No to ID

Unsurprisingly I am opposed to ID cards. Shocking, I know.

ID cards as being pushed on three main fronts: They will help the fight against terrorism, they will help the fight against crime, they will help prevent and return illegal imigrants.

The terrorism point is my favourite. It uses the public’s ignorance against them something cronic. Almost all of the terrorists involved in the recent terrorist attacks on the UK, Spain, America, etc, have had perfectly valid ID which they left in places they hoped it would get found. They are not like ‘old skool’ terrorists who wanted to plant their bomb and scurry away before it blew up. They are martyrs, they know their bombs will explode with them attached to them. They want that to happen, so who they are either isn’t important, or is very important because they have composed messages to be found once they are done.

The fighting crime point is also quite high in my list of amusing points. They have said, on many occasions, that this will not turn into a case of ‘papers please’. The police will not be allowed to ask you for your ID card during their routine stop and searches, so what’s it going to do for the fight against crime? Oh, of course. The lines about it not becoming a case of ‘papers please’ is just a smoke screen so they can get the cards in place. Once they’ve spent billions rolling out the system, forced everyone to pay hundreds of pounds for the right to be stamped like cattle, they’ll then realse! Oh my god, you know what, these don’t work as tools to fight crime unless the police can ask to see them! Convienient, the opposition will want to cry, but they will quietly allow the amendment because billions have already been spent and the cards are already in place.

Illegal immigrants do not, on the whole, get jobs with reputable businesses. They get jobs at very low rates of pay for businesses which are happy to exploit them. These businesses don’t care now if the person is illegally in the country, what difference is an ID card going to make? There are already in place perfectly viable and useable methods of checking if a person can legally work in this country, the businesses which employ illegal workers are the ones which don’t care what the check returns or don’t even bother to do one at all. There is enough undercover footage of people making it clear that they can’t legally work in the UK and these people being totally unconcerned for this to be considered fact. If the police can’t stop you and ask to see your ID, so how are they going to be able to use the system to find and deport illegals?

The police will eventually be given the power to stop you and ask for your ID card. The majority of people in this country don’t care about that though. They’ve no experience of being harrassed by the police because they’re white. ID card stop and searches will provide yet another reason to stop minority groups, to ask for them to prove their right to exist.

No computer system is perfect. Biometrics are not perfect. What happens if your details are lost or stolen? Can someone tell me how I can get a replacement retina and set of fingerprints please? Once your information is lost there are no ways of changing it. There already exists the technology to clone finger prints, if everyone in the country is on the database then there will be even more reasons for people to develop this cloning technology for all biometric data. Once you’ve lost control of your biometric identity, what then? When the technology is the sole arbitor of your right to exist freely, what happens when someone cracks the database and changes your bio-scans to their own? When your ID card says you’re not you, how do you get your details back? What happens when the more mundane happens and the biometric scanner returns a false when it should have returned a true? How long does that follow you for?

ID card supporters have ignored all of the questions and jumped on a knee-jerk billion pound bandwagon. It’d be sad if it wasn’t going to cost me a large amount of money.