Neil’s back with another vain attempt to sell us an ID card or two, so…

1. ID cards are good in principle. NO2ID have no objections in principle to a ID card scheme, indeed they admit there are potential benefits to an ID scheme. Maybe they should change their name to ‘NO to the govt’s current proposals for ID’ to reflect their position more accurately.

There are potential benefits to having a secure system of verifying identity, no of which outweigh the detailed and precise objections raised regarding the Identity Cards Bill and the the specific proposals being brought forward by government.

Neil, we are long past the point of debating the principles of ID cards. There is a Bill before parliament which has completed all it stages in the House of Commons and which awaits only its final stage; a third reading debate in the Lords, before passing into law – unless of course the Lords either rejects the Bill outright or holds out for amendments that the government refuse to accept, in which case the Bill goes back to square one in the Commons but with the Parliament Act as backup should the Commons wish to impose its will on the Lords.

No amount of debate or argument on the principles of ID cards, at this stage, will change the fact that is a poorly drafted piece of legislation, one which changes at a stroke the very nature of the relationship between the citizen and the state, which provides for 61 separate powers for the Home Secretary to amend the scheme by secondary legislation. Nor will it change the fact that the government has failed, in the face of detailed, specific and verifiable objections to its proposals, to offer any response other than ‘we don’t accept your argument’.

I appreciate your efforts to put detailed counter arguments to those of us who have argued forcefully against this bill but don’t you think this is something that the government should have been doing? And don’t you also think that their failure to debate the issues with us and make any effort at all to respond to criticisms and concerns with detailed, reasoned argument says something about the government’s real case for ID cards; i.e. that they don’t have one.

How, in what is supposed to be a democratic society, is it acceptable for a government to hold a position where, in the face of detailed, logical and reasoned and, for the most part, expert argument in opposition to a proposal their sole response is to say:

“We’re right. You’re wrong. Fuck you!â€?

2. ID cards work in practise. Sweden has a compulsory NIR which brings many benefits. NO2ID oppose a compulsory NIR but cannot answer the question; if it works in Sweden, why not here?

Apples and Oranges, Neil. Apples and Oranges.

In part the article itself provides an answer to the question of ‘why not here’:

“The long history of registration has made it a part of the cultural heritage. Churches and the old church registers are for instance often the first place to visit for people looking for details about their ancestors. A vast amount of information is usually found. Today, the identity records are administered and kept by the tax authority.

This explains why an instrument that (from a British, or indeed an American perspective) could be perceived as a compulsion is in Sweden at least seen as a person’s natural right. There is an important contractual, even democratic, element here: some data (like tax returns) has to be provided to state authorities, but citizens also expect the state to automatically provide them with the different types of benefits due to them – including many that are sent automatically and not even applied for.�

The bare comparison of Britain and Sweden you are making ignores 1400 years of British history; the entire evolution of the British nation state, its constitution and its legal an judicial system – everything from Anglo-Saxon law, which even William the Conqueror had to swear to uphold in his coronation oath, through Magna Carta; the Peasants Revolt; The Reformation and Dissolution of the Monasteries, The English Civil War, The Act of Union, the Glorious Revolution, English Bill of Rights and Act of Settlement, the Great Reform Bill of 1823, The Tolpuddle Martyrs and the Trade Union movement, The British Empire, Women’s Suffrage and, damn it, the founding of the Labour Party as the first mass political movement to represent the interests of the ordinary working man.

Everything that we are, every principle and idea that makes Britain what it is is vested in this comparison, in this question of ‘why not here’?

Yes, twenty-one of the twenty-five current EU member states have ID cards, and in every single case you will find if you look at their history that this is the direct result of either the Napoleonic Civil Code, which forms the basis of civil law in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and even Italy, or of periods of authoritarian rule, either Fascist (Spain, Greece) or Communist (the former Eastern-bloc accession countries).

At the most basic and visceral level the reason why what works in Sweden will not work here is because of a single basic fact – we are NOT Swedish.

If look at what the Swedish system does and how it works, the first thing that becomes obvious is that the Swedish ‘personnummer’ is not just an ID card number, it serves also as their equivalent of our own NHS Medical Card Number and National Insurance Number – it has a clear purpose beyond simply verifying identity. It has a purpose that Swedes accept and even value - this is not true here. If it were then thre government would not be trying scare us into accepting it with talk of terrorism and ID theft.

Moreover – and crucially – there is this:

“There is an important exception: data protected by the privacy law. Personal details regarding a person’s character, state of mental and physical health, family circumstances, economy and ability to work are protected from the public eye and only available to relevant authorities and the individual himself. The privacy law protects any information that can be damaging to the person concerned if it were to be circulated.�

That, a specific privacy law, is something we entirely lack in this country, we rely instead on common law principles and conventions – the privilege of the doctor-patient or lawyer-client relationship – any of which can be removed at a stroke by a government with a mind to do it and big enough Commons majority to back them up.

We have no written constitution and no constitutional bill of rights – the Human Rights Act is not a constitutional law as it cannot, in all but the most extreme circumstances, prevent an unconstitutional law from being placed on the statute books or strike down such a law on principle; only when that law is used to violate an individual’s rights does it come into play. The right that we have a citizens are, for the most part, those we have wrested from the iron grip of the state by force – Magna Carta, Civil War – won as concessions from the state in the face of the threat of civil unrest or secured through occasional contributions from liberal-minded reformist parliamentarians like Wilberforce. Our rights are secured, therefore, on nothing more solid or secure than our ability as citizens to hold them to ourselves; personal privacy in the face of an authoritarian state is maintained only by withholding and securing personal information from the state and by our ability to maintain, as citizens, the right to withhold such information; a right the government is trying, now, to take away from us.

Neil, you have argued time and again that principled objections to ID cards don’t, in your opinion, stand up to scrutiny. Yet I doubt you’ve ever really considered the principles that are actually at stake here – those that I have set out above.

Do you understand now why we are fighting so hard to keep this Bill from becoming law on principle? Or is your misplaced faith in modernity, like Blair’s, so absolute that you also fail to heed the words of George Santayana:

“Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.�

3. All opinion polls that ask the neutral question; ‘Do you want ID cards or not?’, have more in favour than against. Of course if you feed them negative statements about the cost and technology and tell them none of the benefits, you will lower the number in favour, but that hardly makes it an unbiased survey, does it?

We seem to have a curious inversion of the Pedant-General’s commentary going on here.

P-G’s article cites two opinion polls – a MORI poll conducted for the government in April 2004 which shows 80% in favour of ID cards and a YouGov poll from July 2005 with shows only 45% in favour, with 42% against – a mere 3% differential.

As P-G also ably demonstrates, of the two polls, the one which was conducted using an unbiased questionnaire and research methodology was the YouGov poll which showed the least support for ID cards. The MORI used questions which were framed on the core premise that the introduction of ID cards was inevitable and would happen, irrespective of the views of those being surveyed.

Or, to put it another way, MORI asked the question:

Will you support ID cards WHEN they are introduced?

YouGov asked:

Are you in favour of, or opposed to, the introduction of a system of national identity cards in Britain?

P-G does a fine job of dealing with the ‘validity’ of the government’s claims to have popular support for their proposals, so I don’t propose to repeat his argument in full as he misses only one point in his analysis.

As any committed psephologist knows there are two things that must be cited in publishing the outcome of an opinion poll; the results of the poll itself (obviously) and the poll’s statistical margin for error; given and +/- figure.

Typically on a poll the size of that carried out by YouGov, which is of a size not dissimilar to opinion polls on voting intention conducted in the run in to an election, the statistical margin for error is around +/- 3% - for any given percentage figure the actual figure were it extrapolated to the whole population could be anything from 3% lower to 3% higher.

If we apply this to YouGov’s results, the actual level of support for ID cards could be anything from 42-48%, while the percentage against could lie somewhere in the range of 39-45% - one cannot, therefore, claim definitively that public support for ID cards is greater than opposition to them as, allowing for the margin of error, the actual differential between the two figures could run anywhere from a 9% differential in favour of ID cards to a 3% differential against.

There is another, more fundamental point when it comes to these figures, one which arises from the very nature of democracy as it functions within a civilised society.

In any democratic society, there is point where opposition to a particular policy or law grows to the extent that that policy or law become unworkable; either because a substantial section of the population simply cease to observe the law/policy and disregards it provisions or because interests of balancing the will of the majority with the need to consider and protect the rights of minorities in order to maintain social order come to take precedence over crude measurements of democratic will.

Representative democracy does not strictly observe the principle that ‘the majority will is always right’ – that, as Plato notes in ‘Republic’ leads only to the ‘tyranny of the majority’ – and is principle which remains very much an active part of British parliamentary democracy; the majority of Britain’s major social reforms; on abortion, abolition of the death penalty, full equality before the law for the gay community, have come about from this very principle and from the use of private member’s bill’s and the practice of permitting MPs a free vote on such matters.

The tipping point at which opposition to a particular law, policy or measure renders it unworkable and its implementation undemocratic is much lower than the 51% opposition required for an absolute majority against – the precise figure required will vary depending on the issue at stake and proximity to a general election; in the court of ‘public opinion’ one requires only minority opposition large enough and motivated to remove a government from power at the next election to win the day.

The last great example of this was, of course, the poll tax. It would not be true to say that opposition to the poll tax ran at 51% of the electorate or that 51% of the population refused to pay – also personally I never did pay a single penny of it. But when it came to the crunch with the Thatcher government there were enough of us out there to make it clear that both the tax itself, and ultimately the leader responsible for its introduction, had become such a liability to the Tory party that its survival as a government necessitated the removal of both.

(And on a personal note, one of the great joys of reading Robin Cook’s ‘The Point of Departure’ is that he has finally answered a question that has been bugging me since the day of Thatcher’s political demise – are politicians on leaving high office issued with a P45 like everyone else?

The answer, as Cook relates in his book, is yes!

Somewhere deep inside there is something inescapably satisfying to finally know, for a fact, that Thatcher did get a P45 – if only someone could have sent her a B1 as well!)

After that I think it unnecessary to comment further on Neil’s claim that “All opinion polls that ask the neutral question; ‘Do you want ID cards or not?’, have more in favour than against.â€? other than to wonder whether he’s getting his material from Alistair Campbell.

4. ID cards will not become compulsory until 2013. Before this date the system will have been running for 5 years, any problems will be ironed out. There will also be a general election before this date, so the public will have plenty of time to voice their objections if they are not happy.

Ah, yes, technology and democracy, where shall I begin?

“…the system will have been running for 5 years, any problems will be ironed outâ€? - there is no guarantee of this at all. There are already several instances of large-scale public sector IT projects where problems have not been ironed out in the space of five years and, in some cases, were never ironed out at all resulting in the system being scrapped without ever coming into full use.

Given the current state of the technology on which this system relies, particularly in terms of biometrics, there remains a long way to go before the industry will be able to provide a system that is robust and reliable enough to do the job properly. By simple inference, if we buy into this technology now, before it is ready, then we, as taxpayers, will be paying considerable sums of money to those vendors with whom the government takes out contracts just to pay for the additional research and development required to deliver a fully working system.

There is nothing in the government’s current proposals to suggest such costs have been factored into calculations, although KPMG’s recommendation that the Home Office revisit its assumptions on ‘contingencies’ strongly suggests that any such costs indicated in existing budget proposals are almost certainly going to be inadequate.

Five years is also a hell of a long time in terms of IT and technology development cycles – if it takes five years to get the system right following it introduction then by the time they actually get it working it will already be near obsolete – and again we have, at this stage, no way of knowing whether and to what extent the governments claims as to the costs of the system accurately allow the costs of upgrading the technical systems on which it relies – although, again, suspicion falls back on KPMG’s comments about revisiting the numbers on contingencies as suggesting that existing estimates may well be inadequate.

And, of course, we have the government’s track record on IT procurement to rely on as evidence of their ability to deliver on time and on budget.

“There will also be a general election before this date, so the public will have plenty of time to voice their objections if they are not happy.�

So, Neil. Do you seriously believe that were there to be a change of government at the next general election, the Tories – the only opposition party which could take power – for all their parliamentary opposition to the present Bill, will actually repeal this legislation outright and dismantle the entire system that Labour will have, by then, put in place?

No. Me neither – so your point here is a complete non-argument.

5. In 2003, 101,000 people had their identity stolen in the UK, this has risen from just 20,000 in 1999, a 500% increase over 4 years. It is one of the fastest growing crimes. It is undeniable (even opponents agree) that ID cards and a NIR will make it much more difficult to have a false identity.

Really, Neil, you should know better by now that to cite a source like CIFAS, which has an clear and obvious vested interest in the ID cards bill, as ‘evidence’ in support of your argument…

…particularly when in making their case they cite government’s already discredited claims about the costs of identity fraud (£1.3 billion) that are actually debunked by the article from Spyblog cited in your very next point.

CIFAS’s members will not only be the biggest users of ID verification services but, once they get hold of National Identity Registration Numbers will also be the owners of by far the largest Private Sector identity-linked personal information databases – once they have the NIRN they will go into overdrive seeking to suck up every last shred of personal data they can possibly get their hands on, after all, their entire business model is based on exactly such practices.

CIFAS will, inevitably, form the hub of a Private Sector database state to mirror the Public Sector one that this Bill will create for the government and, as such, one has to consider their ‘evidence’ as hopelessly biased.

You also misinterpret CIFAS’s figures – they cite 101,000 cases of identity fraud in 2003, not 101,000 people – the figure given for people affected by such fraud is given lower down as 43,000 – you forget that a single ID fraud can generate multiple cases.

As for making ownership of a false identity more difficult – yes that may well be true, but that does not make it impossible.

ID cards, far from deterring efforts to obtain a false identity will actually make such efforts all the more attractive, particularly to terrorist organisations and organised crime. To generate a convincing false identity, at present, requires the acquisition of several documents from different sources, increasing the risk to the criminal/terrorist, that their attempts to obtain a false ID will be detected.

ID cards, if the system is cracked – and it will be, provide the ‘Gold Standard’ for ID fraud, the one that every criminal will want to achieve.

Just look at the history of ‘copy protection’ on software, music and now films. Billions have been poured into the development of systems designed to prevent theft of intellectual property, the respective industries have tried everything; software, hardware, Internet-based product activation, encryption, spoiler signals – nothing has worked. The combined efforts of Microsoft, Sony, AOL Time-Warner and no end of specialist, experts and R & D labs have failed entirely over a period of more than 20 years to produce a single secure system which can prevent the unauthorised duplication and distribution of a computer program, piece of music or film. What makes you think that government will succeed where everyone else has failed?

Now think of it this way – suppose you are, once ID cards are introduced, a victim of ID fraud. Suppose a criminal does manage to crack the system and use your supposedly secure identity to clean out you bank account or acquire thousands of pounds in credit, loans or fraudulently purchased goods?

How, then, are you going to prove that none of this was down to you, that your identity was, in fact stolen?

Think about it? If that happens to you then you’re fucked aren’t you? Who is going to believe you when you say ‘It wasn’t me?’.

More to the point, even if it turns out the system is insecure, will the government and its users even admit to it, knowing that without absolute confidence that the system is secure, public confidence in it will evaporate overnight.

Let me give you a clue as to what’s likely to happen in that scenario…

M-A-T-R-I-X C-H-U-R-C-H-I-L-L

6. Even opponents of ID cards admit identity fraud cost (latest figure 2002) at least £150 million a year (they also admit this is likely to be an underestimate). The annual running costs of ID cards will be £85 million. So this alone, means ID cards pay for themselves, without all the other benefits in streamlining efficiency, controlling immigration, stopping electoral fraud, proof of age and general convenience. When we consider how fast identity crime is growing, it becomes apparent how important ID cards will be. At the present rate of growth, 1.1 million people in the UK could be affected by identity theft by 2008 when ID cards will be introduced.

Again, you quote figures from unverifiable government sources. If the government is so sure of its numbers then why not let the LSE look them over?

7. Biometrics can be encrypted or distorted in such a way that they are almost totally secure and also changeable in the unlikely event of theft by hackers. As this article on ‘bio payment’ in the US explains;

“Representatives from Pay By Touch and BioPay said when it comes to security, users of biometric payment services can relax because both companies don’t store pictures of fingerprints. Instead, tiny measurements unique to each finger are recorded as an algorithm. If a hacker breaks into the system, all he or she would find is a number rather than a usable image of a fingerprint, they said.”

And ‘Pay by Touch’ and ‘BioPay’ are what, precisely?

Vendors who sell payment systems which use biometric technology.

Of course they’re going to say how wonderful its all going to be, they make their profits from selling the fucking things. Y’know, Mandy Rice-Davis and all that; “Well he would say that, wouldn’t heâ€?

For fuck’s sake Neil, if the government announced plans to repeal the Law of Gravity would you jump out of a plane without a fucking parachute?

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Links to everything referenced are in Neil’s original piece otherwise…

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