Yesterday, the British Home secretary, David Blunkett, announced plans for the eventual introduction of universal ID cards for all British residents.
Personally, I am strongly opposed to them on the following grounds :
Civil liberty – if we have to have cards, there will eventually be a law requiring them to be carried. At the moment Blunkett is proposing that owning a card is mandatory but carrying it is not. If there is a law, then the police will be empowered to stop people and ask them to show their cards. It was exactly this abuse that led to ID cards, introduced during WWII, being dropped in the 1950’s – abuse by the police.
Incompetence – the assumption is that the computer systems to manage cards and the smart chips in them will never get it wrong, ever, for 50 million plus cards. To coin a phrase – they must be fucking joking. There will ALWAYS be errors, I guarantee that some poor sod will spend years being harassed because the data on him are wrong and there will not be a proper method of redress.
The police are in favour – always a bad sign when the police are in favour of something. See civil liberty point above.
I think there are few arguments that can justify the threat to civil liberty and misery inflicted by getting the data wrong.
I was wondering about the whole ID card thing the other day - since it is often argued that the legalisation(or tolerance, whatever) of cannabis has been workable in the Netherlands, can we not extend this line of thinking and examine the problems/issues that national ID cards have raised in other countries, say Germany or Belgium?
Years ago I was watching a program about people who swapped jobs with others doing the same job in different countries. One was a Welsh policeman who went to Genoa. On patrol with the local police in the docks area, every person who wasn’t white was stopped and asked for his ID card. There were a couple of arrests. The local cop did nothing except harass non-white men. The Welsh copper, to his credit, was (admittedly guardedly) critical of the Genoese.
Now, one anecdote does not make a case but it was pretty shocking to see the complete failure of the local police to do anything other than harass a certain section of the community.
Making an ID card mandatory gives the police an easy target, same as GATSO cameras. And, given the slow, over-bureaurocratised nature of the criminal justice system, they’ll spend all their time processing non-card carrying crime. As committed by all those people who, coming from a culture that doesn’t require an ID card, forget to carrry it. You know, hardened criminals like pensioners, or women who forget to move it between handbags.
I’d like to know what, say, Dutch or Italian civil liberties groups think of ID cards.
Oh and another reason for using them - forgery. The assumption is that the cards cannot be forged. Yeah, and pigs might fly. I’d put money on there being a market for forged, benefit entitled/permitted to work cards among people who don’t have them.
A pertinent question to ask here is why Mr Blunkett thinks this is a good idea and, if the cards are not to be carried for identification purposes, what use is to be made of them?
To control benefit fraud - the original reason. First proposed in the early 90’s by the Conservaticves but abandoned on the grounds of practicality.
To control illegal immigration. At the moment there is an illegal immigration problem in the UK, courtesy of the EU and the Schengen Agreement.
The first reason is understandable - to get any benefits you need to have a card.
The second is ludicrous - to get job you need to have a card. That means everybody has to have a card. Illegal immigraiton should be controlled at the points of entry. We are an island after all. But it’s cheaper to get employers to police the system rather than the state, even if it’s one of the duties of the state.
I’m in the U.k. and not too happy about Blunkett’s latest wheeze either. I would be really grateful if Dopers living in countries that Do have I.D. cards could post to tell us the good and the bad about them.
I would oppose them if only because I hate bureaucracy and I doubt more bureaucracy is the solution to anything. China is a bureacratic nightmare because the government feels they need to control everything and yet I have not seen any country where it is so easy to get documents with different dates of birth etc. By western standards it is extremely easy there. It is just a pain and an unproductive waste of time to navigate the bureaucracy.
Spain has ID cards and again I can see no positive reason to keep them. Changing any information (like address) is such a pain and requires such a level of proof that most people don’t bother so, in fact, nobody, not even the police, expect the information to be correct or current. The document is just one more bureaucratic hassle.
Legally the ID card in Spain is only a proof of identity and nothing else and no other document can serve as proof of identity. So for example, a police officer is testifying in court. First he needs to present his ID card to show that he is, in fact, who he claims to be and then his police ID to show he is, in fact, a police officer. The police ID cannot serve to identify him as to who he is, only to show the person named on it is, in fact, a police officer.
If this is not pure idiocy I don’t know what is. In my view, the less authority the government has to require me to do things and to control me, the better.
If the Government really wants to crack down on benefit fraud and illegal immigration, there are positive steps it can take. Properly resourcing fraud investigation units, for instance (which would be cheaper than ID cards), or generally not farming out essential data collation services to private contractors who have proved their incompetence many times over. Perhaps these steps should at least be considered, before restricting my civil liberties?
Just back from lunch, reading the paper (Telegraph). Apparantly the cards could cost anything up to £100 each. Even allowing a 50% discount for Torygraph scare mongering, £50 is outrageous. And guess who will be paying? No prizes.
Imagine the scenario:
Little Hitler at the DSS: “How can I help you, Mr Alien?”
Go Alien: “Can I have a new ID card? I’ve just lost my job and need to apply for benefits.”
Little Hitler: “Yes, Mr Alien, that will be £50 for your new card.”
Go Alien: “But I’m out of work. I don’t have the money. That’s why I need a card.”
Little Hitler: “I’m sorry, but without a card you get no unemployement benefits. Next customer.”
David Blunkett, New Labour, New Police State.:mad:
The problem with #1 is that the vast majority (according to NPR in the states) of benefit fraud is false claims of need, not of identity. Most people say they are who they are, just that they also need the benefits, so the ID cards would cost a lot more than they’d save.
Scientific American had an interesting article about it that actually said that the more “secure” and universal the ID card, the worse would be the complications when ID theft and mistakes occured and there would still be fake IDs and ID theft that would be that much more difficult to detect (higher confidence in the false ID). Also, anyone already with a different/stolen/fake ID would be incorporated into the new system, essentially “confirming” their fake ID.
Coming from South Africa, where we have had ID books for many years, it is completely normal for me to carry a government issued form of identification with me wherever I go. In South Africa, the ID book also contained the driver’s licence, registered postal address, record of voting and firearm licences, so it was more of a general purpose document. It was not compulsory to have it on you at all times, but it was needed so regularly (any situation where you needed to prove to be yourself - banks, university enrollment, voting, passport application, etc) and you were screwed if you didn’t have it, so I took to sticking it in a back pocket of my moonbag-thingy.
[self-hijack] In a perverse insight into the Apartheid mentality, the ID book contains just one page for recording one’s voting, and three for firearm licences!![/hijack]
A recent law change has made it compulsory to have your driver’s licence with you when you drive, and the Govt is in the process of issuing new card licences, but until then, the driver’s licence in the ID book has to suffice, so it is carried by all drivers.
Of course, our ID books also contain our racial classification, not as blatently as in the “bad old days” but hidden as part of an ID number. That serves as a reminder of the abuse that this kind of classification and documentation can be put too, but I guess that I am just too used to the fact to let it borrow me - I have printed off some info for reading (from both sides of the issue) tonight, so perhaps my opinions will have changed by the morning!!
Yes they are - after some further reading, it seems there are five categories of argument/objection:[ol][li]It would not have prevented terrorist attacks of the sort that occured on Sept 11 (16 out of 19 of the hijackers had valid visas and IDs) - although the Govt has backed away from this as a reason for ID cards.[]The cards (indeed no system of ID) are not forgery proof.[]Relying on them as the sole source for proof of identity (rather than asking for multiple forms of identification) will increase the risk of ID fraud rather than decrease it.[]The majority of benefit fraud is not to do with false identification, but rather with false claims of need or the ammount of benfit needed.[]The police are likely to push for the right to request to see the card and this will lead to abuse as they target ethnic minorities.It is a step down the slippery slope to an invasion of privacy.[/ol]The first three are valid points, although the third does put you in a bit of a bind at times - when we moved into our new flat this year, the on-street parking was restricted to residents only. To get a permit, we needed to prove our ID and address (usually in the form of a utility bill with our name on it) - since utilities are billed every three months here, this left us in a bit of a quandry!! Evenually they accepted a copy of our lease agreement and gave us the permit. [/li]
I cannot comment on the fourth point (no numbers) and the fifth and sixth seem the most contentious - and rather alarmist, if you ask me… Surely it is not a given that the state will abuse the powers it has, and to counter the “If you have nothing to hide” argument with “Would you be happy to let the police read your personal mail?” seems ridiculous to me…
The state will always abuse its powers, look at the way the current government is forcing through legislation without reference to parliament (e.g. extending the number of government agencies that can enquire on private email under RIPA). States always have and always will.
It is an invasion of privacy. By having a unique ID, the government can set up a single database to pull everything it has on me together, without my consent, without recourse to the data protection act. IIRC, this is the prime motivation for the ID card scheme. These data are then accessible to any petty government official. The police will no longer bother to investigate crimes, they will trawl through data to find suspects (e.g. DNA profiles. The law already allows police to keep all DNA samples, even if the sampled person is not subsequently charged.)
And then there’s the assumption that there will be no mistakes. No mistake? Who are they kidding? There will ALWAYS be mistakes. If it goes wrong, it’s not just money we’re talking about, it’s peoples’ lives we’re messing with. And, when there are errors, remember, the government’s first instinct is try to lie its way out of trouble (e.g. Stephen Byers) rather than come clean and fix the problem.
ID cards have been mandatory for Germans forever, and nobody has a problem with it. There were protests in the 80s when the traditional card, which resembled a passport in design, was replaced by a plastic machine-readable card - the left-wing (ironically, it’s the right-wing in Germany that has fostered IDs, contrary to America) scaremongered about an Orwellian state and the like, but that’s simply crap IMHO. IDs could theoretically be abused, but in practice they never are, so what’s all the fuzz about.
(I don’t know whether there’s an obligation to carry your ID wherever you are - I don’t, and I hardly ever carry my ID with me, but I’ve never been asked for it surpsrisingly.)
If I may reply to grimpixie’s list of the sx categories:
Correct, but that’s not the point. Maybe the US government used Sept 11 as an excuse to propose IDs in America, but the main purpose to me seems something different.
You’ve never seen one of the cards of the latest generation. Special plastic, coated in some special foil with somethig like a watermark on it, seals, and whatnot. They actually are damned secure.
Be more precise, please. In which situations would non-ID card countries require multiple idetification?
Might be, but as you said there’s a minority of it that could be avoided using IDs.
As said, I’ve never been asked for my card except for situations where it was predictable (e.g. when entering a casino, to check the age). There are no cops running around on the streets yelling “Show me your ID” at everyone passing by.
Sure, the authorities know a lot about me. But the ID card is just one bit in this system, and certainly the least worrying.
So basically, I feel similar to grimpixie: If you’ve never had an ID card, it might sound like a nightmare to you, but if you’ve alwaays lived in a country where they’re mandatory you don’t feel oppressed by it at all.
I don’t know and am also keen to find out. I only have the one anecdote I referred to earlier to go on, which doesn’t really count. I shall have to do a bit of searching, unless anybody has evidence already to hand.