Blogger Mr Eugenides displays courage to rival that of Leonidas (the chocolatier rather than the king of the Spartans) as he takes on intellectual giantess Polly Toynbee in the argument over government surveillance and points up classic fallacy after classic fallacy in her defence of ID cards and CCTV cameras.
What case does Mr E offer in reply? The “what if a bad government took control?” one. Yep, a fallacy so limp that no one can be bothered to give it a fancy Latin name (though I’m happy to be corrected). I hate to break it to him and other “libertarian” lovers of this non-argument, but this administration already has hold of telephone tapping equipment, synthetic toxins, night-vision goggles, laser-guided sniper rifles, stun grenades, and powerful new non-nuclear explosives. All of these at least offer the option of being deployed by security operatives who follow orders without question, leave no audit trail, and know exactly how to apply the hardware to the software (to the short-lived dismay of many mass murderers with AK-47s and fist-length beards—and, indeed, one harmless electrician visiting London from Latin America).
Apart from the possibility that government agents might frisbee them Odd Job-style into the necks of misbehaving chavs, what threat exactly do computerised plastic rectangles present when wielded by people who can barely manipulate email? Mr E warns us about these horrors and waves his hypotheticals in our face, but he doesn’t actually point to anything real. It’s all very well pomping on about Polly’s broken arguments, but threatening “serious and grave dangers” and citing a “sizeable body of concern” aren’t any kind of argument at all; they’re the sort of empty clichés intoned by Sir Bufton Tufton MP in front of a sleeping House of Commons.
And I haven’t even mentioned Mr E’s catastrophic failure to understand the nature of English law: “framed in such a way to protect us from future abuses”, “[enshrines] fundamental human rights”. It’s ironic that he should wheel out such lame and ill-informed rhetoric since one thing states that don’t have ID cards do tend to have is a legal system based on common law. His writing about this curious phenomenon might have been a smidgen more interesting than bitch-slapping Polly Toynbee across five sides of A4. I’d invite my sister to take time off from giving one of her classes to treat him to some of the same if I didn’t think he’d enjoy it.
Don’t get me wrong. As I have said here before, the introduction of ID cards is likely to be a shambles of Millennium Dome proportions and a bigger waste of money than Elton John, Imelda Marcos, and Elvis Presley could brainstorm together in a week speeding on the finest amphetamines, but it’s partly because the supposed civil liberties arguments are so shockingly feeble and so poorly made that Tony Blair can get away with backing a centralised database of citizens on the grounds that it would be more “modern” to have one than not to.
At least that majority of people in favour of ID cards and security cameras Mr E sneers at have been able to point to concrete reasons why they would and do improve their everyday lives, reasons that those living under the totalitarian regimes of our neighbours France and the Netherlands have proved in the field. It’s good to attack the ropey reasoning of the pros, but not when you’re an anti sitting in a cat’s cradle made out of Silly String.
Reading the comments under the piece doesn’t help either: the complacency of the usual media suspects is as nothing next to the scatological smugness of certain bloggertarians. At this point I could imitate the approach Mr Eugenides took with Ms Toynbee and make crude sexual suggestions about what he and his admirers get up to in the ever-more-threatened privacy of their bedrooms, but I won’t because I’m not very boring indeed. I mean, do any of these all-lads-together types think that John Reid wakes up a cold sweat worrying that the Devil’s Kitchen is going to feature another post calling him a “cunt” or that broadsheet corporatists feel that their arguments are fatally undermined by Tim Worstall labelling them “morons”?
Both sites sling the word “fascism” about too liberally [boom-tish!] but Harry’s Place is better than Samizdata—not because the Harry’s Place people are right and the Samizdata people are wrong; but because some of the Harry’s Place gang still know how to make a case. They’ve spent the last half-decade defending themselves against fierce criticism from former allies and defending the outcomes of certain real-world policies, while many Samizdatans have spent it congratulating each other on the sexiness of one another’s minarchist fantasies. In the world of the fighting keyboardists it’s the difference between a corps of battleworn commandos and a gentlemen’s shooting club. I suppose that’s a reason to be glad our wicked, oppressive, authoritarian government forbids us to carry guns: Perry De Havilland would have accidentally shot his valet at least twice with a Glock before wardytron had been able to find a semi-automatic that wouldn’t spoil the line of his Henry-Fonda-in-Twelve-Angry-Men summer suit.
Omigod. We The People can’t bear arms. What if we are taken over by a future government of giant lizards?!
“Omigod. We The People can’t bear arms. What if we are taken over by a future government of giant lizards?!”
Oh, we don’t worry about that. David Icke already has their number….
Both sites sling the word “fascism” about too liberally [boom-tish!] but Harry’s Place is better than Samizdata—not because the Harry’s Place people are right and the Samizdata people are wrong; but because some of the Harry’s Place gang still know how to make a case
While this is certainly true (and only partly for the reason you give: but also because the better HPers are engaged with the outside world, rather than just talking into a bubble of like-minded gun-slinging libertarians and anarcho-capitalists), it is also the case, that, on a reasonable majority of topics, the Harry’s Place people are right, and the Samizdata people are wrong.
So there.
Funnily enough, besides the “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” argument from the “majority” of people who see nothing wrong with ID cards (is that the same majority who votes for big brother ?), I am yet to see a good argument from the pros apart from blanket assertions.
When a crown court judge friend of mine tells me that he is dead against ID cards and will not get one, I am starting to think that maybe I am not wrong to be against it myself.
I personally wonder how Toynbee can still be taken seriously by anybody. That aside, if she comes out in favour of ID cards, especially because of the specious and idiotic things (I cannot even call them arguments) she writes, then really it is a bad idea.
A carnival of fallacies…
There’s been a couple of noteworthy responses to Mr Eugenides fisking of Polly Pot’s recent Blairite love-in that, in turn, deserve a response.
Tom, at Let’s Be Sensible, seems to be trying to be, well, sensible in taking issue with M…
‘or that broadsheet corporatists feel that their arguments are fatally undermined by Tim Worstall labelling them “morons”?’
I doubt it very much personally. Although at least two Observer hacks have written emails telling me they like the err, robust approach I have to Polly’s ideas (the pornographic imagery as you know I leave to others).
The straightforward answer is to have a referendum on the ID card and the use of CCTV for surveillance*. It should appease the libertarians among us if policies like this past a majority vote, especially if the legislation was reversible by a similar referendum should it be required in the future.
CCTV doesn’t really grate against my libertarian sensitivities, because it would be near impossible use it in that specifically preemtive manner indicative of the Thought Police. I mean you’d need a hard core, dedicated Gestapo of at least half a million Agent Smiths to monitor all those cameras and make sure the proles were not planning a revolt outside some cornershop in Brixton on a saturday night.
Arg! I had assumed the Tony n TwoJags show were two giant lizards dressed up in human(ish) costumes.
Now you have spoiled my illusions by suggesting they are not. Or is that a cunning ploy to put us off the scent…
If they really arn’t aliens then I suppose we’ll have to do something about them then.
Re ID Cards just how would they have stopped the tube bombers?
Thinking about it on my run (the streets are very dull round here), I think your dismissal of this “limp fallacy” is simplistic.
Yes, most of the apparatus of state oppression is waiting to be picked up, but prior use, legaility and legitimisation of prior use effectively kills any proper opposition and allows ready extension. The minor ammendment is a common ploy of officialdom. Oh well! we already have a law to allow us to check your emails, does it really matter if we check your post? Thousands of CCTVs, so what difference does one more in your street make?
And naturally it is all in our own interest, preventing crime etc. What decent person can object to monitoring of our net usage when they are only trying to protect children? Why would a law abiding person have a problem with surveillance? Our privacy disappears in a welter of high sounding justifications.
Not doing anything illegal when I’m having a shit, but I don’t want a CCTV there ta!
[…] I hadn’t noticed this until I read Tom Hamilton’s post at Let’s Be Sensible, but the Devil’s Kitchen calls the Mr Eugenides essay that I blogged about “one of the finest posts ever written“. Does Eton College do refunds? […]
“[W]hat threat exactly do computerised plastic rectangles present when wielded by people who can barely manipulate email?” ‘That it doesn’t matter how intrusive ID cards are since we can rely on bureaucratic incompetence to protect us’ is a singularly unconsoling argument.
“Mr E’s catastrophic failure to understand the nature of English law”
do you want to expand on this?
I don’t know what point you’re trying to make with the common law thing, but I presume you mean that the guarantee of our freedom is not the law being “framed in such a way to protect us from future abuses”, but our common law rights.
That’s a pretty outdated view – it was true in the 19th century, but it definitely isn’t today. think of cases like Rossminster, or Liversidge v Anderson, where common law rights were not held to be enforceable in the face of statute, and the judgments both gave wide latitude to the Executive.
This is of course pretty obvious – common law could never protect anyone against an Act passed in Parliament, and things such as ID cards and the NHS database will inevitably be accompanied by Acts dictating how they may be used. Even the Human Rights Act isn’t much defence, given that Article 8 of the Convention ( right to privacy) can broadly be derogated from as long as the laws doing so are clear enough (cf Malone v UK).
As the judgment in Ex p Fewing made clear, common law can protect citizens when the executive acts beyond its powers, but NOT when the government is acting under positive powers granted to it by statute.
Therefore Mr E’s comments are correct – laws should be “framed in such a way to protect us from future abuses”, by avoiding giving executive bodies broad and sweeping powers – it should confine the powers it gives to being specific and tightly controlled.
This is why your dismissal of the “what if a bad government took control?” arguement is so half arsed. It’s fucking mad for a Government to tell us we need ID cards, and to begin the process of introducing them, without having given us any indication of what the Act controlling their use will say.
Actually discussing this might have been a smidgen more interesting than sounding off about things you half understand, while throwing around long words to sound impressive.
You presume wrongly. I was pointing out that, generally, English law is not built on a fundamental code, of human rights for example, but on custom and precedent. What’s interesting (to me at least) about this, is that countries where law is built around a code do have ID cards, and those that don’t don’t. I wasn’t claiming to understand this strange situation. Quite the opposite: I was inviting Mr E (or anyone else) to explain it to me, especially as it rubs up against supposedly principle-based arguments against ID cards.
I know naff all about common law rights, but your invoking specific cases to make your argument about English law (against a claim I never made, but you wish I had) neatly illustrates my point about the character of our legal system.
They would be if that’s what he had written. He said “laws are framed in such a way to protect us from future abuses”. On the whole, I’d say that, in this country, they aren’t, or at least that this isn’t the primary concern of lawmakers currently. We tidy up the mess afterwards. (I also happen to think that that is a bad thing.)
From what I have been following of the debate about this, the contents of the act controlling ID cards seem to have been central to most of the intelligent discussion on the matter. I wish all the discussion centred on this. Indeed, the last time there was a dust-up at PooterGeek about it that was the sole topic of discussion, so I have already discussed this, at tedious length and with a bottle of nice wine at stake. If you can’t be bothered to use the search box I provide then I’m not going to do it for you.
As for the “long words” thing, anyone who read my original post properly (not you) or any of the many posts I’ve written here about the use of the English language will know that’s just crap. Short enough for you?
I’m terribly sorry about not respecting your blog enough to search all through it…
Maybe this explains why –
“I wasn’t claiming to understand this strange situation. Quite the opposite: I was inviting Mr E (or anyone else) to explain it to me…I know naff all about common law rights”.
Contrast this with what you originally said:
“And I haven’t even mentioned Mr E’s catastrophic failure to understand the nature of English law: “framed in such a way to protect us from future abuses”, “[enshrines] fundamental human rights”. It’s ironic that he should wheel out such lame and ill-informed rhetoric since one thing states that don’t have ID cards do tend to have is a legal system based on common law.”
Sorry about mis-interpreting your point there. I had thought you were attacking Mr E for stupidity, whilst implying that, in contrast to your “ill-informed” target’s “catastrophic” ignorance, you understood the common law in a way he never could.
Now I realise you were making a reasonable, non-judgemental request for enlightenment on the subject.
On another subject, did anyone else reading this thread find the post from incitatus indescribably amusing?
“The straightforward answer is to have a referendum on the ID card and the use of CCTV for surveillance*. It should appease the libertarians among us if policies like this past a majority vote”
apparently he himself is a libertarian…
The main thing in my view is that ID cards will be useful for the square root of fuck-all. It is the usual grandstanding by politicians pretending to do something, when it is nothing of the sort. Same vein as the future green taxes, or most things come to think of it.
Even if ID cards could be proven to be useful for something trivial, the cost is way too prohibitive to show any value for money. Since it is somebody else’s money anyway (namely ours), it doesn’t matter.
The concept is also abhorrent because it stems from a complete change in the relation between the citizen and state, where the latter feels quite justified in considering us suspects by default.
That is well before we start talking about the implications for individual privacy.
It is a fact that most information about us exist in one way or another, but most of it is voluntary and most importantly, disseminated. That is an important safeguard which is completely overlooked by la Toynbee (but she is a dipstick), because if a mistake is made, or if your central record becomes corrupted (these are not assumptions, because we all know it will happen, we just don’t know how often and how much), who do you think will be believed ?
Alabaster
Apologies,’ that’s libertarian sensitivities’, not ‘Libertarian sensitivities’. That is, I was using the word libertarian as an adjective to describe a particular aspect of my political beliefs (personal freedom); I wasn’t subscribing to the complete ideology.
My support for the LP on my blog is derived from a will to support the local LP senate candidate for MO. He’s an honest guy and we agree on many thinks of local importance. However, we disagree on many things of national and international importance (hence the Euston Manifesto tag in my blog; hardly the sign of a diehard Libertarian).
As it is, a lot of big ‘L’ Libertarians in America aren’t bothered much by the ID question. Their distaste for a ‘National ID’ in the US is really based on historical principle rather than a belief that it will actually limit their freedom. An ID is essential in the US already. Whether in the form of a Driver’s License or Social Security # you can’t do a lot without them. The state has basically created a National ID of sorts by default. Simply by passing enough legislation to make the owning of one essential. They even tried to make owning an ID essential to vote, but that was considered to be unconstitutional.
sorry incitatus,
I wasn’t really interested in the American Libertarian position on ID. It was the idea that ANY libertarians would be ok with them as long as they passed a majority vote that i found rather touching.
And, tho I may be wrong, I can’t really conceive the person who could be ok with ID cards without having essentially a “green light” view of the state and its powers – in which case they have no relationship to libertarianism, Big or small l.
Of course there’s always soi-disant “libertarian socialism”…
You’re right to condemn vagueness (though I wish you’d taken the same line with your Euston coauthors, among others). Here are some specific concerns: (note that I’ve addressed these as to an audience who don’t care about privacy in the abstract, though of course in practice most people do)
It is proposed that the NIR will contain the whole population’s personal details and be accessible to tens of thousands of civil servants (including, no doubt, some of the people who browsed the Passport Agency’s database for their own amusement, sold data from the Police National Computer to journalists and private detectives or handed over people’s personal details to animal rights terrorists who used them in a campaign of intimidation); this will put people at risk of fraud, blackmail, and worse.
Because records on the NIR will be indexed by “biometric” information it will — if the biometrics become any good (iris codes are close) — make it impossible for people who have a legitimate reason to change their identity and hide their previous identity (including people in witness protection programmes, victims of domestic violence, undercover police/customs/etc. agents, refugees from oprressive régimes, etc.) to do so, since their new records on the database can be retrieved using old copies of their biometric information (for instance, an iris code obtained from an old photo). This will, e.g., disincentivise organised criminals and terrorists from ratting on their partners-in-crime, putting us at greater risk of organised crime and terrorism; and it will disincentivise victims of domestic violence from fleeing their abusers, which is appalling.
More generally the NIR will contain personal information which will be valuable to third parties (all personal information has some value but two specific examples of how the NIR records about a person could be turned into money: crooks could use it to impersonate them, and advertisers could use it to better target marketing); the subjects of the data have an interest in protecting it (because they don’t want to be defrauded/impersonated/spammed), but no means of doing so, whereas the people who are in a position to protect it — the Home Office, the operators of the scheme — have no incentive to do so because they suffer no penalty when it is compromised. It is always a bad idea to create such a misalignment of incentives. (Note that the Home Office have refused to make any estimate of the value of the personal data they will collect in the NIR, arguing that since they do not propose to sell it, it has no value; and so suggesting a complete misunderstanding of the concept of commercial value.)
The Identity Cards Act gives powers to officials to revoke a person’s card which may be exercised without any effective right of appeal and would — if the cards become, as desired by the Home Office, required for access to public services such as the NHS, voting etc. — let those officials completely cut off a person’s access to those services. There is no reason for such officials to have this wide-ranging power and so they shouldn’t have it. It is not necessary for a “bad government” to take control for there to be bad people in the government (see examples above), and if new opportunities for these people to abuse people are created, some of them will be abused. The ID cards scheme creates many of these (a simpler example is the new opportunities it will create for, e.g, racist officials to use requirements for ID card checks / registration etc. to harrass members of ethnic minorities they disfavour).
The NIR will contain a record of each use of a person’s card (so that, for instance, if you visit your GP and, as proposed, have to show your card it will record that you did so, and when and where); the Home Office proposes that this will also record when you book a hotel room, or hire a car, or transfer money from your bank account. It is proposed that this information will be made available to some civil servants and over the web to cardholders (and therefore in practice to their families, authors of spyware installed on their computers, etc.). There is no reason to collect this information in a way that will make available to other people and plenty of reasons not to (of which the most basic is that most people don’t want private details of their lives to be available to anyone else). This feature is not necessary to the design of an ID cards scheme but the Home Office wants to retain it for surveillance (though they argue the purpose of collecting the data is to allow cardholders to discover abuse of their cards, they have not considered designing a scheme in which cryptography is used to ensure that the information may only be retrieved by cardholders — no surprise from the department that keeps trying to bring us key escrow).
If the resolution of CCTV cameras improves it will become practical to obtain iris images from CCTV footage; these could then be compared to biometric data held in the NIR and used to build up a picture of people’s movements (at least excluding people of dark eye colours from whom the current technology can’t capture iris images…). There is no justification for the state to collect this information and therefore it shouldn’t; on the other hand it creates opportunities for lots of behaviour we don’t want (Special Branch building up a big list of people who go to demonstrations, bent CCTV operators looking up passersby’ details in the database and telling the muggers who would be most profitable to attack, etc.).
I’m not really sure what you mean by this bit, by the way:
How are the lives of people in France and the Netherlands improved by CCTV and ID cards (because we are taking part in a war on vagueness, by the way, please give specific and concrete examples)?
You’re right to condemn vagueness (though I wish you’d taken the same line with your Euston coauthors, among others). Here are some specific concerns: (note that I’ve addressed these as to an audience who don’t care about privacy in the abstract, though of course in practice most people do)
It is proposed that the NIR will contain the whole population’s personal details and be accessible to tens of thousands of civil servants (including, no doubt, some of the people who browsed the Passport Agency’s database for their own amusement, sold data from the Police National Computer to journalists and private detectives or handed over people’s personal details to animal rights terrorists who used them in a campaign of intimidation); this will put people at risk of fraud, blackmail, and worse.
Because records on the NIR will be indexed by “biometric” information it will — if the biometrics become any good (iris codes are close) — make it impossible for people who have a legitimate reason to change their identity and hide their previous identity (including people in witness protection programmes, victims of domestic violence, undercover police/customs/etc. agents, refugees from oprressive régimes, etc.) to do so, since their new records on the database can be retrieved using old copies of their biometric information (for instance, an iris code obtained from an old photo). This will, e.g., disincentivise organised criminals and terrorists from ratting on their partners-in-crime, putting us at greater risk of organised crime and terrorism; and it will disincentivise victims of domestic violence from fleeing their abusers, which is appalling.
More generally the NIR will contain personal information which will be valuable to third parties (all personal information has some value but two specific examples of how the NIR records about a person could be turned into money: crooks could use it to impersonate them, and advertisers could use it to better target marketing); the subjects of the data have an interest in protecting it (because they don’t want to be defrauded/impersonated/spammed), but no means of doing so, whereas the people who are in a position to protect it — the Home Office, the operators of the scheme — have no incentive to do so because they suffer no penalty when it is compromised. It is always a bad idea to create such a misalignment of incentives. (Note that the Home Office have refused to make any estimate of the value of the personal data they will collect in the NIR, arguing that since they do not propose to sell it, it has no value; and so suggesting a complete misunderstanding of the concept of commercial value.)
The Identity Cards Act gives powers to officials to revoke a person’s card which may be exercised without any effective right of appeal and would — if the cards become, as desired by the Home Office, required for access to public services such as the NHS, voting etc. — let those officials completely cut off a person’s access to those services. There is no reason for such officials to have this wide-ranging power and so they shouldn’t have it. It is not necessary for a “bad government” to take control for there to be bad people in the government (see examples above), and if new opportunities for these people to abuse people are created, some of them will be abused. The ID cards scheme creates many of these (a simpler example is the new opportunities it will create for, e.g, racist officials to use requirements for ID card checks / registration etc. to harrass members of ethnic minorities they disfavour).
The NIR will contain a record of each use of a person’s card (so that, for instance, if you visit your GP and, as proposed, have to show your card it will record that you did so, and when and where); the Home Office proposes that this will also record when you book a hotel room, or hire a car, or transfer money from your bank account. It is proposed that this information will be made available to some civil servants and over the web to cardholders (and therefore in practice to their families, authors of spyware installed on their computers, etc.). There is no reason to collect this information in a way that will make available to other people and plenty of reasons not to (of which the most basic is that most people don’t want private details of their lives to be available to anyone else). This feature is not necessary to the design of an ID cards scheme but the Home Office wants to retain it for surveillance (though they argue the purpose of collecting the data is to allow cardholders to discover abuse of their cards, they have not considered designing a scheme in which cryptography is used to ensure that the information may only be retrieved by cardholders — no surprise from the department that keeps trying to bring us key escrow).
If the resolution of CCTV cameras improves it will become practical to obtain iris images from CCTV footage; these could then be compared to biometric data held in the NIR and used to build up a picture of people’s movements (at least excluding people of dark eye colours from whom the current technology can’t capture iris images…). There is no justification for the state to collect this information and therefore it shouldn’t; on the other hand it creates opportunities for lots of behaviour we don’t want (Special Branch building up a big list of people who go to demonstrations, bent CCTV operators looking up passersby’ details in the database and telling the muggers who would be most profitable to attack, etc.).
Of course these are mostly aspects of a single general problem, most simply stated as “collecting everyone’s personal data in a big database creates new risks which the scheme does nothing to mitigate, without any compensating advantages”.
I’m not really sure what you mean by this bit, by the way:
How are the lives of people in France and the Netherlands improved by CCTV and ID cards (because we are taking part in a war on vagueness, by the way, please give specific and concrete examples)?
oh, balls, double-posted. Please feel free to delete the first one (and put back the bullet points in the second one, which seem to have been eaten by WordPress…). You might also want to arrange that the comment posting page doesn’t start with a bunch of error messages….
And, as last time, Chris shows up as one of the few antis worth taking seriously.
But it’s the weekend and I have emus and humans to photograph so I’ll tidy up your comment later and I might even have a stab at replying to some of your specific points.
To deal with two more general things:
I think if you asked at least one of my co-authors about that then they would roll their eyes, shake their heads, and rub their faces with their hands. You should try composition by committee some time: it’ll destroy your will to live.
The main point of my original post was to attack what I call the “Did Magna Carta die in vain?!” objections to ID cards. To reduce my case to its crudest components (for the sake of people like alabaster who can’t read whole paragraphs):
I sympathise completely about the bullet points thing. I think it’s less the fault of WordPress itself that it is my customization of the default look-and-feel. Sorry about that. If it’s any consolation it actually makes it a pain for me to comment on my own blog.
There are 3 maion objections to ID cards:
i – no one, including the government, you or Polly, have ever convincingly shown what good they’ll do
ii – it is widely accepted, including apparently by Polly, you and the civil servants in charge, that their introduction is likely to be a costly shambles.
iii – what you call the “ideological arguement” – that ID cards are an intrusion by the state, that they give too much power to the state, and that they therefore make citizens too reliant on the goodwill and efficiency of the state.
Of course one might think that those people seeking to introduce the cards should be the ones putting forward an ideological arguement in favour of it. And this was the thrust of Polly’s original article – that we should be in favour of ID cards because we should trust the state: “Those opposed to the assembling of data are mainly from the anti-state, individualistic right” – “There is a sad lack of voices to praise the benign state these days” – “Conspiracy-theory, bad-state rhetoric has become the received opinion”.
This is something she has got right – like most political arguements, this comes down to one’s view of the state. But it is where you are wrong – questioning the usefulness, and especially questioning the ability of the government to actually handle all the information about us in a competent, fair and secure way, are all arguements from ideology.
The state is NOT competent nor fair nor secure enough to be entrusted with such huge amounts of personal data – how is this not an ideological arguement?
And as for the idea that we simply can’t object to this because there are “far more dangerous existing technologies that supposedly ideological objectors have no objections to”. Well, I suspect that:
i – actually there aren’t that many you could name. Most of the ones in your original post for instance are ludicrous as comparisons – Night vision goggles? are you for real?
ii – the few that do exist are mainly used in a limited, specified way for clear and generally stable purposes – eg the DVLA database
iii – where they are not, then the same people who object to ID cards DO oppose them – eg Blair’s decision to reverse the Wilson doctrine.
The reason for not having ID cards is actually a central one regarding the place of the individual in a free democratic society: you are not required to identify yourself for just being. IE, I do not have to account to the state for myself. We have them here (SA) and since you can’t even open a bloody bank account without one, or vote, for that matter, there is more or less total compliance (although there is also a thriving industry in fake IDs — and also genuine ones issued illicitly by naughty, greedy officials, of whom we have many). Now they are going the European route, suitably impressed by its totalitarianism marketed with a smiley face. Our ID books will be replaced by cards with chips that will give access to, for example, my medical records.
Now what justification could there be for seeking such a power? Our liberal constitution, with its emphasis on the right to privacy and the sanctity of the individual, doesn’t like it. But people will sigh and join the queue. It’s all so wearyingly inevitable, spineless and craven (and I don’t exclude myself in this assessment).
So welcome to the late arrival of 1984, Britons who never never will be slaves…
By the way, the question about bad governments misusing dodgy legislation is a fair one. Ian Smith’s oppressive security laws have been very useful to the merry government of Robert Mugabe. For example.
I like this idea that I’m always wearing a Henry-Fonda-in-Twelve-Angry-Men summer suit, or something similar. On the Huddle For Free Expression someone or other who was interviewing me – me! of all people – for the radio said I had a “Bryan Ferry air” about me.
In fact I’ve just been painting the living room, and I’m sat here in paint-spattered jeans, crappy shoes that I’m about to throw out, and yesterday’s pants. Still, I hear that Ferry’s just shat himself, again, so I win.
PS – “some of the Harry’s Place gang still know how to make a case”. I can see what you’re saying here; you’re saying that I need to teach Harry, David T, Brownie, Marcus, Gene, Graham, Adam Lebor, Venichka, Gordon, Brett and Dan how to make a case.
They’ll have to learn for themselves, I have enough to do already.
[…] Any one who believes that the civil liberties objections to the introduction of identity cards and the near unchecked growth of the database state and the surveillence society are ‘shockingly feeble‘ or a very middle-class disorder would do well to take the time to read both the Information Commissioner’s Office’s ‘Issues Paper: Protecting Children’s Personal Information’ and the Foundation for Information Policy Research’s report on which it is based, Children’s Databases—Safety and Privacy before writing off such concerns. […]