NO2ID

Perhaps the way round this is to have, in addition to the main protest, a number of 'Ordinary' punters going to the HO Stand and asking awkward and loaded questions.
It's not a protest you are just trying to find out about ID Cards from the HO reps!

Black Cloud.

Try to find out beforehand if the police/security staff have any legal grounds to prevent you demonstrating as well.

I like the idea of turning up like an ordinary member of the public, wait till the minister arrives then go to the stand.

A friend pointed me to this - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center . There was a landmark court case in the US in which Californians won the right to protest in shopping centres, even private ones. We could do with this right here.

Letters to the editor of the Evening Chronicle can be sent to jennifer.bradbury@ncjmedia.co.uk according to this page.

Dear Evening Chronicle,

While not living in the area which your paper is circulated, I read with interest the following online article.

I feel that you didn't really present the whole story, and would therefore like to provide a few counterpoints to balance out the rather one-sided (although not necessarily intentionally so) nature of your article.

While it seems the members of the public you interviewed would be more than happy to part with large wads of cash for technology that even the Home Office trials have proven to be highly unreliable, a growing number of people in the UK remain to be convinced about the benefits of biometric information being incorporated into all areas of our daily lives.

The Home Office trials show conclusively that biometric technology is not yet ready for use on a wide scale. Of the three biometrics used, even the best - iris scanning - had a 4% verification failure rate (9% in disabled people). Fingerprint recognition had a failure rate of 19% and facial recognition a failure rate of 31%.

While these may sound like insignificant failure rates, even with 99.9% accuracy, on a national scale, taking into account all 48 million "eligible" UK citizens that would be stored on the system, it is theoretically possible that your data would match with any one of perhaps another 48,000 citizens!

You cannot afford to have such failures on a system that will supposedly "prove" our identities beyond any shadow of a doubt. Just imagine the fun that criminals will have with completely "trusted" fake identities. Far from giving us greater security, this highly expensive system gives us nothing but insurmountable danger, and infinite possibilities for untraceable identity fraud. Criminals do not adhere to the law, and will always remain one step ahead. Biometric technology will do nothing to stop them, and will in many cases provide whole new avenues of opportunity to commit crimes.

The technology is very, very far from ready for mainstream use, and while it's proponents (private companies who stand to make a tidy sum from selling it to us) wish to push it on as as quickly as they can, the long term benefit and need for this technology are still yet to be proven. Before even making a sound case for it, the government are rushing to push this upon us so fast, they are barely even acknowledging the glaringly obvious dangers of rapidly tieing us down to such expensive and proven unreliable technology.

As anybody with a computer knows, technology moves on at an stounding rate. In far less than ten years time, the current equipment and data recorded by it will be totally obsolete, and we'll be forced to pay through the nose, yet again, just to keep the system up to date. The companies behind this scheme are rubbing their hands with glee all the way to the bank, because they know what a bottomless cash-cow they've landed for themselves.

Then, after we've spent our billions of pounds to "protect" ourselves - will we be any safer from previously unknown, legitimate UK born and bred terrorists who can walk into a public place and commit a completely random act of violence? It doesn't take a degree in psychology to realise that people's identity details tell you absolutely nothing whatsoever about their intentions - those who believe otherwise are naive at best.

This whole scheme is nothing more than an exceptionally expensive tax on our identities, and a giant step into a "Big Brother" state that, far from strengthening, will critically weaken our national security in the long term.

If you aren't already scared witless about the effect ID cards and the database state will have on our lives, you simply haven't understood the facts of the matter yet. We still have a chance to stop this nightmare from ever becoming a reality, if we take action and stand up against it right now.

Yours sincerely,

David Silvester,
Nottingham NO2ID Local Campaign Coordinator