I wish they really had proved that. I wouldn’t mind paying a load of tax to see the footage.

First, systemic incompetence. When it comes to ambitious IT programmes, the government’s proved time and time again that it couldn’t hit a cow’s arse with a banjo. There are much better things to spend billions on – just in crime and terror stakes, investing in cops and security services.

Second, individual incompetence. We’ve all experienced “computer says no” bullshit, whether it’s trying to get ebay accounts unfrozen or persuading councils to let you pay council tax. When – not if – that incompetence affects ID cards, it’ll make Kafka seem like a cheery optimist.

Third, bad data. DVLA with 10 million more cars than exist on the roads, loads of cars not on the database at all. Massive error rates in PNC. THousands of people wrongly described as criminals when being background checked. etc.

Fourth: Mission creep. With any system like this you need to look not just at what it’s intended for, but what it can be used for. The “income tax to fight napoleon” thing is a good example of that, as are anti terrorism control orders. Temporary powers almost always become permanent powers; possible uses almost always become everyday uses.

And there’s mission creep in the outside world too: enabling police to randomly stop motorists was intended to fight drink driving, but I’ve been stopped in checks to make sure my tyres were legal, because one of my passengers looked like he might take drugs, because I was driving near a red-light area, because the police were doing a crackdown on burglars… you get the idea.

It’s far too long to quote, but there’s a superb section in Unspeak that shows how anti-terror stuff can be twisted – so for example the legislation means that if your gran sends money to a charity thinking it’s feeding afghan orphans, but said charity turns out to have been compromised and some funds redirected to Osama, then your gran is an “enemy combatant” and can therefore be held indefinitely and subject to repetitive administration of justified force – ie, beaten to within an inch of her life.

Christ, I’m depressed now.

ID cards and the National Identity Register, which will contain less information on individuals than the data collected by the average store card

Well, obviously: your store card records what you buy. Over a couple of years, that could be thousands and thousands of individual items, compared to, on the ID database, merely ten fingerprints, two retina scans, one DNA profile, one signature, etc. Far more information on a store card, but far more intrusive information on the ID card.

And has anyone told Blair that store cards are voluntary and free?

Actually, the Government appear to have decided to appropriate our store card data anyway, in what would be blatant violation of the Data Protection Act if it weren’t for the usual “Oh, unless it’s us, in which case it’s OK” clause. Time to ditch those cards, then.

Will be? It *is* a stealth tax. I’m not worried that it might turn into one, it already *is* one by design.

I agree entirely. It’s a blatantly obvious tax.

It was reported in November that fragments of the bomb used in the Omagh bombing of 1998 had enough usable DNA on the bomb’s toggle switch and tape to reconstruct a suspect DNA profile using the LCN technique. When cross-referenced against the UK DNA database, this profile produced a match.

A 14 year-old schoolboy from Nottingham.

Worth reading in full.

However, the nice people at NO2ID (thank you), have also identified a couple of new and exciting elements in the PM’s email, including one genuine misrepresentation – 900,000 untraced crime-scene marks is not the same as 900,000 unsolved and potentially soluble crimes. See notes here.

Sorry Granpa, I wasn’t around then so don’t remember it! ;-)

“In many cases, these estimates deliberately exaggerate the cost of ID cards by adding in the cost of biometric passports. This is both unfair and inaccurate. As I have said, it is clear that if we want to travel abroad, we will soon have no choice but to have a biometric passport.”

Stop me if I’m barking up totally the wrong tree here, but hasn’t the British Government had a teensy weensy bit of influence over forthcoming new passport regulations?

Oh I don’t know. The stated purpose of income tax was to fund the defeat of Napoleon.