m sure you’ve guessed by now - its not quite as simple as that thanks to the business of ‘designated documents’.

In my earlier piece on ‘Unlocking the Register’ I pointed out that more or less any official document which has a serial number which is unique to an individual and is issued under the authority of the Government by Act of Parliament or Statutory Instrument could be recorded, by its serial number, in the National Identity Register and thus become a ‘foreign key’ to unlock personal data held elsewhere.

I should clarify one thing here. Its NOT true that such keys can be added at will by the Home Secretary - the Bill requires the passing of secondary legislation, at least, to extend the register with such keys. However, as experienced Parliamentary watchers will know, secondary legislation means things like statutory instruments and regulations, things which aren’t generally subject to the degree of scrutiny and debate which goes with passing a full blown Act of Parliament.

Most of the work on secondary legislation tends to go in committees and when it does reach the floor of the House itself it tends to be in one of those debates your sometimes see on TV where there’s only just about enough MP’s present for the session to be quorate - the quorum for a division (vote) in the Commons is a mere 40 MPs, a little over 6% of its total membership. It’d all very much the kind of routine stuff which goes on well under the radar of the media, and therefore the public as well.

To complicate matters further, because extending the register, for the most part, requires secondary legislation it doesn’t necessarily follow that such extensions will be made in statutory instruments which relate directly to the Identity Card Bill, or rather Act as it will be if we get to this stage. In fact its far more likely that such extensions will be embedded in secondary legislation which otherwise relates to an entirely different Act of Parliament - it is perfectly possible to include the provisions for extending the Register to add a key to your entry on the Electoral Register within new regulations for postal voting which apply primarily to the Representation of the People Act. In fact the Identity Cards Bill contains, itself, a good example of just this kind of legislative complexity in that right at the end, in Schedule 2, it amends both the Forgery and Counterfeiting Act of 1981 and the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Act of 2004.

So even while its not true that the Home Secretary can extend the register without recourse to Parliament, the manner in which such extensions are likely to be made is so complex as to obfuscate the process to extent that most extensions would pass almost unnoticed by the Public until it was too late and they were entered in to law.

Anyway, getting back to the question of designated documents, what they are and what the implications of them may, in fact almost certainly will be…

A designated document is a document issued under Governmental authority where the Home Secretary has decided that in order to obtain that document you must either have an ID card or, if not, you must obtain an ID card at the same time as you obtain the document.

The one example of a designated document included in the Bill at present is your passport - one this Bill becomes law, you will only be able to obtain a passport if you have an ID card and - and here’s the sneaky part - any application for a passport will be treated as an application for an ID card such that the application will include all the information required to create your entry on the National Identity Register.

This is not actual compulsion, in the strict sense of the word, as you still have the option of not having a passport - and therefore not being able to leave the UK - but then you have remember that there’s more to this than the prospect of foregoing a foreign holiday if you choose the civil disobedience route of refusing to register. What if you’re in the kind of job which involves travelling overseas? Are you really going to refuse to register and put your job at risk?

This then begs the question of what other documents might also be ‘designated’ in future. Well already from the existing bill it can be seen that the National Identity Register will also include a reference to your Driver’s Licence, National Insurance Number and any immigration documents that may apply to you if you’re not currently a UK citizen - oh, and lets not forget that if you’re a EU citizen from a country which already issues ID Cards, such a France or Germany, and you’re living and working in the UK, then the register can capture an serial numbers associated with the identity papers issued to you in your homeland.

So, just from that, its looks likely that if you drive and need to renew your driver’s licence or you lose your documents and require replacements then - oh dear - you’ll have to get an ID card at the same time. And as with passports, if your job requires you to drive then a refusal to obtain an ID card would place your employment at risk.

The same could also, hypothetically, apply with your National Insurance Number. What if claim forms for welfare benefits were to be designated, or basic tax documents like the P45 or P46 you need to obtain on starting a new job?

You’re still free to refuse to get an ID card, of course, but only if your career plans include sleeping in cardboard box and drinking meths…

…and even then you may not be entirely safe as even homeless people, in some circumstances, are entitled to benefits if they attend a DSS office in person.

Hypothetically, you could even in certain situations be forced into registering for ID card when trying to obtain documents which don’t actually relate to you.

What about the simple matter of registering births, deaths and marriages?

I think it fairly obvious that marriage licence and certificate will be ‘designated’ at some point and probably fairly early on, on the pretext that ID cards will tackle ‘marriage fraud’ where immigrants enter into a marriage of convenience in order to obtain legal residency.

But what about registering the birth of child or the death of a family member? What if birth and death certificates were also designated so that in order to obtain the documents you had to get an ID card - even though the document you want does not relate directly to you?

Well in the first instance it is, if I remember correctly, a criminal offence not to register a birth so a refusal to register on the grounds that you don’t want an ID card could land you in court and, in any case, if you don’t register the birth then your child effectively becomes a non-person with no legal existence - so how are you going to get your child benefit, child trust fund and tax credits (if eligible)? What happens if they’re taken ill? Will you be able to register them with a GP and obtain treatment? And even later on, how will you get then into school?

Death certificates raise a different but not less difficult set of issues? Without a death certificate, would you even be able to arrange a funeral? What about claiming on life insurance policies and the whole issue of your deceased relatives estate?

Again, there’s no actual compulsion but it would be impossible to deal with even basic matters which are essential to your ability to function in society if you refuse to obtain an ID card.

I’ve already highlighted two scenarios in which people’s very jobs could depend on them obtaining designated documents and, therefore, force them into obtaining ID cards even with statutory compulsion - and to them you can also add anyone else who’s job might, quite literally, depend on them obtaining a document which could be designated.

This should be obvious but if you’re in the kind of job which requires you to provide a criminal record certificate to your employer or to a statutory regulator - for example, registered childminders have to provide such certificates to Ofsted - then you’re faced with as simple a situation as is possible if, or rather, when these certificates become designated documents. No ID card = no criminal record certificate = no job.

Hey it won’t do much the general economy, but cardboard box manufacturers must be licking their lips in anticipation… and still, there is no statutory compulsion.

As should be obvious by now, simply designating a small number of key documents will place millions of people in a situation where they have no real choice but to get an ID card, whether they really want one or not - and all without any explicit statutory compulsion.

You see, you really do have a choice here. You don’t have to get an ID card… not unless the next time the census comes around you fancy filling in you occupation as ‘Hobo’.

—

Ah, to quote the great social commentator, Jimmy Cricket, ‘but there’s more’.

You see not only does the bill allow the Home Secretary to designate certain documents as automatically requiring an ID, it also allows him to designate certain classes of individual as well.

Now, so far, and entirely in keeping with the carefully stage managed sales pitch for the Bill, the only class of designated individual included explicitly to date is - yes you guessed it - immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees.

But will it stop there - of course not.

For one thing it should be patently obvious where the whole business of designating particular classes of individuals as having to have ID cards will go next. If the general public will swallow this kind of compulsion when it comes to immigration it will also quite happily accept the same for anyone convicted of a criminal offence or placed under an Anti-Social Behaviour Order.

“Norman Stanley Fletcher -I sentence you to five years in prison… and an ID card”

But then there are also millions of public servants, people who work the Government and who, because of their work are either issued routinely with official identification documents or, in some cases, are subject to professional registration and background checks either to verify their qualifications or because, like teachers, social workers, doctors and nurses, their work involves them interacting with vulnerable people - anyone applying for a teaching job, for example, is already subject to a criminal record check plus checks against the sex offenders register and two other similar specialist registers, before being allowed to work in the profession.

Does anyone seriously expect that any of these will not routinely be issued with ID cards alongside their other official ID? That this will not be a, in fact, a condition of employment for say, Police Officers or members of the Armed Forces? That any of these people with have any choice whatsoever in the matter, other than the choice of giving up their career?

You would have though, even expected, that the Public and Commercial Services Union - the largest of the Civil Service unions - would be leading the charge against this pernicious piece of legislation, but head along to their campaigns section and you find not a single mention of ID cards, just the usual stuff about job cuts, pay and pensions plus the obligatory and rather ironic link to their ‘Unite Against Fascism‘ campaign. The same goes for Amicus and Unison - no mention of ID cards on either union’s website despite both being unions whose members will undoubtedly find themselves forced into registering for ID cards in order to keep their jobs. So far, according to No2ID, only the T&G amongst the big unions has come out against ID cards and even noticed their existence - even the TUC is silent on the matter of ID cards, so far, preferring instead to welcome the provisions for corporate manslaughter and new rights for working parents in their response to the Queen’s Speech.

—

ID cards are, according to the Government, not going to be compulsory as yet, although they have indicated that they’d like to be compulsory by 2010.

Well if that is true, then how come so many millions of people look likely to have no choice whatsover when it comes to registering for ID cards? If there is no compulsion, why does the bill contain an open-ended provisions for compulsion via the backdoor? You don’t have to register but if you don’t we can make it almost impossible to function in society.

Civil disobedience, in form of a refusal to register, may still be possible but compared to other situations in which it has proved effective in the past, not least the Poll Tax, this time around it going to much, much more difficult to put it into practice in the kind of sustained way which could bring down this legislation.

Its seem that the Government has learned a trick or two from the Tories along the way and especially from the Miner’s strike of the early 1980’s - its bloody hard to engage in civil disobedience when the result is to reduce you and your family to abject poverty.

Still - you might think - there’s always the chance of a little revenge at the ballot box come the next general election…

… well don’t you bet on it.

For one thing, once the register is in place, no government of whatever political persuasion is going to dismantle it - not even the Liberal Democrats.

Why? Because by then there will be too many vested interests involved, too many institutions, agencies and even private sector businesses with an interest not only in keeping the system but extending its use as far as possible. No government can afford to take on the combined weight of the Police, Intelligence Services plus those sections of the Civil Service for whom the Identity Register is the ultimate ‘wet dream’ plus all the Banks and Financial Institutions who’re going to love having a national identity verification system.

And lets also not forget our ‘friends’ over the big pond, the good ol’ US of A, who’re already sniffing around access to UK ID cards under the guise of ‘technological compatibility’ - in fact its worth noting for all the concerns in the US over their own moves to a national ID scheme, at least their consitution gives them some civil liberties protection, which is more than we’ve got.

But ultimately, its not the vested interest which will preclude a little well-deserved electoral vengeance by whatever refuseniks might hold out until the next election…

… after all, what are they going to do if, or more likely when, their application for an entry on the electoral register or for a postal vote become yet another designated document requiring an ID card?

There is no escape.

Another day and some more information you may not have come across regarding the Identity Cards Bill.

One of the key omissions from the bill is that it has no provisions whatsoever to cover the recording of information from the National Identity Register by third party.

The bill itself, speaks only of providing authorised and secure access to the Register not whether, having accessed the register, or indeed having asked you to provide you ID card as a means of proving identity - which any third party can do so long as it also offers a reasonable alternative method as well - that third party is permitted to record any of the information it obtains.

Why is this an important issue?

Well first of all we’re back to the issue of foreign keys again and the little matter of reciprocation. In just the same way as the National Identity Register will be used to stored foreign keys which can unlock your records held in other databases - you tax and national insurance records for starters - so the National Identity Registration Number and possibly also the ID card number as well, if it too is unique to you, can become a foreign key in another system.

Just think of who will be asking you to verify you identity, other than the government, on a pretty routine and regular basis. There’s banks and building societies for starters. Then there’s insurance companies, finance companies, credit card companies and credit reference agencies as well as pension providers, stock brokers and investment companies - any financial institution with which you have any dealings will want to verify your identity using the register.

And then what about shops? Given a choice between ‘chip and pin’ or an ID card as a means of ensuring that you are who you say you are when you make a purchase using a credit or debit card, which are there going to go for?

What if all of these record your National Identity Registration Number in their own electronic records? In their own databases, right next to the serial numbers of your bank and building society accounts, your insurance policies, your loans, credit and debit card payments, your pensionm your credit records - everything.

Database after database detailing every single financial transaction you ever make other than straight forward cash purchases. How much you spend. What you spend it on? Where you made your purchase and what time you made it? Even whether you went to the cashpoint to take out a bit of cash, plus which cashpoint you went to and at what time…

… and in everyone of them, your personal records could be identified, isolated and, ultimately examined electronically because they’re all tagged with your National Identity Register Number - a reciprocal foreign key which the Government will already have - and all without you even knowing its there unless you use the Data Protection Act to look for it because nothing in the Identity Cards Bill prevents any third party from recording that number!

—

There are currently, I think, 645 Members of Parliament and of these all but a very small number - the Speaker and his deputies - have the right note only to vote on this bill but also to propose at put forward amendments.

With this in mind I am offering a direct challenge to any Member of Parliament who either opposes or is concerned about the civil liberities implications of introducing Identity Cards.

The challenge is in two parts - a test of integrity and then a test of intent.

The test of integrity is quite simple for an MP, any MP, to put forward an amendment to the Identity Cards Bill which will make it a criminal offence for any third party not specified by Act of Parliament or Statutory Instrument to make a permanant record, and particularly an electronic record in a database, of an individual’s National Identity Registration Number and ID Card Number or any other information stored on the register under clause 4 of schedule 1 of the Bill without the express consent of the individual themselves and also to prohibit third parties from discriminating against an individual should they refuse to give such consent - the latter would be a civil offence giving rise to a tort.

There are circumstances in which it is quite right an proper for a third party to store information held in the register under that particular clause and most of these are already covered by legislation - employers, for example, must keep records of National Insurance Number in order to deduct income tax and NI and keep the accompanying records.

That’s fine I have no problem with that but it does not, in turn, require them to also record the National Identity Registration Number.

Can I make something very clear, as well - this provision would not prevent the effective operation of an National Identity Scheme or prevent a third party from verifying someone’s identity using the register. Someone making a lawful identify check, a bank, building society, a shop even, need only know that the person in front of them is who they say they are and not the full details of their Identity Records - any legitimate question that the vast majority of third party users of the register could ask can be answered on a simple yes or no basis:

Is this who they say they are? Yes or No

Are the entitled to work in the UK? Yes or No

Do they live at the address they’ve given me? Yes or No.

It’s simple. Its secure and it presents far less a risk to civil liberties than allowing the unresricted and uncontrolled recording of information from the register by third parties, which is what the Bill as currently writen will allow.

That’s it. The test of integrity - Does any Member of Parliament, or even a Member of the House of Lords have the integrity and conviction to take on board this amendment and give an undertaking that they will introduce it into Parliament during the passage of this Bill.

As for the Test of Intent, that should be obvious.

As well a providing a set of much needed safeguards this particular amendment will also provide a clear and unequivocal test of the Government’s intent on the future use of the National Identity Register.

If the Government has no interest whatsoever in using the register as a key to unlock personal records held by a range of third parties - banks being the most important but also record held by any private sector business or non-governmental organisation - then it can have no objection whatsoever to this amendment.

The amendment would not hinder the operation of lawful identity verification schemes in the slightest, nor would it prevent the Government from expressly authorising a third party, such as a bank, to make a record of an individual’s National Identity Register. but what it would do is bring such authorities as the Government might wish to give out into the open and under the democratic scrutint of Parliament.

That’s the Test of Intent. If the Government has no intention of allowing the National Identoty Register to become the hub of an extensive and largely covert surveillance system which extends into almost every aspect of our personal lives then it must accept this amendment - anything less would, to my show, demonstrate clearly that there is, as many suspect, some degree of more sinister intent underlying the Bill.

—

I know that at least one - newly elected - MP has popped into here from time to time, more to respond to a bit of political knockabout than anything else, so that may get this amnendment picked up, assuming he has the time and inclination to look in.

But that’s not enough and without wishing to sound like I’m fishing for Googlejuice from my fellow bloggers, on this I do need to ask that anyone reading this who is as concerned as I am as to the potential threats this bill may pose to civil liberties please, please spread the wpord as widely as possible.

This needs to be visible as only by being as visible as possible will the challenge I’ve laid down reach MP’s and - hopefull- lead to the introduction of the amendment to the Identity Cards Bill that I’ve put forward in this piece.

Come on - you know it makes sense.

Although not an immediate personal concern, I have followed with some interest the unfolding story of the AUT boycott of Israeli Universities which has featured over the last few weeks on a number of blogs, not least of which has been Harry’s Place, Norman Geras’ blog and Engage.

Boycotts, in general, are only really effective if they get to the ‘guilty party’ either directly or indirectly, which never really looked likely in the case of the AUT Boycott - an academic boycott of a couple of Israeli universities was never really going to make a dent in Israeli government policy on the Palestinian issue, not least because both universities would have little difficulty in ‘taking their business elsewhere’, particularly the US and I have to agree with Norman Geras that analogies drawn, by some, with apartheid-era South Africa were specious at best.

What’s really caught my eye today, however, are the comments of Dr Sue Blackwell, one of the main supporters of the boycott, who’s response to the vote to overturn the boycott has been reported by the BBC as follows:

…she was disappointed but not surprised by the vote. She had believed it would be a “stitch-up”.

“We won the moral argument. They just won the vote.”

And also by Israeli site Haaretz as:

“the outcome seemed to be “fixed.” She said many people who had never participated in the AUT would come with the specific aim of stopping the boycott.

“I have never heard of such a thing in the 14 years I have been active in the AUT,” she said, noting that special sessions are convened only when there have been changes. “There is something anti-democratic in this,” she said. Even when a vote was taken and she lost, Blackwell said, she had never tried to get signatures for a new vote.

Now hang on a second here. If these reports are correct then the simple fact that people who usually don’t turn out to meetings or votes of the AUT suddenly decided to show for this one is, in Sue’s mind, evidence that the fix was in on the vote and the whole thing was ‘anti-democratic’. This seems to be some strange new interpretation of the meaning and purpose of democracy that I’ve not quite come across before.

A bunch of people who generally don’t get typically get involved suddenly find themselves faced with an issue that, a matter of principle, they care enough about to actually get up and do something about it and thats ‘anti-democratic’ - if anything it would seem that this vote is actually far more democratic than the original decision to impose a boycott simple on the grounds that it looks like far more people who were entitled to vote actually did so on this occasion.

Ok, given the source of the ‘anti-democratic’ comment it is possible that Sue could be being misquoted on that point, even if the comment does seem consistent with her other comments about the vote being a ’stitch-up’ but even so to suggest that just because you lose a vote it necessarily follows that the ballot was somehow unfair, without any apparent evidence to substantiate your view seems not only churlish but bordering on the dictatorial.

Sorry sue, but for all you claim to ‘won the moral argument’ by taking the attitude that your defeat was a stitch up you not only lose the argument but any credibility you might previously have had and have exposed yourself as being little more than a proponent of the same kind of hardened ideological zealotry you otherwise profess to be trying to oppose…

… and a really, really bad loser as well.

As some have rightly identified already, the key to understanding the potential threat to civil liberties posed by the Identity Cards Bill is not the cards themselves or even their content, the biometric data on which so much debate has focussed but rather on the database to which as this information will ultimately be linked, the National Identity Register.

With the publication of the bill its now possible to analyse fully just what this register will contain and why this might pose such a threat to our most important freedoms.

The key to understanding the Bill is, in actual fact, not contained within its main text but in a schedule to the Bill which defines the nature and extent of the information which may be stored on the register.

Much of what is specified here is already common knowledge to those with an interest in the subject and, for the most part, obvious even to the layman, which includes:

Full name - and any other names you’ve been known by
Date and place of birth
Gender
Your current address and any other addresses at which you may live for part of the year - and this is cumulative, so over time will form a complete record of everywhere you’ve ever lived.

Then there’s the somewhat more controversial identifying information which for the time being includes:

A photograph
Signature
Fingerprints, and
Other, as yet unspecified biometric information although, at least at this stage, the definition of biometric data as concerning only external characteristics, included for the purpose of the Interpretation Act 1978, would appear to rule out the inclusion of DNA profiles for the time being - although that’s not quite the impediment it might first appear, as you’ll soon see.

Oh and lets not forget that it will also record your nationality and, where relevant, immigrations status.

All of that, however, pales into insignificance when set against the provisions of clause 4 of the schedule, wherein lies the dark heart of the register.

To understand this section fully you need to understand a concept from the world of relational databases - relax, I’ll try not to allow this to get too geeky - and the concept of foreign keys. In simple terms a foreign key, in the context of the Register, is a piece of information stored in one database which enables you to identify information stored in another database.

If this seems difficult then the Bill provides a perfect example of what I mean - one of the many foreign keys that will be stored in the register with your new ID number is your National Insurance number. And once you have that number then you have the key needed to identify your tax and national insurance records as well as records of any welfare benefits you claim. You NI number is the key to several government databases, all of which hold information about you.

What of it, you might think? Well look a little more closely as you’ll find that your NI number is not the only foreign key that’s going to find its way into the register - just the ones that the Government have chosen to name explicitly include the serial number of your driver’s licence, passport number and, if you’re not a UK citizen, any immigration documents that relate to you and your stay in the UK.

Ok, so far, so good…

… But hang on a second, what about all the other governmental records systems which could also provide keys to be stored in the register?

Well that’s covered, but in a very interesting and extremely disingenuous way. You see having named a few obvious candidate foreign keys, what the government does next is drop into the Bill a rather clever little catch-all clause which states that in addition it can also add to the register - without your consent, btw:

“The number of any designated document which is held by the applicant that is a document the number of which does not fall within any of the preceding sub-paragraphs”

A designated document? What’s that?

Well, basically any official document issued under the provisions of an Act of Parliament which contains a unique identifier which could be used as a foreign key in the register.

Now just think about that for a second.

Any official document - in other words any set of personal records held either the government, an agency of the government or an agency working for the government. That’s your council tax records, police records, court records, social services records, medical records, military service records [if you’ve been in the armed forces] and potentially even your personnel and employment records [if you’ve ever been employed in certain types of work in the public sector].

The National Identity Register is far more than just a record of your identity, its also the skeleton key the government needs to unlock and connect together records of almost every aspect of your life.

Oh, and I should mention, that’s why the exclusion of DNA profiles from the register is not quite as reassuring as it might at first seem. You see the government doesn’t need to include such information in either the ID cards themselves or the register. All it, in fact, needs to do to add DNA profile information is add another foreign key to the register to enable it to link to a DNA database held elsewhere.

What’s most interesting, and revealing of the Government’s attitude to debate on identity cards and the register, in not the information it explicitly tells you its going to store, but all the information it will store without ever telling you what it intends to do - all the records covered by the catch-all clause, even where there may be some very good arguments in favour of identity registration in some cases.

Your NHS medical card number is a perfect illustration of this issue.

From the standpoint of a clinician, and especially medical staff working in A&E departments, in particular, the Identity Register and its link to the new computerised NHS medical records system could be massively beneficial - a real lifesaver in fact.

Each year literally thousands of people will be admitted to A&E departments across the UK needing emergency treatment in circumstances in which medical staff have no idea of exactly who they are and the patient is unable to identify themselves - just think of someone walking home on their own who ends up in road traffic accident as an example. In such situations medical staff may quite literally be, flying blind, in trying to treat them. No identification, no medical records. No medical records, no way of knowing whether the treatment you plan to give them could actually kill them rather than cure them.

It should be obvious to anyone, even the most hardened opponent of ID cards, just what the benefits might be in that situation - take your John Doe, run his fingerprints through the biometric scanner and straight away, assuming the system works, you have their identity, and from there, their medical records and all of a sudden, as a doctor, you can be sure of the treatment they need.

Now you’d think, playing Devil’s Advocate here, that this would just the kind of scenario the Government would be desperate to push as more justification of the positive benefits of introducing ID cards. How much more persuasive argument could their possibly be than ‘your ID card could, one day, save your life’.

So why is this not part of the debate? Why, indeed, is there no mention whatsoever of including your NHS number on the register? Quite simply, because people have a very different attitude to their medical records than they do to things like their tax and national insurance records and the government knows this very well.

Its a question of differing perceptions.

Your tax records may be personal to you in the sense that they relate specifically to you but, on the whole, people don’t see those records as things which belong to them on a personal level. They’re not just your records but they legitimately belong, also, to the Government - after all, without them how would the government collect its taxes.

Medical records are a very different matter. Most people seen those as being very personal, in fact just about as personal as it gets. People trust and believe in, implicitly, that the Doctor-Patient relationship is and should remain entirely private, after all you’ll often tell your doctor things you wouldn’t even tell your family, let alone the government. Despite the fact that your medical records are actually held by a government agency, the NHS, people possess a very clear sense of who those records should and shouldn’t be disclosed to and the list of shouldn’ts certainly includes the government itself.

In reality, there’s nothing in the ID cards bill, itself, which suggests that it will allow the government, the police or anyone else to intrude on the privileged relationship we have with doctors, for the simple reason that that relationship is covered by an entirely different Act of Parliament.

Nevertheless, in terms of public perception, the idea that the National Identity Register will include a key which could be used to access your medical records would make a lot of people very anxious indeed - while many people may instinctively support the idea of ID cards and the register when its use is linked to issues such as combating fraud, identity theft and illegal immigration, they’re likely to be far less certain that its a good idea when faced with the possibility that it could give the DSS a means of accessing their medical records as part of a drive against benefit fraud, especially at a time where we have a government committed to getting people of incapacity benefit and into work by any and every means at its disposal.

This issue of foreign keys and the ability it may give government agencies to accurately cross-link different source of information has certainly been recognised by those campaigning against the introduction of ID cards but what also seems clear is that they haven’t yet quite understood the full extent of what may, indeed what will be possible, as a result of the creation of a national identity register.

That’s not to say that they’ve got it wrong, merely that they’ve yet to understand the full scope of what is possible and that, as a result, their arguments aren’t as yet as fully formed as they could, and really should be.

But then that almost certainly explains the indecent haste with which the Government is pursuing these proposals - the longer the debate the closer people will get to understanding the full extent of what’s possible by using the register and the more likely it is that these proposals will lose much of the shine of public support they currently seem to attract.

UPDATE - 27/5/05

I’ve added an important update to this argument here - please read.

If ever proof were needed to whats really at stake, the Identity Cards bill has finally been published proving that the real prize for govenment is not the cards themselves, which take up two and a half pages of the bill - four if you could the new criminal offence of possessing false ID - but the National Identity Register itself, the basics of which take up seven full clauses and the first seven pages of the Bill.

I’ll look at the bill in detail later but, me being me, the first thing I did look for was the provisions for the use of information from the register without consent only to find that, as usual, the authority resides with the Secretary of State and not the Courts.

By the same token, under Civil Penalties it looks like its going to be a fixed penalty system, set by - guess who? - the Secretary of State again under a system where if you disagree with his decision you have to send him your objection first, and only when he - meaing a civil servant in reality - has given a final ruling can you then appeal the decision through a County Court.

So that’s guilty until proven innocent yet again.

For once, and probably only once, I find myself in full agreement with John Hemming [pause for sharp intake of breath] on the subject of the Standards Board and the current Code of Conduct for Councillors.

As a principle the idea that Councillors should be accountable for their actions in between times where that accountability is vested in the electorate is no bad thing. Public Office brings with it certain duties and responsibilities, in terms of conduct, which we have right to expect our elected representatives to adhere to - I think everyone would agree with that.

Equally I think that most, if not all, would agree that the list of principles defined by the Nolan Commission on Standards in Public Life sets exactly the right tone for what should be our legitimate expectations of those holding public office - although this has since been extended and adjusted so that honesty and integrity are presented as a single principle and Stewardship, Personal Judgement, Respect for Others and a Duty to Uphold the Law have been added to the list.

The problem starts, however, when you realise that of more than 3,700 complaints last year only a quarter were actually referred for investigation and in only half of those cases are the complaints upheld and action taken.

Reading through some of the complaints - there’s a full archive on the Standards Board’s website - it clear that many are obviously trivial, relate to matters which have nothing whatsoever to do with a Councillor’s public office and in some cases appear simply malicious.

It also seems to the be the case that the mere existence of the Standards Board and the Code of Conduct has become a vehicle by which Council Officers and even other Councillors now regard themselves as being above personal criticism even within the context of Council Meetings - Councillors do not have the same rights of privilage on statements made in the Council Chamber that Members of Parliament have on the floor of the Commons which seems rather an anomaly as both are largely in same line of business, its only really the scale of interests which is different.

Its an unfortunate and I think unhealthy fact of life that were I a councillor then much of the political ‘knockabout’ between myself [and others] and John Hemming over the course of the recent election campaign could easily have landed me up ‘on a charge’ before the Standards Committee for I was, and I suspect, John too, would consider nothing more than than the usual hurly burly of political discourse which goes on, legitmately, during election campaigns.

Equally at least one of the ‘principles’ set out for Councillors seems entirely at odds with the reality of British political culture. The Standards Board has this to say on the subject of Personal Judgement:

“members may take account of the views of others, including their political groups, but should reach their own conclusions on the issues before them and act in accordance with those conclusions.”

… a statement which, without qualification, appears not to admit the existence of the poltical whip and which makes no distinction between poltical judgements, which are rightly matters of party policy, and judgements taken which acting in judicial or quasi-judicial capacity on, for instance, a recruitment panel or planning committee, which are non-political.

In fact, as this particular case shows, there seems to be a particular problem within the Standards Board itself when it comes to understand the difference between political and non-political activity.

Reading this case I can’t help but disagree fundamentally with the Standards Officer’s assertion that simply because the Councillor in question chose to make an ascerbic comment about Council policy on residential care, as defined by the ruling party, he was by default acting in his official capacity as a Councillor. It seems to me that, instead, he was acting as politician and making a legitimate political point about the policy of another political party - questions of taste and sensitivity may come into it elsewhere - but the fact remains that a party activist in the same situation could, and probably would, have made the same kind of comment without fear of sanction. By imposing his own unnuanced view, in this case, that the councillor was acting as a councillor and not as a politician at the time he made the comments, thereby bringing this matters unnecessarily under the jurisdiction of the Standards Board, the Standards Officer was, as I see it, clearly interfering in legitimate political discourse and by logical extention, in the lawful process of democracy itself.

I could go an higlight many other issues with which I have a real problem, not least one case where, in rendering judgement on matter of personal criticism directed by a councillor towards a council officer, the Standard’s Officer states clearly that that the issue of whether that criticism had any foundation in reality was not considered relevant to the question of whether the tone and context in which the criticism was made was disrespectful - something I consider to be a total crock of shit. and I also find myself deeply disturbed by the extent to which the notion of ‘bringing their office into disrepute’ appears to routinely impinge on private and personal matters which have nothing, really, to do with public office.

It seems that these days, as a councillor, you’re not even allowed to have a row with the sales drone in Dixons when they try to claim that consumer protection legislation doesn’t really apply to them for fear of being recognised as a councillor and being hit a complaint that of bringing the Council into disrepute. I find it wholly bizarre and to say the least horrifying that some tactics I take for granted in such situations - in the sales drone scenario, for example, my usual response would be to go for the mobile phone and loudly announce my intent to call the local Tradings Standards department - would, were I councillor, result in my being investigated for seeking to gain an undue advantage from my office for simply trying to exercise my normal statutory rights.

The one bit of good news is that the current Code of Conduct is up for review at the moment - the consultation document can be found here - and councillors, and others, have the chance to challege the current system and seek changes which will place the emphasis where it should be, on supporting proper and open democratic accountability rather than on hamstringing councillors, most of whom are simply trying to fulfil their office to the best of their ability.

Councillors should, of course, know by now that they have until 17th June to get their comments in but, more than that, it needs ordinary citizens who care about local democracy to put their views forward as well and challenge this present system - after all, if councillors no longer find themselves able to call the local bureaucracy to account thanks to this code of conduct then, ultimately, its us ordinary citizens who lose out as well if not most of all.

I’m not the first to observe this by any means - Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert has made a career and damn good living out of it - but if this planet has one inexhausable, infinitely renewable resource then that resource in human stupidity…

… and there’s nothing so certain to bring that fact home to you than a few hours a week spent on the Internet.

The simple fact is that there are still plenty of people out there who are dumb enough to…

- send their bank account details to someone who e-mails them with the opening gambit of

“Good day, My name is Joshua N’Dombo and I am been working for the Nigerian Oil Minister for the last nine years…”

- invest money in what are obviously either pyramid or ponzi schemes

- believe they’ve won the Elbonian Lottery, which they’ve never even heard of let alone entered, just because someone sends them an e-mail telling them they’ve won

Never mind the whole business of believing that your bank/building society/credit card company needs you to remind them what your username, password and pin number is or that you really are going to win the big prize from that scratchcard that arrived through the post and not some crappy faux gold pendant that even Gerald Ratner would have refused to stock, just so long as you phone a premium rate line at £3 a minute - because, of course, your card is going to be the only winner.

Now to that venerable list of human stupidity we can add all those people who blithely handed over their e-mail addresses to the Labour Party through its ‘Big Conversation’ website without ever expecting to hear from them again.

Ok, as might be obvious by now this is a bit of a continuation of something which started with me debunking Guido Fawkes’ ineptly researched innuendos regards the Labour Party’s campaign e-mails during the recent election campaign here and here. - a spat which has brought in nigh on 200 visitors from the BBC in just over 24 hours since being featured on their website.

The difference this time is that, thanks to a comment from Eliot Flack-Hill the so-called ‘concerns’ of ‘privacy campaigners’ become oh very much clearer.

Eliot, to start with, takes issue with my assertion that only Labour Party members and people registering through Labour’s website went on to receive e-mails from the party. Not True, says Eliot, he only added a comment to the ‘Big Conversation’ website.

Mmmm. And just who did you think owned that website, Eliot? After all it was a Labour Party policy initiative which was announced at the Labour Party Conference and was paid for by… you guessed it… the Labour Party.

Eliot then goes on to admit that not only did he blithely hand over his e-mail address when asked by the site but he also ‘can’t recall what that site stipulated re personal data’ which would generally suggest that he didn’t bother to check anyway, making him would generally be known in trade as ’spambait’ as the experienced netizen knows damn well that you never, ever give a proper personal e-mail address to a website you’re not planning to use on a regular basis - that’s what free and eminently disposable webmail accounts at Hotmail and Yahoo are for.

But then none of that matters as he’s sure that if he’d have known that his e-mail address would wind up being used by Labour, at a later date, to send e-mails to him he would not have bothered with the Big Conversation in the first place.

It’s here that we step into the realms of logical inference as follows:

Q - A Labour Party website asks you for your e-mail address. Why?

A - So they can send you emails. Duh!

What we’re people expecting? A personal reply from Tony? A quick note to say sorry for invading Iraq?

Come on folks, it not difficult is it? Yet even with the benefit of hindsight it seems some folks still can;t work it out for themselves.

Ultimately we get to Eliot’s real beef which echo’s Guido’s comments about Tory voters getting e-mails from Labour when he says:

“I feel that Labour’s use of electronic data during the election campaign was exessive [sic], dishonest and underhand - I got more emails from Labour (referring to me as ‘Dear Supporter’ and some of them ludicrously claiming to be from ‘Tony Blair’) than I did from the Lib Dems, of whom I AM a member.”

Leaving aside the obvious questions like…

- Why not just click the unsubscribe link and have yourself removed from the mailing list?

And

- Have you never come across the concept of spam filtering?

Both of which become rather salient when you find out that Eliot is a software developer for IBM mainframes and can, therefore, hardly claim to be a total novice when it comes to information technology/

It seems the real ‘issue’ here has more to do with Labour having stolen a march on the other parties by taking the time bring in people who understood how to use the available technology to full extent permissable in law. It just happens that one of the people brought in - Zack Exley - has a bit of name recognition value due to his work during the US Elections which allows the likes of Guido Fawkes to feed on the paranoia and ignorance of some of the less net savvy amongst us.

FINAL WORD

Just to finish the analysis, I’ve now been through several of the Labour Party e-mails to look at exactly what was going on ‘under the hood’.

First thing to note is absence of embedded scripting or IFRAME tags - so nothing was happening unless you actually clicked on a link or image in the e-mail anyway. Sure they knew they’d sent you an e-mail as Guido states - of course they did, they sent the damn thing in the first place - but after that you were only even going to register ‘on the radar’ is you chose to click on a link and make something happen all by yourself.

Second, the only link to have a consistant personal identifier string attached to it was the unsubscribe link and it appears that the only change made to this link after the ‘Clem Atlee’s Battlebus’ e-mail from Matt Carter on 19th April - which was the last to use any ‘hidden’ scripting was that the method of unsubscribing was changed from a website link, which automatically unsubscribed you further e-mails to a mailto link which generated an unsubscribe e-mail you had to send manually.

The only e-mail to use this link other than for the purpose of registering your intent to unsubscribe from Labour’s mailing list was one that was ostensibly from Tony himself, announcing that he’d gone to the Queen to seek the dissolution of Parliament, and which used this identifier on links to volunteer for election duty and to invite recipients to send their questions to Tony via the Labour website.

And just for the ubergeeks out there, this identifier was in the form of four 8 character strings - a total of 32 characters in all - which is also, as it happens, the length of a GUID (global unique identifier) field used in most SQL-based databases, including MySQL on which this very blog runs.

Third, the other identifers in e-mails appear to relate only to specific elements in the email such as a particular image or link, i.e. ‘donate’ or ‘volunteer’. These used indentifiers in the format ‘LNK’ plus a 5 digit serial number - giving too few combinations, in fact, to allow for individual link tracking. These would have given Labour only statistical data on which particular links/images people were more inclined to respond to. Did people respond better to e-mails from Tony or did they prefer to be hearing from John O’Farrell? Did a generic appeal to support Labour work better than one which played on the party’s support for the NHS?

There idenitifiers, likewise, disappeared after April 19th, although whether as result of ‘pressure’ from the likes of Guido or simply becuase they’d already done their job by that point is, at this stage, still unclear. As I mentioned in my original piece, for a legal standpoint Guido was simply blowing smoke and has/had nothing which would stand up in court. However people like Zack Exley have been around long enough to understand how even a wrong-headed and inaccurate analysis like that which Guido finally put forward can easily blow up to the point where issues with the medium overtake the message that being put across to the detriment of the campaign as a whole.

In all, these hidden links undoubtedly provided useful stuff for the marketeers looking to identify which messages worked best and drew the best response but nothing which could be used to track individual behaviour, let alone tie that behaviour back to a specific person and post code.

That just leaves the matter of the one bona fide bit of cute scripting in thw whole campaign, the link redirection on links to the Privacy Policy itself which used a redirection via a server belonging to Microsoft - well actually Hotmail to be precise.

In simple terms what happened was that if you did click the Privacy Policy link you were redirected to the page in question, without necessarily realising it unless you were watching closely, via a cgi script running on a server at Hotmail.com.

So what’s all that about? Was it really the Beast of Redmond that was watching all along?

Well not really. This same type of link seems to crop up in many places on the net and on many different and unrelated websites and appears to be nothing more than Microsoft’s own proprietory version of Google Juice - hit the link and your hit on the site/page is first logged by MSN Search and goes some way to bumping your site up its search engine rankings and also, in the new cases, triggering their web crawlers to register and index the site with their own search engine before you are forwarded on the page you actually want - sneaky, yes, in a putting one over the competition (Google, Yahoo) kind of way but hardly a threat to your privacy.

And that’s all folks. That’s the whole shebang laid bare and in detail and nothing, really, to get worked up about at all.

If people want to debate the ethics of Labour’s use of new technology during the election campaign then fine, go ahead, its probably of interest to some - just don’t go wasting your time, effort and especially your money mount fruitless legal challenges because the only thing that’ll get you is a sizable bill…

… and don’t forget, by the time the next major election comes around - probably not next year’s local elections but almost certainly the next round elections in the Welsh Assembly and Scottish Parliament - it won;t just be Labour doing this but the other two major parties as well.

Res Ipsa Loquitur

Bizarre stuff on the Beeb’s website at the moment about ‘Christian Video Games’ which claims that Christian game developers are ‘taking a stand’ against the demonic forces of Doom and Resident Evil.

Even more bizarrely, Rev Ralph Bagley, developer of a game called ‘Catechumen‘ claims that what the market wants is…

“No blood, no guts, no gore,” before adding;

“What we want are emotionally full games that don’t just rely on adreneline.

But hey, lets not stop there ‘cos things are about to get even stranger as after a rambling preamble about early Roman persecution of Christians, the sales pitch for the game goes on to read…

“Catechumen is a first person action/adventure Christian game where your goal is to defeat the forces of evil, descending deeper into the depths of the Earth and rescue your captured brethren.

N’Lightning Software’s Christian Game: Catechumen
Rescue your captured Christian brethren. Your mentor and some of his flock have been taken hostage by the evil Roman Empire, controlled by Satan himself. The forces of evil and darkness will claim a great victory if he does not survive! Take up this quest and fight for the Lord!”

All of which amounts to -

Hey guys, fancy a game of Doom with the blood turned off? Look, seriously its ok? You’re still fighting demons like the in the real thing but its Christian, you see, ‘cos we’ve given you the Holy Hand-Grenade of Antioch instead of the BFG…

And lets not forget the ‘Evil Roman empire’ - what did they ever do for us?

All right … all right … but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order … what HAVE the Romans done for US? - sorry, couldn’t resist, y’know

This is almost as weird as the idiots digging up fossils and then claiming that the dinosaurs died out in the biblical flood or even that they were taken on to Noah’s Ark - there’s even a ‘feasibility study’ on whether Noah could have accomodated them all - only if they were ‘juveniles’ apparently, which conjures images of Kevin the Teenage T-Rex stomping round the Ark and complaining about having to clean out the Brontosaurus pen - and best of all, a Christian Theme Park which shows dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden.

My favorite bit in all this is this wonderful example of spurious logic:

“Creationist researcher John Woodmorappe has calculated that Noah had on board with him representatives from about 8,000 animal genera (including some now-extinct animals), or around 16,000 individual animals. When you realize that horses, zebras, and donkeys are probably descended from the horse-like ‘kind’, Noah did not have to carry two sets of each such animal. Also, dogs, wolves, and coyotes are probably from a single canine ‘kind’, so hundreds of different dogs were not needed.”

Errr….. right. Yeeeessssss!

So what your actually saying here is that Noah didn’t need to take two actual horses, two zebras and two donkeys, he just took two of their common ancestor…

…and the same goes for dogs as well. Never mind the whole business of wolves, coyotes, dingos, jackals not to mention everything from Irish Wolfhounds to the runty lite rat dogs like Chiahuahuas and Yorkies, Noah just took a couple of ancestral canines from which all these breeds and species are descended.

But hang on a second, here. If all Noah took was a couple of each ancestral species and not the full modern day set then how, exactly, did we get from A to B, so to speak, from a pair of antedeluvian canines to the modern day variety of species in all their glorious diversity?

Has God been popping back from time to time for a little carefully re-modelling? Has he been sitting their in heaven and thinking:

‘I’m fucking bored with having only one species of dog so I think I’ll just have a play around with a few new designs, give one or two of ‘em a bit of make over’

Or could it be, instead, that things have sort of evolved along the way of their own accord - which does tend to fuck up your whole argument just a tad and make you look like a bunch of halfwits, doesn’t it?

Whoops, there I go, blaspheming again… but I’ll get to that shortly.