John Leyden at the Register only has to write two stories a day - Paul Hales
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Opposition to UK ID card scheme grows
THE UK GOVERNMENT has pared back its plans to make people carry identity cards and revealed how it will rely heavily on public support to get the scheme up and running.
ID cards were meant to be introduced in 2009, but will not be lumped on British citizens en masse until 2012, the Home Office revealed today.
Meanwhile, the Government has opened a public consultation on the plans, even though they were passed into law two years ago.
The Home Office will encourage students to add their fingerprints to its identity database voluntarily.
Jacquie Smith, the home secretary, said the Home Office would tell students that the identity card would help them "open their first bank account, take out a student loan or start employment."
It will not be compulsory for people to use an identity card for these purposes and, indeed, most students manage to pull off these rights of passage into the adult world without an ID card. However, the government is battling against growing opposition to the plans.
Smith added: "I want them to be able to choose how they participate in the Scheme as well, so that they can enjoy its benefits as quickly as possible."
"The government is targeting students and young people, to get them on before they realise what's happening," said Phil Booth, national co-ordinator of NO2ID, a group campaigning against the 'database state'.
This offer does not extend to letting people refuse to take part. Although about half of British people are opposed to the scheme (with less than half supporting it, according to a Daily Telegraph survey last year), the Home Office has threatened to fine people up to £1,000 if they refuse to give the government their fingerprints.
The Home Office said its own surveys found that 60 percent of people supported the scheme. Nevertheless, Smith said that people wouldn't have to carry an ID card at all as long as they loaded their biometric and other personal details on the identity database and bought a biometric passport.
But the problem with the ID card wasn't the card itself, but the database behind it, said a Conservative Party statement.
Shadow home secretary David Davis said: "The government may have removed the highly visible element but they have still left the dangerous core of this project.
"The National Identity Register, which will contain dozens of personal details of every adult in this country in one place, will be a severe threat to our security and a real target for criminals, hackers and terrorists.
"This is before you take the government's legendary inability to handle people's data securely into account."
The National Identity Register is designed to store not only people's biometrics and other personal details, but also a record of their daily activities based on when and how they use their card.
Yet Smith insisted that the Home Office's public consultation would stem from its desire for people to have "as much control and ownership of their own data as possible".
In the wake of recent government data breaches like the loss of 25 million child benefit records, Smith said she was aware of the "sensitivities that surround the use of personal identity information."
"We will work closely with the National Identity Scheme Commissioner, the Information Commissioner, privacy experts and others on how to make the Scheme function in the interests of its users," she added.
However, the Home Office has persistently refused the Information Commissioner's request to perform a privacy impact (PIA) assessment on the ID scheme. A PIA is meant to help the Government avoid things like the loss of 25 million child benefit records.
Smith repeated government claims that the ID card would cut crime and immigration and make life more convenient for people.
The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats both said the billions being spent on ID cards would be better spent putting more police on the beat.
From later this year, said Smith, the government would start forcing the first batch of foreigners from outside the EU to carry ID cards. Then British people working at airports would be forced to carry them. And then they'll come for you.
Nick Clegg, Liberal Democrat leader, said the government's piecemeal approach to introducing ID cards was intended to "camouflage their true intentions until after the next General Election", which was to "build the world’s most powerful, expensive and unnecessary database". µ
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just having biometric information without a interlocking system for police records/driving licence etc would be a waste of time and money
The issue for me is the big-brother like imbalance of information. Nameless faceless people access my records whenever they like without my knowledge. 

This could be addressed by allowing me to login to read my file and see a record of all queries made against it. 

There is an argument that the police and security services must be allowed to perform covert searches to avoid tipping off their target. This is easily accommodated by a middle-ground simply allowing delayed notification of some searches. 

To avoid the system being abused by most searches being delayed, delays of more than a year would require judicial approval and a detailed reason attached to the request with a named, responsible person who could be legally responsible for delays later shown to be applied dishonestly.

To avoid notifications being delayed indefinitely, the numbers of delayed notification at each age would be public information and hard limits would be set on the number of delayed notifications at 1 year, 5 year and 10 years with full disclosure at 25 years. 
Am I the only person who would like to point out how utterly delightfull Adolph Hitler would have found this database?

Of course, it could never happen here. We have all forgotten what a disaster the tories were, and will forgive labour for being just like the tories, and when the liberals have been elected and done the same again, everyone will still be happy with immigration levels, and would never dream of voting BNP, right?

It could never happen here. Right?

And I'm sure they felt that way in Germany in the 1920s too!
I think this ID card scam by HM government is an insult to our forefathers who selflessly laid down their lives so that their descendants could continue to enjoy the democracy that has endured over the ages. We didn't let any Stalin and Hitler dictators of the world walk all over us. Yet here we are early in the 21st century allowing a Scottish-strong contingent implement tyranny by the back door.

AT adds: I think you'll find that they all had ID cards while they were defending our freedom. They were only abolished in the mid 1950s.
As a weapon against terrorism and crime the only way it could even come close to working is to ban cash transactions completely so everything would have to be ID'ed - this would of course add credit card charges and time to every transaction and every vendor would need a very expensive ID card reader. Thats going to drive most small business' to the wall.
As for security of YOUR data - is this not the same government thats crowing about it bought account information from some of the most 'secure' institutions in the banking world recently?
...was never a requirement of the National ID card scheme. That is to say, right from the start of the scheme, it was never planned to make the /carrying/ of ID cards compulsory.

No one was ever at risk of being nicked for not carrying their ID card but rather, as some of the other quotes in the article point out, the main purpose of the ID card scheme is to establish a national identity database.

Registering for, and submitting to biometric sampling will be compulsory however, and failure to submit oneself will result not only in you being charged, arrested and, in the end, being sampled and added to the database, but your entry on the database will include a £1000 fine and a criminal conviction.

Sadly, any change of government, regardless of current criticisms by the opposition parties, will not change this - whichever political party is in 'power' at the time that it becomes feasible will still want the ID database.

The reason for this is that the ID database is not being introduced for any of the reasons so far given, such as preventing terrorism or ID theft.

Regarding terrorism for example, if it is not compulsory to carry the ID card it will not help in identifying terrorists on the 'street' - they will still have to be first identified by other methods before any check can be done to find out if they have an entry on a database to validate them. If such a suspected person is a foreigner, who comes from a country that doesn't have a similar biometric database to the one planned here, and which doesn't have a biometric data sharing agreement with us, there simply won't any data to prove anything.

Regarding ID theft, it rather gives the lie to the statements that access to the database will be highly restricted. Apart from government related areas, such as taxes and benefits, most identity fraud occurs in commerce and for it to be effective commerce will need access to it. That means very wide and essentially unrestricted access to the database for business concerns.

If one accepts that the stated purposes of the national identity database are bogus what then is the real purpose behind the it?

If you think about the nature of the data that will held on the database the question answers itself: The data held on database will be data on all of the citizens of this country and so therefore the primary role of the database concerns the tracking and controlling of the citizens whose details are held in the DB. It can have little relevance to people who are not on the database because there will be no data on them

Now why, in an ostensibly free-world, would a government feel the need for such an overview and degree of control over their own citizens?

That, I think, is probably the most pertinent question that could be asked today, regarding this entire issue.

Putting aside the fact that elected government officials are /supposed/ to be representing 'us', 'us' being the citizens of whichever country we are citizens of, what mandate does government have for ruling and controlling us?

The only legitimate answer that immediately comes to mind is protection against threats that the general citizenry is unaware of. Could this be the case, and the real justification of why national ID databases are required?

At this point things open right out again – anything might be possible.

One candidate, for a start, is global climate change. The answer to the question of global climate change seems beyond doubt. Quite apart from the personal experience of people who have lived long enough to have witnessed changes in climate for themselves, there also seems to be an overwhelming amount of verified data to back it up. Regardless of the causes of global climate change, the fact that it's happening seem to be denied by very few people. More importantly, the major governments of the world seem to be accepting that it's happening even if they don't agree on the causes.

Well, how would a national ID database be relevant to this issue?

Well cutting to the chase, amongst many things that will be affected by global climate change will be changes in insect behaviour. “Uh?”, will the be response of most people. That is until they realise that most of the food that's produced on the planet relies upon an insect vector for fertilisation. Well, those pesky insects are shifting and changing their areas of operation and this in turn will ultimately affect food production. If we combine that with possible water shortages, as the water content of the planet is re-distributed, with the strong probability that dry places will get drier and wet places will get wetter, we can see a clearly possible, even if not probable, scenario where global shortages of both food and potable water result.

Aha – rationing.

So perhaps that's one possible reason why implementing a national database scheme is so important now. It would certainly make sense in a scenario where there are widespread food and water shortages.

Have a nice day:)

This so called ID in the name of so called protection against terrorism is a load of crap. Another failing excuse to monitor and control world population to further carry out their monsterous agenda of a New World Order,,,,Dont get ID'd and dont get Chipped,,,a big scam
just consider whether you would trust your ID information to anyone who has shown that they should not be trusted to guard a childs rattle for five minuites!.
Fingerprint readers are not as bad as readers who must read aloud or in lip-synch. I can see where they smudge credentials, being hands-on touchy-feely.

If the Home Office MUST have this, why don't they let the Americans or EU to pay for it? The Americans are already drooling about their "Server in the Skye," and Eurofeds are seeking similar IDs.

In Blighty, everyone knows most blokes anyway. So this just may be a foreign-based phishing-scheme? I fail to conger how pub printing punters will emancipate them, students or not. Is that poppiepanda?

As for NO2ID, shite, is it that No. 2? I agree that most people don't want their dirty laundry wafting through cyberspace on the interwibble. That's just pants!


Almost every single country on the planet has a compulsary ID card scheme, why should we not have one?

If you are a honest person, you have nothing to fear, it's only the scumbag dole scroungers, illegal immigrants and crooks that have something to fear..
Thus far, I have not been convinced by a single argument in favour of Identity Cards. Several were debunked in your article - namely that we already manage to achieve every single one of the things that would apparently be administratively easier with ID cards. 

I don't understand how the carrying about ones person a piece of plastic with one's name on it prevents the detonation of an explosive device. 

I don't understand how said piece of plastic will prevent illegal immigration more effectively than border guards - people manage to fake passports, why can't they fake these? For those that lack the requisite faking-abilities, there will still be black market shrimp fishing jobs in Morecombe Bay, just as there are now.

Finally, if we are not universally required to have these cards on us at all times, I have even less ability to see how these objectives can be met.