Big Brother Watch

Can't touch this

I'm slow off the mark on this one, but I note with sadness that our friends at No2ID now have a thoroughly unwelcome near-namesake which got underway this month - Touch2ID. As the Wiltshire Times reveals, it is a new scheme which builds a fingerprint database of young people foolish enough to volunteer to give them.  The idea is that they can then carry around the fingerprint card they've been given to prove their age, to stop underage drinking.

So, as always, this latest data collection scheme is justified by protecting the children.  Won't somebody think of them?  Fortunately for us all, turns out someone did - UK Biometrics!  How kind!  The scheme's organisers have so far taken prints from 130 young people, apparently - and they boast that it's free for the teenagers concerned.  But how can such bounty possibly come about?

Why, because this business has been given a mere £49,000 to run their first scheme in Trowbridge - from the taxpayer, from you and me!

One ought to think about access to the records generated by the creation of the card.  Amusingly, the company boasts that the data is safe because there's no name or address stored on the card - yes, but the people running the scheme will have the data, won't they - and who else besides them?

By Alex Deane

**UPDATE** An alert supporter has sent me the minutes from the relevant council meeting in Trowbridge, where you will see (page 3) that the members note with approval that the business is spending money on the scheme because of the "huge potential market".  Blimey. 

Council of the (last) week - Liverpool!

We are a tad late with this one, but it is still certainly worth giving full exposure and our most hearty of congratulations to Liverpool City Council.

Their eponymous Premier League team may be struggling, but the Council - which has recently been named the most improved in the country - last week voted to oppose the introduction of ID cards in the city.

The motion, passed on 9th December, said it did not believe ID cards and the accompanying database would prevent crime, terrorism or illegal immigration and criticised the Prime Minister for giving the impression at the last Labour Conference that ID cards would not be introduced while "clearly preparing for these pilot schemes".

They also said that they would actively refuse to cooperate with any plans to promote the National Identity Scheme and were prepared to work with organisations campaigning against the scheme, including our good friends No2ID, to "raise awareness among Liverpool citizens of the dangers of the ID card and database scheme".

And while I'm talking about Liverpool, I'd like to award a second Big Brother Watch round of applause to the majority of Liverpool councillors who saw off the proposal, put forward by Liverpool Primary Care Trust, to rate films showing smoking as 18 certificates.

It seems that we have found the antithesis of Sandwell Council. Just 93 miles may separate these two authorities but it's an ocean in terms of their thinking on personal privacy and liberty.

By Dylan Sharpe

Shmoozed hack pens fairytale ID card defence

Angela Epstein, journalist at the Manchester Evening News and ID card cheerleader has today authored a typically desperate promotion of the ID card scheme after (in her own words) ‘a shmooze with home office minister Meg Hillier’. One can only imagine what such a meeting involved but if Hillier’s webcast is anything to go by, Ms Epstein must be very impressionable indeed.

Epstein is one of 1,386 unusual individuals who have applied for the card - which is being trialled in Manchester (population 2,500,000) - and makes no effort to hide that she was ‘thrilled to be invited to be first in the queue’.

Her agonising attempt to put a mumsy feel to the benefits of the ID card scheme is wretched and her reasoning stretches no further than the standard defence that we have proven on several occasions is completely fatuous:

‘I personally can’t see what there is to lose if you’re a law abiding citizen with nothing to hide’

Time and time again Alan Johnson et al have tried to dupe the public with this feeble line but it misses the rotten principle. Everyone becomes a suspect and rather than being used as an investigative tool, a DNA database is the first port of call and ultimately it is the public who suffer.

‘But I genuinely felt proud and excited when I was finally handed my card. I loved seeing my name, face and the words British citizen on this tiny piece of plastic. That’s who I am, and why shouldn’t anyone know?’

Anyone who possesses a passport has their name on a slightly larger leather bound document but not many have a burning desire to band it around. One only has to cite the Jeremy Clarkson incident to highlight the importance of keeping your identity private.

The remainder of the article is just plain terrifying:

‘if it’s another weapon in the fight against identity fraud, illegal workers and terrorism, then that can only be for the good.’

Of course it can only be for the good. How could a titanic arsenal of surveillance possibly be a bad thing? Well there's the government's chronic record on data loss and data being stolen for a start. Or the problem of being fined if your information is found to be out of date.  

To conclude, Epstein seamlessly and quite bizarrely flows into Mills and Boon mode:

‘Slipping it into my purse and slinking off into the gloom of an icy winter afternoon, I felt like I was pocketing a piece of history.’

Here, it can safely be affirmed, ID cards are beyond the realms of sensuality, even for Angela. The sooner the Epsteins of this world wake up and smell the Victory Coffee the sooner we can attempt to regain our vanishing civil liberties.

By James Stannard

Home Office minister tries to sell ID cards on webchat...and fails

After the terrors of Mumsnet and the furore of 'Biscuitgate', Home Office Minister Meg Hillier MP appeared on the Manchester Evening News website today for a webchat about ID cards.

The hour-long chat was a largely unremarkable series of probing and reasonable questions from understandably angry Mancunians; punctuated by typically lame and party-line responses from Ms Hillier, and the odd amusing faux pas from the Under-Secretary of State.

Such as, in answer to the question 'with regards to the current test in Manchester are there clearly defined sucess criteria?':

"I'm confident that once the people of Manchester get and use their cards they'll be spreading the word and there'll be a steady rise in numbers over the years." 

So that will be all 2,000 of them spreading the good news...And the wonderful:

"The databases will be very secure - think Police National Computer."

Like in this case, where an officer was misusing the database for 18 months before being caught. Alex has written about this in greater detail on CentreRight.

But by far the most pleasing aspect of the exercise was the online poll run in conjunction, which asked whether you will get an ID card. After an hour of Meg's heavy-sell, it stood at a terrific 97% No - 3% Yes (see below).

You will also see in the snapshot below, that Big Brother Watch asked a question - namely why she is using taxpayers' money promoting a scheme that nobody wants and is no longer compulsory. You will also note the Minister bravely sidestepped this question.

 By Dylan Sharpe

A plug for our friends at No2ID - who may be able to help YOU

As a result of a very successful PledgeBank campaign, our friends at No2ID have a legal fund devoted to assisting people who don't want to "apply" for an ID card.

While frank compulsion has been dropped for now, the strategy of implementation the Government is mounting is plainly still inherently coercive.

There is notionally "voluntary" application from this Autumn but some people - those working for IPS, its contractors, and the originally designated airports - Manchester and City Airports* - may find themselves under real "indirect" pressure to apply...

That is prima facie unlawful under s16 of the Act as well as potentially a violation of all sorts of employment rights.  That is not to say that it won't happen, though - the Home Office, with a desperate need for the scheme to be said to have succeeded, claimed to have opened for business with an application 'opportunity' for its own staff at the end of last month.

If any civil servant or member of contractor staff or airport worker is being pressed, or deceptively "invited", to apply, then get in touch with No2ID - they can help you.

By Alex Deane

BioP@ss: The next stage of ID cards

No sooner than the Prime Minister signals a u-turn on the introduction of ID cards in Britain; news has seeped out of the continent that the EU may be next to try and impose a system of biometric cataloguing and identification on its citizens.

According to this report, chip manufacturers are being lined up to participate in a new European research project called BioP@ss, with the intention of developing a 'high-security chip card platform'.

It goes on to say:

..BioP@ss is the biggest chip card research project in the EU. Its goal is to do the technical spadework for the introduction of an electronic ID card in chip card format valid throughout the entire EU.

In addition to its function as an ID card, it will be capable of providing a secure means of authentication for services offered by governments and public authorities..

The BioP@ss research project is apparently due to be completed in 2011 and already has a total budget of €13 million.

From one nightmare scenario - the DNA, fingerprints, vital statistics and personal details of the entire British population available at the click of a button to the government, police, local and other authorities - we now see on the horizon a far more scary prospect: that very same data available at the click of a button to any state official across the entirety of Europe.

My most grateful of acknowledgements to Aaron K Martin for alerting us to this article - it is a topic on which Big Brother Watch will be extremely vigilant in the coming months.

By Dylan Sharpe 

ID cards: register at your peril

The Manchester Evening News are reporting that just 2,000 people have signed up to the ID cards trial currently taking place in Greater Manchester, and only 10,000 nationwide have registered with the Home Office website to get an application form.

The £30 voluntary scheme is being rolled out across Greater Manchester later this year as a trial for the national card. This follows on from news earlier this week, that the Home Office was offering its own staff the chance to be among the first people in the UK to have an identity card.

According to the report, a spokesman for the Identity and Passport Service explained the poor take-up so far by saying: "I don't think that 10,000 people is very low when you think that we haven't really marketed the scheme yet."

Now, while 10,000 is pathetically low given the population of Great Britain, the question remains why anyone is registering for one of these cards.

As explained by our friends at No2ID,

"Every registered individual will be under an obligation to notify any change in registrable facts. It is a clear aim of the system to require identity verification for many more civil transactions, the occasions to be stored in the audit trail. Information verified and indexed by numbers from the NIR would be easily cross-referenced in any database or set of databases. The "meta-database" of all the thousands of databases cross-referenced is much more powerful and much less secure than the NIR itself."

In essence, each one of the 10,000 people who have willingly given up £30 for one of these new cards is opening themselves up to, not only the most powerful and intrusive surveillance the state currently has available, they are also signing up to a lifetime of punitive fines and harassment, as the authorities endeavour to keep their biometric information up-to-date.

The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats have pledged to get rid of ID cards and Gordon Brown is currently backing away from them as fast as he can.

Do not sign up for one of these cards.

By Dylan Sharpe

Gordon Brown's speech

Well, he gives with one hand and takes away with another.

• A promise that in the next Parliament a Labour government would not provide for compulsory ID cards (not that much of a promise, given that the Tories wouldn't either, and that the important thing isn't the card, but the database... but still)

• But he makes a weird announcement about a scheme for teen mothers which, on the face of it, would corral people rightly considered by the law to be adults into young mum ghettoes. Let's just say we await the details!

-- UPDATE --

Here's the full text, courtesy of PoliticsHome.

He included a strange line about the Conservative Party trying to make it harder to convict criminals using DNA evidence.  That is probably a reference to the latest Conservative policy paper. But I think he'll find that it's actually the ECHR doing what he apparently dislikes, and for good reason.

By Alex Deane

Pace of ID card roll-out increases

Although ignored by the national press this morning, featured here and here, is the news that skilled foreign workers are to get ID cards three months early after Home Secretary Alan Johnson struck a deal with the post office.

Immigrants will be provided their ID cards for free from UK Border Agency offices, while existing foreign nationals will have to pay £8 if they apply through the post office.

Johnson was also keen to celebrate the fact that ID cards had been issued to 90,000 foreign nationals, beating the government's target of issuing 75,000 by November 2009.

This is plainly the latest stage of the Government’s attempt to introduce ID cards by the back-door.

Furthermore, it is a disgrace that taxpayers’ are paying for immigrants to have their cards processed for free at the Border, whilst anyone getting one at the Post Office has to pay. 

By Dylan Sharpe