Identity Entitlement Cards
The UK Home Office is currently (Jan 2003) champing at the bit to introduce compulsory identity cards. Except of course they don't call them "Compulsory Identity Cards" because that would sound intrusive and threatening; instead they call them "Univeral Entitlement Cards" which sounds warm and fuzzy and even perhaps a bit empowering. They won't be compulsory, you understand, but just a means to prove your entitlement to gain access to such things as healthcare, employment and banking. So if you don't have one of these (entirely non-compulsory) cards you won't be able to work, open a bank account or see a doctor.
I disapprove of the proposed scheme, and you can read my submission to the Home Office if you really feel like it (available in MS Word format or in Star Office SDW format). Read on for some of my salient objections...
But what's the problem, are you paranoid or something?
I don't think so. I just don't like the idea of government (who I am often obliged by law to divulge information to) having a means of pulling together all their data to create a comprehensive picture of people's lives. If government employees already go snooping into data they have no reason to look at purely out of personal curiosity then it's probably a bad idea to hook all the government's different databases together and allow effortless cross-referencing.
If you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to fear, right?
Wrong. I'll elaborate in a moment, but first let me get something off my chest:
"If you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to fear" is possibly the single most fatuous and empty-headed pathetic excuse for an argument I have ever heard anybody use on any topic. Ever. It betrays a willingess to allow endless intrusion into and surveillence of all our lives because, hey, you'd only possibly object if you're a criminal.
Thankyou. I feel better now. Even if you've "got nothing to hide" you've still got plenty to fear from Identity cards.
To start with, money that is spent on introducing ID cards can't be spent on other more worthy projects. The Home Office estimates its currently proposed scheme would cost somewhere around £1.5 billion, and given the history large IT projects have of being delivered late and over budget (think of, say, the Passport Office, Criminal Records Bureau, National Insurance and Air Traffic Control for starters) it seems likely to cost plenty more than that. That's a few billion pounds that, because it's been given to an IT contractor, can't be spent on those little things like schools, hospitals, policemen on the beat and so on.
Also, just imagine the joys of having another bit of official paperwork in your life. A bit of paperwork you have to pay money for and which will expire after a few years or when you move house, at which point you have to fill in more papers, pay more money and get it replaced. I know I'm looking forward to it.
But surely ID cards are useful for...
...fighting terrorism!
Not really. The problem with stopping terrorist attacks is discerning a person's intentions, not their identity. The September 11 hijackers operated under their own names and I don't see how having provided them with another way of telling people who they were would have hindered them in any way: "Oh, good morning, may I see your ID Card... welcome aboard Mr Atta. We hope you have a pleasant flight".
France, Spain and Greece have ID Card schemes and have problems with Basque separatist, Corsican separtist and marxist ('November 17') terror groups respectively. The British government fought the IRA and assorted other terror groups to something resembling a stalemate in Northern Ireland without the help of ID cards. West Germany had ID cards but still had its share of problems with terrorism ('72 Munich olympics, Bader-Meinhoff, Red Army Faction).
If anything, ID cards would complicate the business of checking travel documents at ports of entry and therefore make it fractionally easier for Nefarious Wrongdoers to sneak in. This is because the Home Office thinks one good use for ID cards would be as a travel document within the EU (a bit like a passport except it won't have room for the next-of-kin details and won't be universally recognised; so won't be as useful as a passport). This means there will then be yet another sort of document for Customs officers to have to be familiar with and for forgers to try their luck with.
...fighting fraud!
This is the really puzzling bit. The title of the Consultation Paper is "Entitlement Cards and Identity Fraud", which kind of suggests that the cards would be useful against identity fraud. But nowhere in the entire paper does it really explain quite how the proposed cards would actually prevent identity fraud. Any transaction conducted by post, telephone or internet would be just as easy to conduct fraudulently using details copied from someone else's ID card as they are at the moment using such things as credit card details, date of birth, name and address. Any transaction conducted face to face which required an ID card as proof of identity could be conducted fraudulently using a forged card. Note that this forged card would not have to be a perfect forgery, nor even a particularly good one. It just has to be good enough to pass a fairly casual inspection by a fairly inexperienced inspector such as a bank clerk. The only way I can think to really ensure that a forged card cannot be used face to face is to have all the card-holder's details (at least name, address, date of birth and some biometric such as a photo or fingerprint) in a machine-readable format such as a 2D barcode which is digitally signed by the card-issuing authority, read the card details into the verifying machine, verify the signature and then check that the biometric on the card matches the person presenting the card. This prevents a fraudster using someone else's card or a copy of their details because the biometrics won't match, and prevents them making a card with their own biometric and someone else's name because they can't generate the digital signature. But this only works face to face because otherwise the biometric cannot be trusted to be genuine, rather than a recording that's being played back. And it only works if a card reader with the appropriate signature-verifying software is available and the inspector really does check that the person presenting the card looks something like the photograph on the card (or we've also got a fingerprint reader available).
...identifying crime suspects!
Woah, let's not get ahead of ourselves. If there was one thing ID cards were really good for, you'd have thought that absolutely positively establishing an already convicted criminal's identity would be it. Perhaps not... In a recent case in Germany (where ID cards are compulsory and have to be carried at all times) a convicted fraudster persuaded her sister to impersonate her and go to jail in her place. The fraud was only discovered when the imposter confessed after 10 months inside and asked to be let out.
...fighting black market working?
They certainly won't stop any of the black market employers who at the moment knowingly employ illegal immigrants in illegal conditions for illegal rates of pay and deliberately don't pay tax and National Insurance and deliberately ignore health and safety laws. It just gives them something else to ignore.
...saving people's lives in medical emergencies?
This is probably the silliest reason of all for introducing ID cards: that they will be a useful way to convey vital medical information in life-threatening emergencies. In fact, they are probably the worst possible way of doing this. The way such information is currently conveyed is via the "medic alert" bracelet, which has two very important properties that cannot be shared by any ID Card. Firstly, it is a bracelet, so will be fastened to the person's wrist instead of sitting out of sight in the wallet in the locker in the changing room when they have a seizure in the swimming pool. Secondly, it is designed to be unusual and attract attention to itself. If someone needs to carry extra medical information with them they can do so, by printing up a card with the relevant facts written on it in big red letters in 4 languages and keeping that in their wallet.
Donor cards work much the same way. They are deliberately designed to be distinctive, have a highly visible colour scheme and convey important information very simply.
Let's put this to the test. Which of the 3 cards below do you think will be the least useful at quickly conveying vital life-saving information in the street or in an ambulance or in a busy casualty ward? And yes, I have just made up Boyle's Syndrome and trimethyl-methyluline: I'm just making a general point, that's all.
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| A donor card, or |
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clearly worded urgent instructions, or |
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a proposed sample UK ID card? |
...allowing us to vote over the internet?
A worthy subject for a future opinion piece of its own, "e-voting" is so fraught with risks and vulnerable to fraud we're better off sticking with the well understood and thoroughly debugged paper-and-pencil based system we have at the moment.
...something, surely?
Not that I can think of. Except for channeling billions of pounds of public money into the pockets of IT contractors, establishing a convenient infrastructure for further intrusion into people's private lives and creating all sorts of new and vibrant criminal activity. But hey, at least they'll make David Blunkett feel good.