Orwellian
Government listens to turkeys, bans Christmas
Rather than go over the insane anti-file sharing plan the government apparently intends to implement, here’s an extract from this month’s The Word magazine talking about EMI.
The average salary across EMI is estimated at £57,328, heavily weighted towards the top. A FTSE 100 company on average has fewer than 20 execs on £500K-plus; EMI is reported to have over 50. These top execs are the ones sitting on top of massive severance packages too…
While all labels rely on that 10 per cent of signings who are multi-platinum successes in every key territory, EMI has (Norah Jones excepted) not signed and nurtured one this side of the millennium…
EMI ignored the warnings of the last ten years to its detriment. The same accusation can be levelled at all the majors. For the first time, a format (MP3) and a delivery channel (online) were developed outside of the labels’ control; their inability to understand the opportunities and possibilities were pre-Luddite.
So obviously, the solution is to cripple the internet industry. Sheesh.
What a bunch of discs
When the Guardian urged the government to “free our data”, I’m pretty sure they didn’t mean that the government should compromise the personal data of half the population. The “discgate” (gah, why does everything need to be called “-gate”?) scandal is all the more horrifying because of the sheer stupidity involved: it seems that 25 million people’s data was entrusted to a junior clerk and stored without encryption before burnt to CD and lost in the post. [The data was encrypted after all. Thanks Charles.]
It’s a spectacular display of utter incompetence, but of course there’s a bigger point here. There are all kinds of rules, procedures and laws to prevent such stupidity from happening, and none of them made any difference.
These are the people who will protect us from ID thieves? Jesus wept.
And that’s why the ID card scheme gives sensible people the heebie-jeebies. It’s not fear of Big Brother watching us; it’s the perfectly reasonable fear that Big Brother is D-U-M dumb. What’s the point of biometric scanning and other high-tech protection if the entire system can be compromised by a clerk with a CD burner?
As this sorry saga proves, relying on the government to safeguard our personal data is like asking Fred West to babysit.
Stars of CCTV
London has 10,000 crime-fighting CCTV cameras which cost £200 million, figures show today.
But an analysis of the publicly funded spy network, which is owned and controlled by local authorities and Transport for London, has cast doubt on its ability to help solve crime.
A comparison of the number of cameras in each London borough with the proportion of crimes solved there found that police are no more likely to catch offenders in areas with hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any.
Embarrassed by your passport photo? This’d be a good time to change it
If your passport is due for renewal in the next wee while, it’s worth doing it sooner rather than later: prices are going up again, and they’ll go up even more over the next few years if the ID card system isn’t thrown into the skip where it belongs.
Looking on the bright side, the Passport Office - sorry, I mean the not-Orwellian-at-all Identity & Passport Service - seems to be on top of its game just now, because the whole process from online submission to receiving my shiny new passport took just over a week. And for now at least, you don’t need to give the government your DNA or get yourself microchipped.
A good day to bury bad news
Government: Look! Over there! It’s Blair! He’s finally resigning!
*everybody runs over to listen to Blair’s speech*
*government waits until everyone’s out of earshot*
Government (whispering): The ID card system’s going to cost another half billion.
Ah, ID cards. Remember them? They were going to cost £3.1 billion and save us all from everything. The official cost’s gone up to £5.5 billion now, and it would have been higher still if the Home Office hadn’t palmed off a half-billion in costs to the Foreign Office so they’re no longer included in the total.
It’s worth noting that the £5.5 billion is the official cost, which no sane person believes is anywhere close to the real cost of this shambles.
It’s also worth noting that by delaying the announcement, the government broke the law: Section 37 of the Identity Cards Act 2006, to be precise, which says the announcements should be “before the end of every six months” - so these figures should have been out in early April.
Let’s recap, shall we?
- Every justification for an ID card system - terrorism, identity fraud, immigration etc - has been comprehensively debunked.
- In IT terms, the government couldn’t hit a cow’s arse with a banjo. This will be the most ambitious IT project the government has ever attempted.
- When the government embarked on its initial public consultation about ID cards, 5,000-odd concerned anti-ID petitions were lumped together as a single complaint from (I assume) a Mr Internet, enabling the Home Office to claim widespread public support.
- The official figures - which no sane person believes - are already spiralling out of control to the tune of a billion quid per year.
- A few years back the government angrily denied claims that the ID card system would cost £6 billion. If trends continue, the official cost of the ID card system will hit £6 billion in October.
- If it thinks doing so could help avoid anti-ID card publicity, the government will cheerfully break the law.
And yet despite all this, the anti-ID crowd think it’s going to be an expensive disaster! The fools!
ID cards - it’s about curtains
This is not my idea - I saw it on a site, possibly Fark, today - and the original was worded much better than this half-remembered paraphrase, but hopefully it’ll survive my mangling: Not wanting ID cards or over-the-top state surveillance isn’t because you’re up to no good; it’s about privacy, the same way you put curtains on your windows. You don’t have curtains because you’re up to no good; you have them because having people staring into your house is annoying and occasionally creepy.
ID cards: a price worth paying
Sorry, I’m back on ID cards again. But it’s Squander Two’s fault, because his excellent post on the subject got me thinking about one of Blair’s emailed arguments:
If national ID cards do help us counter crime and terrorism, it is, of course, the law-abiding majority who will benefit and whose own liberties will be protected. This helps explain why, according to the recent authoritative Social Attitudes survey, the majority of people favour compulsory ID cards.
I’ve mentioned that survey before, but it’s worth coming back to. The key point:
Seven out of ten people believe that compulsory ID cards are “a price worth paying” to combat terrorism.
Now maybe I’m wrong - I can’t check, because the actual survey is a paid-only publication and I can’t see how the questions were worded - but assuming the above line is an accurate reflection of what people were asked, then it’s a leading question - it’s based on the very shaky assumption that ID cards do indeed combat terrorism. Based on the evidence so far, the survey could easily have asked this instead:
Compulsory ID cards won’t do anything to stop terrorism but could enable every little petty jobsworth to get on your tits, could make it considerably easier for criminals to steal your identity and could make it impossible for you to get benefits, to get healthcare, to travel or even to bank if some incompetent arse mucks up your entry on the database. Is that a price worth paying to prevent the government from looking stupid?
Sadly, they weren’t asked that, so the figure of 70% in favour of compulsory ID cards… hang on a minute, wasn’t this scheme supposed to be voluntary?… has to stand. So what else is A Price Worth Paying?
22% believe torturing terror suspects is a price worth paying.
35% believe that banning “some” peaceful protests and demos is a price worth paying.
45% believe that denying terror suspects trial by jury is a price worth paying.
79% believe that detention for weeks at a time without charge is a price worth paying.
Again, the questions were based on combatting terrorism, and as many others have pointed out the answers are based on the belief that these things would only affect other people, such as brown men with beards who look a bit shifty. I’d love to see how the people surveyed would have responded to this, which is essentially the same questions put in a slightly different way:
If you were peacefully protesting against a government policy and you were told such demonstrations were illegal, arrested, detained without charge, kept incommunicado for weeks, forced to endure physical and mental torture and finally released without apology or compensation, knowing that the state will watch you as a suspected terrorist for the rest of your days, and you were told that, hey, it’s a price worth paying… would you agree?
Far fetched? Not when we can falsely accuse people of training 9/11 hijackers, stick them in Belmarsh for five months and let them out again without any compensation, even though they’ve lost their job and suffered god knows what inside:
The Home Office argues that since Mr Raissi has neither been charged with an offence nor “completely exonerated” he does not qualify [for compensation].
That “completely exonerated” dig is telling - remember that Mr Raissi hasn’t been charged, so he’s innocent until proven guilty. As Steven Poole writes in his book, Unspeak:
You might still think it desirable that anyone accused of a crime in Britain should be assumed to be innocent until proven guilty. The widespread usage of the phrase “terrorist suspects”, on the contrary, presumes guilt. It derives from, and feeds back into, an alarming assumption that the lamentably old-fashioned ideal of presumed innocence is no longer appropriate to modern times. It is at one with the fine contemporary tradition of contempt for the courts evinced by Labour home secretaries. After the four co-defendants of Kamal Bourgass in the “ricin plot” trial were unanimously acquitted, and a further prosecution collapsed, Charles Clarke said: “We will obviously keep a very close eye on the eight men being freed today, and consider exactly what to do in the light of this decision.” Once you are a “terrorist suspect”, it seems, not even a not-guilty verdict will help you. You may no longer be a suspect, but you are still, by definition, a terrorist . . .
Blair responds personally to ID card critics
The road pricing petition isn’t the only protest getting an email response from Tony: anti-ID card signatories are getting an email too. Although it’s easy to summarise - “I’m in ur base, eroding ur civil libertiez” - here’s the whole text. As you’d expect it trots out the usual crap - ID cards preventing benefit fraud, fighting terrorism, stopping children from being abducted by evil wizards and forced to mine salt in the centre of the Earth, that sort of thing.
The petition disputes the idea that ID cards will help reduce crime or terrorism. While I certainly accept that ID cards will not prevent all terrorist outrages or crime, I believe they will make an important contribution to making our borders more secure, countering fraud, and tackling international crime and terrorism. More importantly, this is also what our security services - who have the task of protecting this country - believe.
So I would like to explain why I think it would be foolish to ignore the opportunity to use biometrics such as fingerprints to secure our identities. I would also like to discuss some of the claims about costs - particularly the way the cost of an ID card is often inflated by including in estimates the cost of a biometric passport which, it seems certain, all those who want to travel abroad will soon need.
In contrast to these exaggerated figures, the real benefits for our country and its citizens from ID cards and the National Identity Register, which will contain less information on individuals than the data collected by the average store card, should be delivered for a cost of around £3 a year over its ten-year life.
But first, it’s important to set out why we need to do more to secure our identities and how I believe ID cards will help. We live in a world in which people, money and information are more mobile than ever before. Terrorists and international criminal gangs increasingly exploit this to move undetected across borders and to disappear within countries. Terrorists routinely use multiple identities - up to 50 at a time. Indeed this is an essential part of the way they operate and is specifically taught at Al-Qaeda training camps. One in four criminals also uses a false identity. ID cards which contain biometric recognition details and which are linked to a National Identity Register will make this much more difficult.
Secure identities will also help us counter the fast-growing problem of identity fraud. This already costs £1.7 billion annually. There is no doubt that building yourself a new and false identity is all too easy at the moment. Forging an ID card and matching biometric record will be much harder.
I also believe that the National Identity Register will help police bring those guilty of serious crimes to justice. They will be able, for example, to compare the fingerprints found at the scene of some 900,000 unsolved crimes against the information held on the register. Another benefit from biometric technology will be to improve the flow of information between countries on the identity of offenders.
The National Identity Register will also help improve protection for the vulnerable, enabling more effective and quicker checks on those seeking to work, for example, with children. It should make it much more difficult, as has happened tragically in the past, for people to slip through the net.
Proper identity management and ID cards also have an important role to play in preventing illegal immigration and illegal working. The effectiveness on the new biometric technology is, in fact, already being seen. In trials using this technology on visa applications at just nine overseas posts, our officials have already uncovered 1,400 people trying illegally to get back into the UK.
Nor is Britain alone in believing that biometrics offer a massive opportunity to secure our identities. Firms across the world are already using fingerprint or iris recognition for their staff. France, Italy and Spain are among other European countries already planning to add biometrics to their ID cards. Over 50 countries across the world are developing biometric passports, and all EU countries are proposing to include fingerprint biometrics on their passports. The introduction in 2006 of British e-passports incorporating facial image biometrics has meant that British passport holders can continue to visit the United States without a visa. What the National Identity Scheme does is take this opportunity to ensure we maximise the benefits to the UK.
These then are the ways I believe ID cards can help cut crime and terrorism. I recognise that these arguments will not convince those who oppose a National Identity Scheme on civil liberty grounds. They will, I hope, be reassured by the strict safeguards now in place on the data held on the register and the right for each individual to check it. But I hope it might make those who believe ID cards will be ineffective reconsider their opposition.
If national ID cards do help us counter crime and terrorism, it is, of course, the law-abiding majority who will benefit and whose own liberties will be protected. This helps explain why, according to the recent authoritative Social Attitudes survey, the majority of people favour compulsory ID cards.
I am also convinced that there will also be other positive benefits. A national ID card system, for example, will prevent the need, as now, to take a whole range of documents to establish our identity. Over time, they will also help improve access to services.
The petition also talks about cost. It is true that individuals will have to pay a fee to meet the cost of their ID card in the same way, for example, as they now do for their passports. But I simply don’t recognise most claims of the cost of ID cards. 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. We estimate that the cost of biometric passports will account for 70% of the cost of the combined passports/id cards. The additional cost of the ID cards is expected to be less than £30 or £3 a year for their 10-year lifespan. Our aim is to ensure we also make the most of the benefits these biometric advances bring within our borders and in our everyday lives.
Yours sincerely,
Tony Blair
The nice people at No2ID have a rather different perspective.
X-ray cameras on lampposts. This is a spoof… right?
Survey finds that most Brits are idiots
An overwhelming majority of people in Britain are willing to surrender civil liberties to help tackle the threat of terrorism, the nation’s leading social research institute will disclose today.The survey found seven in every 10 people think compulsory identity cards for all adults would be “a price worth paying” to reduce the threat of terrorism. Eight in 10 say the authorities should be able to tap the phones of people suspected of involvement in terrorism, open their mail and impose electronic tagging or home curfews.