NO2ID

Perhaps all MPs should carry RFID devices. Anyone on the electoral roll for their constituency should be able to check their member's location with a web browser.
If they have nothing to hide............

I think a better, Realpolitik thought is to ask our beloved MPs


If they have anything to hide..........

Like 400,000 civil servants won't root through their database entries and sell off the info to the Daily Mail or the odd crim....

oops! I see several people are thinking on similar lines.

I really don't think we should try to educate the public, as their preferences (see Iraq War) mean f-all.

Target the MPs. They will have to be the first to carry ID cards. See how they like it.

MPs are usually exempt from the burdens of lesser mortals - see the pensions fiasco. The rest of us must work till we drop, but they retain their Rolls Royce pension scheme.

They will probably be given privacy for their personal details.

Actually, I think you've put your finger on part of the problem. I believe that MPs (and everyone else who works in the Palace of Westminster) has to carry an entry/identity card around with them at all times. They use it to open electronic door locks, show it to security guards, etc. They are therefore unconsciously being conditioned to the idea that it's perfectly reasonable to carry an ID card around with you. I suspect this was behind Andy Burnham's comment "I take the view that it is part of being a good citizen, proving who you are, day in day out" (see: http://forum.no2id.net/viewtopic.php?t=5307); he already does this every day.

I don't believe that most MPs are stupid enough to confuse a work ID/security system with the outside world.
I, like many people, have a card to show that I am a bona fide member of my employer's workforce. It also grants me access to certain secure areas of the hospital that I have a need to visit in the course of my work.
This is quite reasonable.
To promote a card that, effectively, would be required to access my own house/car/street/shop/pub is an affront to the way that the populace/government balance has developed in this country. It shows a detachment of Westminster from real life that, over the last decade, has become more and more obvious.

Our MPs are not stupid individually, but it would appear that like any crowd, the group IQ is a function of the inverse of the number present. Either that or there is an unpublished agreement between the major parties that a controlled electorate is in the best interests of them all.
Whichever way, Uncle Joe Djugashvili would approve.

I can't beleive the minor irrelivant excuses you come up with for why you should hide away in your 'freedom'.
The benefits outway the cons 10000%.

If your a scum bag criminal you deserve to be caught. This would help and would be huge for any victim of crime.

Any parallels with Nazi Germany are just ridiculous and I wont say any more about those conspiracy therorists... I bet you think we have aliens in underground bunkers! Idiots

I am one for supporting any Government and National Authority to do the right thing. To know about who we are, not for total public view but access to those in Law inforcement who are vetted.

And yes, there will be mistakes and if one indervidual is wrongly treated by the system, terrible, but without the system 1000's of people are missing justice!
I'm with the good for the masses over the indervidual.

I'm sorry but i could not disagree more with your cause!

'The benefits outway the cons 10000%.'

This is your belief, not mine. And lets face it it is a befief as there are no facts on the ground.

'I'm with the good for the masses over the indervidual.'

A very dangerous thought process.

I would hate to live in a socioty that valued the masses over the minority.
No matter what.

'Any parallels with Nazi Germany are just ridiculous'

I agee with regaurds to the current governmnet, But what about future governments. This is the real debate, do we want all future governments to have all this extra information and therefore power at thier fingertips. When we have no way of knowing what kind of governmnet may be in power.

'I am one for supporting any Government and National Authority to do the right thing'

What is the right thing? Who decides what is right or wrong? Lets face it the governmnet and National Authorities make wrong decisions all the time. See the Poll Tax and Iraq War. (I'd also add ID cards).

'I'm sorry but i could not disagree more with your cause!'

Thats ok no need to apologise, your entitled to your view. as I am to mine
Its a shame the governmnet won't let us express our views in a referendum or by simply making the ID card voluntary. and see how many people pick it up.

Self-contradiction, I'd suggest.



And at least the actual Nazis can spell the 'individual' they wish to subjugate.

If you have nothing to fear...

Where does that put all the suposed pluses to ID cards?

So you would commit a crime to get your point over. This is one thing that makes people support CCTV. Graffiti is an abnoxious pass time that costs us all money. This means that you would be trying to enforce your views upon others, This is not civil liberties This is exactly what gives activists a bad name. There are many ways to get over your points of veiw. But you would like to break the law. We live in a feee society. But there are times when CCTV is needed. Many serious criminals have been caught as a result of CCTV. What is wrong with that. Why are you afraid of being seen. Thousands of people walk up and down our roads every day. So if you do not wish to be seen then wear a veil

You seem to be a knee-jerk reaction kind of a person. Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty ? Perhaps the original poster meant spray painting on a privately owned wall ?
Obviously that thought never crossed your narrow mind.

Do you have curtains?

Why?

There are a few points I would like to make after reading this thread.

First, i have a problem with the nothing to hide argument. when I have had this argument with people they have claimed they don't mind the government knowing everything about them no matter what example i give.

The sceond point I want to make is about RFID chips and all the other modern gadgets that are going to be used to spy on us. As a middle aged man I find most of the other middle aged people I talk to are complete ludites. If you start talking to them about chips in your passport, your paper money, your clothes and food packaging and satellite tracking of everything and everybody etc .....they just cannot comprehend what i am talking about. they understand the words but they don't think this applies to them or I am talking about some distant time in the future when they are dead.

Finally someone slagged off the poll tax. Whilst not perfect it seemed pretty fair to me, fairer than what we have got now and fairer than what we are about to get. The pilot scheme for the new rates system is being tested in Northern Ireland where rates are expect to trebble for the privilege of living in a nice are where there is little crime.

It does seem to be an argument that springs to the mind of the unimaginitive, the confirmist, the vehemently dull. In those cases countering it is very hard.

There is a hard-core of authoritarian personalities, smaller in this country than in most others but still amounting to maybe 20%, whom we will never win over (except perhaps by appeals to authority - "It is not British" or "right thinking people/the vast majority agree"). They tend also to be very particularistic, not seeing the transgressions of people like them as the same as those of out groups.

Countering nothing-to-hide is not about converting people in this segment of the population. It is about isolating them. We have to reduce the appeal of the argument to the undecideds - a lot of whom are particularistic too, but not blind believers in the wisdom of power.

I like that one...

moderation note:

Discussion of council tax v poll tax moved to "Everything Else" forum

Discussion of children's records, use of information and so forth moved to new thread "The sprawling database state" on this forum

JamesHammerton: "With the proposed cards and database, this proposal amounts to claiming there's nothing we need hide from all of the following:"

The information will be stored on computers. Only on rare ocassions do people look at the information on computers. Your Bank Manager does not look at the transactions on your account before sending out an overdraft letter. No one does, the whole process is automated.

"That's a lot of people and even if most are honest and decent, it would only take a minority of unscrupulous, over zealous or corrupt officials to cause considerable harm."

Unscrupulous, over zealous or corrupt officials already have theoretical access to masses of harmful data. However, in practise only authorised users are allowed access to information on a need to know basis. IT technical experts rarely have access to live data. Please provide any examples of officials abusing data to cause harm.

no2eu: What a stupid slogan. A man is in court on a murder charge, some 12 years after the offence, due to a routine DNA trawl after being arrested for drunken driving. If no match had been found his civil liberties would in no way have been violated. As it is, a lot of women have had their civil liberties enhanced.

The concept of 'Innocent until proved guilty' came about in an age when there was no fingerprinting, DNA testing, CCTV cameras or ID Cards. It protected individuals who could not prove their innocence by any means. Why do you object to being eliminated from an enquiry by means of technology?

Ironballs: The authorities are already after the porn merchants. Thankfully.

Certainly.

Here's one from the DVLA:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/staf ... 951945.stm

Here's another from the DWP. We don't yet know who the perptrators were, but they must have worked for the DWP to get access to this data:

http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,1665852,00.html

The information commissioner also recently condemned the thriving black market in personal data stolen from sources including the Police National Computer.

This is what happens today, when we have multiple, disconnected government databases recording different parts of our lives. The problem would be much, much worse if they were all linked together via the proposed National Identity Register.

Thanks for the info. With ID Cards, the Tax Credit scam would have been a lot harder.

How will ID Cards make the situation worse? The databases will not be interconnected. No one in the DVLA or any other agancy will have access to any other database.

How? The Tax Credit fiasco was primarily an online venture. You have no way of validating that the card they pretend to have is real, or that the associated NIR entry is unforged.


A common index (i.e. the NIR) achieves this without needing actual interconnection. You also assume the incorruptibility of the staff with access to the NIR, and the perfect security of the system itself. Both of these assumptions are unsafe.

You are thinking backwards and are being irrational Gordon.

Without the tax Credit scam people wouldn't be forced to hand over ownership of their identities to the state.

1) the state introduced 'tax' credits because they were 'taking' too much 'tax'.
2) people have claimed 'tax' credits 'fraudulantly'.
3) find the solution by dealing with 1) rather than introducing another layer of irrational 'legislation' that will futher complicate the already insane system. Why don't you go back to the root of the problem? First you have to justify taxation before you can justify ID cards for the "tax credit scam".

Come on man. Get with the program.


Sovereign Individual
__________________
A proponent of the coming free age. http://tolfa.us/ http://www.startster.com/downloads/Mast ... System.pdf

The state will presumably prevent on-line faud by using the ID card in future.

Any system can be defrauded by determined fraudsters. That is a given for designing a system. ID cards make it more difficult.


The state is taking too much tax is a matter of opinion. Sweden and other countries take much more in tax and are more successful countries by all international standards.

This will be difficult because an ID card is due to have a 10-year lifespan. That is a very long time for someone to work out how to subvert whatever measures are in place. And the state will not be able to simply change or update the system if it is compromised - not with tens of millions duly issued to the population.


I would tend to follow this somewhat but *only in principle*. Any fraudsters will have up to ten years in which to acquire the means to subvert such a system. When the insubvertible system is subverted, what then? Would the state admit to this? I doubt it. Given the cost (both financial and political) there will be a very strong incentive to keep this very quiet indeed. And from that point on, we will all be vulnerable, but thinking that we were safe.

What is the basis for your presumption? Can you point us to any evidence that the government intends to do this, or has any idea how it would even try? They're the ones proposing to spend between £6bn and £19bn of our money on this scheme, so it's incumbent upon them to show how it could actually solve this important problem.

As ever, please supply references to back up any claims you make about government plans.



Precisely.



The ease or difficulty of breaking into the ID card system is largely irrelevent. It would be a single, ultra-high-value target, with huge potential gains for the people who compromise it, so criminals and fraudsters will expend a lot of time and effort to do so. As you correctly point out, they will succeed. When that happens, and we find we cannot trust the one "gold standard" system of identity verification which the government wants everyone to use, all the time, we'll all be much worse off than we are now.

The best way to avoid this is not to put everyone's identity eggs in one basket in the first place.