UK ID card protest will rebound on activists

A STORY on NTK, the UK weekly scandal sheet [Surely "purveyor of fine T-shirts? Ed] last week highlighted a campaign to mass email the Home Office protesting about the UK government's plans for the introduction of national ID cards. There's even a boilerplate email that you can use to avoid coming up with any original ideas of your own.

Leaving aside for a moment that this plan is an incitement to spam, which should carry the death penalty, or at the very least a chance to audition as a replacement for Maurice Gibb, there seems to be one rather obvious fault which seems to have eluded the trendy liberals up in arms over ID cards.

If a mass emailing takes place, the home office will have a handy cut-out-'n'-keep list of every troublemaker, anarchist, old Labourite, whining lefty and a Mrs Trellis of North Wales, complete with their home addresses. This will obviously come in very handy for sending round the black helicopters in the middle of the night and disappearing them.

Now this could be an extremely sophisticated plan by the Government to fool the above listed malcontents into furnishing their personal details, but given the current Administration's inability to achieve anything useful other than keeping the Conservatives out of office, this seems unlikely.

No, what we have here is yet another example of the hard of thinking objecting to carrying around a piece of plastic containing their personal information - something that almost everyone else in the World does already. If you live in the UK you already do this too. As I discovered only last week, it only takes the Police a couple of seconds to check your car registration number with the DVLA computers in Swansea -- "Good evening, Mr Thomas," said the traffic cop that had just stopped me. I got off, you'll be glad to hear. [But you don't always get off, do you? Ed.]

If you drive a car, you also have a driving licence bearing your photograph; if you go on holiday you may find a passport useful; credit cards increasingly carry photos as proof of ID; smartcards, on which a microprocessor replaces the magnetic stripe, will be universal by the end of next year -- with the processing power of a 286, they can also carry personal biometric data as proof of ID; if you pay tax or sign on for benefit, you'll need your National Insurance number; and so on, and on.

That's a lot of personal information about you lot, held on lots of different systems. Surely a single database makes more sense - one place to check if your details are correct instead of dozens. I have absolutely no objection to the data held on me to be collated in one place where I can check it -- do you? Even my DNA is held by the Police (voluntarily, I hasten to add). If yours isn't, what precisely is your objection? [I don't want to inflict clones of myself on future generations. Ed.]

Let's be honest - no one in the industrialised world in the 21st century has an awful lot of privacy any more, so for God's sake stop whining and learn to live with it. Oh, and you lot that have already emailed the Home Office -- beware the knock on the door in the night. µ

More Voices of Unreason
System on a chop? Duck a l'orange, more like
Who needs broadband anyway?
£7 million UK technology centre can't get broadband
Confusion all round as Celeron heads for the gulag
Oi! Microsoft! People who live in ivory towers shouldn't...
BBC should get off its backside