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Use CommentOnThis.com - the Home Office Strategic Action Plan for their National Identity Scheme

Sam Smith, a volunteer for mySociety , has published a version of the Home Office's :

"Strategic Action Plan for the National Identity Scheme Safeguarding your identity" (.pdf 26 pages)

in web page format which allows for links and comments on each of the paragraphs

See:

http://www.commentonthis.com/idaction/

Just because the Labour government spin doctors tried to bury this report by publishing it literally just before Parliament rose for the Christmas recess, does not mean that opponents of this particular ID scheme should be idle over the holidays.

This document certainly deserves criticism, and we will probably re-publish some of our comments on this new experimental website, as well as here.

As Sam says on his Disruptive Proactivity blog

One thing about doing the id cards document is the amount of care that had been taken over layout and presentation; and the way that headers were used to break up text, seemingly to hide what was actually being said behind the heading.

We have tried similar things by creating a blog entry for each paragraph or section of a Government consultation document, culled from a wretched .pdf format,

e.g. on the Identity Cards Bill in 2004,

www.spy.org.uk/icb/

or on the 2006 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act codes of practice consultations

On Part III Encryption
spyblog.org.uk/ripa3/

and on Part 1 Communications Traffic Data
spyblog.org.uk/ripa1/

so we appreciate the problems.

Fisking these sort of documents paragraph by paragraph, is not exactly fun, but it does prove that you have actually read them, something which, unfortunately, most of our politicians and journalists will not bother to do, before constructing a political or media opinion about them.

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