Gordon Brown still clueless on ID Cards and the National Identity Register centralised biometric database
Our unelected Prime Minister Gordon Brown still does not seem to have grasped the fundamentals of his NuLabour compulsory centralised biometric database the National Identity Register scheme according to this propaganda interview with The Observer newspaper this Sunday
Gordon Brown demonstrated how shockingly out of touch with the real world, by trying to justify the multi-billion pound compulsory national population surveillance and control infrastructure that is the National Identity Register, partly because of some small scale, unproven fingerprint biometric trials in some US and, allegedly, European shops, even though there have been no such successful trials in the UK, and no major UK retailer has decided that the idea is worth spending money on nationally.
The Yorkshire Ranter got in ahead of us, to point out some of the obvious flaws in Gordon Brown's muddled answers to the rather soft and friendly questioning by The Observer regarding so called "ID Cards".
Maybe when you go to a supermarket, as happens in some parts of the States and Europe, you are going to be safer, instead of carrying a credit card which can easily be stolen, to use your biometrics to shop.
This has to be some kind of record for biometric scienciness; the Government has historically always handwaved reality-based objections to ID cards away by claiming that we wouldn't need them very often, whilst also floating insanely grandiose visions of biometric imperialism. Charles Clarke, we may recall, advertised them as "making it easier to rent videos"; as well as offering horrific new possibilities for total surveillance, this would have blasted the Government's hazy costings down to nothing, demanding vast numbers of readers and numbers of transactions per second that even telecoms engineers would consider ambitious. To say nothing of insulting our intelligence.
This idea is both ridiculous, and, typically for Gordon Brown, a re-tread of a previously announced idea - see Gordon Brown - part 3 of the Chatham House speech on the 10th of October 2006, when he was still Chancellor of the Exchequer, trying unsuccessfully to pretend that he had a grasp on "security" and foreign affairs.
See also this NO2ID discussion forum thread on this latest spin by Gordon Brown.
See also Ideal Government, for another dissection of Gordon Brown's ideas on "ID Cards" as outlined in the Observer interview.
We have not forgotten the other recent, dishonest and misleading attempts by Prime Minister Gordon Brown and by his "no longer a safe pair of hands" sidekick Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling, who tried to pretend that the ongoing missing HMRC data .privacy and security breach scandal , which has not gone away, for which they are personally responsibler, would somehow have been less serious, if the the wretched biometric National Identity Register had been in place and linked to the missing Child Benefit Award database.
These political lies were punctured elegantly by this open latter from leading academic experts, who described them as a "fairy-land" scenario.
Comments
WHY YOU SHOULD BE WORRIED ABOUT GOVERNMENT'DATA-SHARING'
Information sharing" is supposed to sound nice. But think about it - gossip is information sharing.
There is still almost daily news of the government mislaying confidential personal information. Well over a month after HMRC lost 25 million people's records - including millions of unencrypted bank account details - you would hope that ministers and officials would be taking things seriously.
The flimsy 6-page official 'interim report' hows the reality. After four weeks of 'investigation', there's no clue that what happened is anything other than normal.
Meanwhile... evidence that it is normal: 3 million learner drivers' details lost in Iowa why collect so much private information in one place, let alone pass it around?) and hundreds of thousands of patients' details go missing from nine seperate NHS Trusts.
Anyone receiving any sort of regular payment from the government (benefit, salary, or fees) should care as much about official information handling habits as they already do about hospital or food hygiene. So should anyone applying for a license or a permit.
So should anyone who receives a pension.
Hidden behind the headlines, HMRC has been steadily exposing the private details of tens of thousands of pensioners, giving away the keys to their pension funds. Just before 'Disc-gate', it was Standard Life customers now it's Countrywide Assured's . In fact, HMRC has been forced to apologise for seven such breaches.
"Reviews" achieve nothing. They are intended to: the whole purpose is to let officialdom carry on as before.
The truth is that the main threat to the security of your identity is Mr Brown's "Transformational Government" data-sharing policies . You cannot keep personal information private if you give it to a government that is itching to pass it around.
The government cannot now be trusted. People across the country are deciding they can choose for themselves who they are and who they trust. The NO2ID Pledge is a way of declaring to your friends and neighbours that you will not cooperate with any further government seizure of your personal information.
Why not make it your New Year's Revolution?
Posted by: Activist | January 7, 2008 7:12 PM
Clarkson's 'steal my ID' stunt backfires
Gobby TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson has been forced to reverse his position after he lost money after publishing his bank account details in a newspaper column.
The Top Gear presenter rather rashly published his account details in a column in The Sun to back up his claims that the child benefit data loss furore, which resulted in the loss of unencrypted CDs containing bank details of 25m people, was a lot of fuss about nothing.
Clarkson published his bank account number and sort code, along with clues to his address, insisting that the worst that could happen was that someone could pay money into his account.
Days later Clarkson was forced to admit he was wrong after an unidentified prankster set up a £500 direct debit from the presenter's account in favour of charity Diabetes UK, the BBC reports. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7174760.stm
"The bank cannot find out who did this because of the Data Protection Act and they cannot stop it from happening again," Clarkson said in a column published in the Sunday Times. "I was wrong and I have been punished for my mistake."
Clarkson, never one to shy away from colourful or controversial commentary, is now hopping mad over the data loss. "Contrary to what I said at the time, we must go after the idiots who lost the discs and stick cocktail sticks in their eyes until they beg for mercy," he said.
Posted by: Blue | January 8, 2008 1:41 PM
@ Blue - nice to see someone else using TOR when posting blog comments.
Posted by: wtwu | January 8, 2008 5:44 PM
Hey!! I'm willing to give up my privacy rights in order to "rent a video more easily" - like I should *need* some kinda ID to hire mainstream Hollywood garbage!?! .. in their dreams ..
.. next thing you know - everyone has to give a DNA sample to sign up for renting a video ..
Posted by: drk | January 9, 2008 5:08 PM