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Story: ID cards: Aviation workers being 'used politically'

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That is the question

thinkfeeldo,

Thanks for taking up the challenge.

Here are my responses to yours:

1 - I tend to agree with your points here, but would add that your "biometrics" are not just yours and yours alone as you rightly say, but they are also immutable. When someone has grabbed, for example, your fingerprint it has been shown to be very easy to create gel-caps to use at crime scenes and spread your dabs about.

2 - I'm not sure that they have made any specific claims about the system's prophylactic properties. They certainly haven't proposed any collect/analyse/predict/prevent mechanisms. The first round is purely focused on identification.

3 - Ministers have actually said several times that in fact the NIR et al would not have prevented the London bombs, or indeed the Madrid ones or the ones in the US. This is apparently not what ID Cards do best. (Obvious question left hanging)

4 - The NIR in and of itself would never be able to affect the "Doctor Shopping" issue of which you speak and the extra bits that would be necessary have not even been proposed.

Your next (unnumbered) paragraph asks what the terrorists' dead would give away in terms of civil liberties to be alive. An emotive question certainly, but based on a false premiss. You assume that the existence of the NIR would have any effect. Would your logic play as well in the tabloids if the remedy, instead of being the NIR was to walk round with a traffic cone on your head. It would have roughly the same level of effect on the problem, but would be a lot cheaper. Now replay your paragraph substituting one for the other. Bear in mind that this "link and moral blackmail" trick is not of my doing but the Home Office.

You next talk about a system to predict the future based on our present data and collected actions. This system has yet to be proposed, but I don't doubt that they would love to try and build it and would legislate to have one in a flash if anyone was even half pretending they could do it. This is also not what the NIR is currently about.

You say that you must take assurances that the NIR will not contain medical data etc at face value. I quite agree in as far as the NIR itself will only contain identifying information. However, the point that others are making is that the other databases that already, or are proposed to contain this info will have an additional key field added; the NIR number of the patient/claimant/suspect/driver and will thereafter be subject to direct index lead searches. No more will they need to spend ages on each search working out the cross reference between this person on the NIR and that person on the NHS mega-database, the indexes will already be there. They will be able to scoop up all the relevant stuff from the other linked databases into one big result. So no, the medical stuff will not be on the NIR, but to all practical effect it might as well be. Carefully examine Home Office denials, the wording is careful not to deny the above, just that the NIR *itself* won't have this info.

You end the paragraph by suggesting no2id should come up with alternative models. I am not very high up in no2id, but without forcing words into their mouths, I suspect that the answer would be along similar lines to asking an anti-death-penalty campaigner to propose an alternative to the headsman's axe for decapitating convicts.

I obviously agree with your statements about the NIR being a dystopian nightmare; my words.

I obviously disagree with Mr McNealy. It wouldn't be a factor in his logic I'm sure that his company would be full square in line for the hardware and OS contracts for the kit to run these leviathans. There's a lot of information out there about each of us, quite true, but it's not the same thing as saying we have no privacy left. Kind of like saying "Oh look she's fallen in the water and is all wet and choking; ahh well, might as well just let her drown now."

Your closing arguments about tweaking the current arrangements to be a bit "better" and about this just being the first of many attempts to control us through a succession of panopticon inspired snooper-bases I think miss the mark slightly. There are so many pessimistic people; "Well it's inevitable, you might as well just give up". I think not thanks. At the moment they have not won the argument about the efficacy of even this general approach and certainly not the details. In fact all they have done to justify the current plan is to drop large hints that link NIR to immigration, or terrorism, or anything else they think somebody might swallow without thinking about it; but when directly challenged dissemble and mumble and move on to the next question please. They need to clearly justify what this monster is for and how it is supposed to achieve that end. We can then have the conversation balancing rights and privacy with potential benefits. As it stands, there *are* no clear benefits to have that conversation about.

In closing, I would like you to think through the actual practical "Street Level" back story, post NIR, of how your working Bobby is going to use ID cards to nab a suspected terrorists/illegal/.

Most of those conversations go:

PC P: Excuse me suspicious looking geezer, can I see your ID card.

Dodgy One: Sorry ociffer, I don't carry one.

PC P: ........

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