Catalogue model
So, Charles Falconer, the UK’s foremost unelected flatmate sounds off on ID cards:
BBC News: ID cards ’should be compulsory’
Lord Falconer told BBC Radio Four’s Any Questions: “The question is should you require – and I think ultimately, unless there is compulsion, you won’t get the benefits of an ID card system – is it right to compel those that don’t have a passport also to get an ID card?“I think it is, I think it will become inevitable that you need reliable means of identification, both to stop people stealing your identity, and also making it much, much easier for you to deal with the state.”
He neglects to mention it’s also to make it much easier for the state to deal with you.
New Labour should ditch ID cards and divert their energies into ensuring their Thousand Year Reich – play the long game. The rate at which they’re cataloguing our children means they’ll probably have most of the population on file within a couple of generations.
The Prime Minister was 24 carat on the subject of ID cards at Prime Minister’s Questions this week…
As for the calculations made by the LSE, I think that I am right that, although the report was put out under the LSE’s name, it was actually written by the leading campaigner against ID cards on the ground of civil liberties. So I do not think that it is an entirely objective assessment.
…showing all the self awareness of a man who’s main line of persuasion on war with Iraq reduced down to little more than “you’re going to have to trust me on this” and “it’s what I believe”. Still, playing the man, what a bastard trick, eh?
The reasons for having ID cards are ever narrowing. They won’t save anyone’s life for a start. But the Prime Minister is adamant that they will stop a new breed of “early 21st century” crime. It’s a disease and biometrics are the cure. Let’s see if we can spot what it is from his answers in the House this week:
Because if we introduce an ID card scheme and reduce identity fraud, that makes a major difference to the costs of Government and the costs of doing business. In today’s world, if we want to tackle illegal migration, crime and identity fraud, using the new biometric technology to have ID cards is an important part of doing so.
…and…
Why are ID cards so important now? Because we know, from all the available evidence, that identity fraud is on the increaseâ€â€that is bound to happen in the modern world. Many people, including the former leader of the Conservative party, reached the conclusion that we need identity cards, and it is right to do that now because the biometric technology is coming in. Other countries are moving towards biometric passports and we will have to do that. The largest part of the cost of an identity card will be the biometric passport, which we must have. I assume that the right hon. Gentleman is in favour of the biometric passport; perhaps he could elucidate thatâ€â€we know that his policy tends to shift a little quickly nowadays.
We need the identity card to fight crime, illegal migration and identity fraud in the early 21st century and the costs will be largely met by the biometric passport.
I love the “we need identity cards, and it is right to do that now because the biometric technology is coming in”. We can so we should. He’s like James Bond nemesis Blofeld and his plans for world domination. In the next Bond film, the villain will be a middle manager with a god complex promoted to his level of incompetence:
We need to blow up London, and it is right to do that now because the satellite made of diamonds is coming in.
And onwards…
With the greatest respect, he should think again about the matter. We will have to introduce biometric passportsâ€â€I know that he agrees with thatâ€â€and we will therefore have to make enormous changes in the years to come for the vast bulk of people who have passports. Identity fraud is also a major and growing problem. People throughout the world are moving towards identity card systems because they are necessary to tackle the problems of today’s world. Of course there is a cost to identity cards but there is a cost to identity fraud in so many different ways.
He does go on about it, doesn’t he? I hope it’s all to do with him desperately trying to sell a pup and not something more deep-seated and festering. Imagine him before a public appearance splashing cold water on his face and chanting “You are Tony Blair, you are Tony Blair, you are Tony Blair” into the mirror. His ID card could be a little mirror he takes everywhere. Some positive reinforcement that he isn’t just a uncomfortable grin and a thinning bouffant, a bucket into which business pours its interests.
Anyway. Identity fraud. It’s a problem. It would, of course, be less of a problem if the Government’s tax credit system wasn’t the “low hanging fruit” of the identity fraud racket.
BBC News: Tax credit fraud hits Job Centres
Up to 13,000 Job Centre staff may have had personal details stolen by criminals making fraudulent claims for tax credits.
…and…
BBC News: Treasury denies tax fraud ‘chaos’
The Treasury has denied a fraud carried out on thousands of Network Rail staff shows the tax system is in crisis.
The system gives nothing more than the impression of having been written for someone’s GCSE Computer Studies project.
So the solution is to sit another massively complicated computer system (with all the overruns, bugs, recriminations and budget bloat that that entails) over the top of the old, massively complicated computer systems, like a filthy rag on a weeping sore.
When I worked in IT, bugs and system crashes caused by programs we had written were know as “factoring in the overtime”. New programs and fixes had to be written and overnight callouts to fix system crashes were paid at double time. The ID Cards are merely this thinking factored up beyond the dreams of the avarice of an IT contractor.
Posted on January 21st, 2006 at 9:51am under ...In a brewery, ID cards, UK politics
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Just focusing on the DNA database of children issue which you’ve linked one of the questions that springs to mind, which has not been raised as far as I can tell, is this:
If a DNA database is being constructed of DNA from young people who have not been charged with any offence than surely that does not just affect the oyung person in question?
If the police or any other state agency(?) collect DNA samples from either of my sons then, although it is not exactly the same, they also have, at least a partial if not a whole, data set on my and my partners DNA profile (not to mention their grandparents and other family members – brothers, sisters, cousins or whatever).
All without any permission from those family members or knowlwdge on their part.
Just think what the state can do with that kind of information. Particularly one which is extending what it defines as “criminal” activity beyond what is normally understood – protesting (Parliament Square & its environs); campaigning (prosecution of people trying to communicate with others to persuade them to support a particular campaign or stop doing something, on the basis that it could cause “alarm” to one or more individuals); support for others liberation struggles (attempts to define in law a cathc all crime of “gloryfying terrorism”); and I’m sure others could provide further examples.
It is to be hoped that we don’t find ourselves in the not too distant future being led by someone who wants to centralise all power to their office (“unitary executive theory” anyone?) and who bypasses checks and balances such as Parliament or the judiciary.
Just think what someone like a Hitler or Stalin could have done with this kind of information. Or even old fashioned imperialists (not to mention the new fashioned imperialists) of the Victorian and Edwardian era’s.
Perhaps the public could be persuaded to embrace ID scratch cards? Rub it with a coin and whatever is revealed is the new you. I’m hoping to get three ‘Duke of Northumberland’ symbols.
Dave, just on the question of the biology of what you’re saying, I’m pretty sure what you’re saying doesn’t hold (although it’s been a while since biology lessons). Sure, your sons’ DNA consists of 50% of yours and 50% of your partner’s. The percentage of relatives’ DNA present tails off as you move away from the immediate family.
The thing is, without a copy of your and your partner’s DNA, how would any system be able to cross-reference your sons’ DNA with yours? In isolation, biologically speaking, there’s nothing for any system to connect your sons to you.
I think.
Of the social engineering implications of such information getting into the wrong hands, however, I’m right with you.
Justin,
It’s probably my fault for once having sat through an episode of CSI.
Dave, I take it all back. Here’s the eminent geneticist Professor Steve Jones was on PM on Radio 4 this evening talking about this very subject:
“What right do the police have to take DNA samples from children without informing their parents and hold them on a database? 24,000 of them – it’s quite astounding. Would any parent listening to this be happy with that – not knowing that their child’s DNA and therefore, by extension, their own DNA, their father’s and mother’s DNA, is being secretly held by the police? I wouldn’t think so. I think it’s outrageous.”
I yield!
Police are already identifying and convicting criminals on the basis of relatives’ DNA being on file.
A DNA sample was found at a crime scene, and put through the DNA database. Although no total match is found, there may be samples on the database that are very similar,if not the same. In the above case, 25 people with similar DNA were contacted, and it was luck that meant the killer was at the top of the list.
But just imagine the police knock on your door one night, say someone with similar DNA has committed a heinous crime, and they want to swab your mouth to compare your DNA to see if you committed the crime. You are compelled to comply as it is your only way of proving your innocence. Now your DNA is on record for ever. And you may be still be convicted for a crime you did not commit, if your DNA profile cannot be instantly labeled as not a match.
DNA has been a miraculous breakthrough, from the early days of the first “blooding” in 1987 of 4,000 men in Narborough, Leicestershire, which led to the conviction of Colin Pitchfork, who murdered 2 schoolgirls. This mass testing of local males was only accepted by the public on the explicit premise that all DNA profiles would be destroyed after the murderer was found. Today, we are not so lucky – our DNA can now be taken and retained for dropping litter.
Now there are doubts being aired over DNA profiling, once hailed as foolproof, but has now been exposed to doubts about its validity. Human error, wrongly reading the profile and mix-ups with samples in labs (vastly more likely to occur in the race to privatize the Forensics arm of the Home Office and Police forces) and the recent discovery that people with no biological link can have the same, or remarkably similar DNA profiles, has raised many concerns about the rush to enshrine all our DNA profiles forever in one all-powerful database.
Worries over the foolproof nature of DNA testing has also been raised by the very man who won a Nobel prize having pioneered DNA technology used in the Pitchfork case, Professor Sir Alex Jeffries. Sue Reid in yesterday’s Daily Mail article quotes him and others:
He is profoundly concerned about how the police use DNA data and about the widespread collection of DNA from the “bystanders” of a crime.
He said: “If you are taken to a police station and interviewed even in the context of a crime investigation (ie,a witness), the police have the right to demand a DNA test from you. That profile will go on the database and stay there. We are facing a potentially serious threat to civil liberties”
She continues:
Scientists have warned that the larger the database, the greater the chances of finding two samples that look the same but are not from the same person. Even the Home Office has admitted no system is “100% foolproof”. It has become an oft repeated axiom that there is a 37 million to one chance that someone unrelated to you possessing the same DNA profile. But statisticians say that, in reality, more than 80% of people have a DNA twin who is not from within their own family.
At least two errors have happened in UK. In one case a man with advanced Parkinsons disease, unable to drive or walk more than 10 meters or dress himself, was imprisoned for a robbery 200 miles away, and “caught” thanks to a relative’s DNA being on the database. Police were insitent they had their man. It was only when the sick man’s lawyers put his DNA through more rigorous testing the police were proved wrong. By this time the sick man had spent 4 months in prison.
If memory serves me right (and I’m a bit rusty), this is because DNA testing profiles are incomplete matches, a reason Sir Jeffries was so insistent at the time it not be called fingerprinting. I think they only look for 16 points of similarity (in US they only looked for 9) to call it a match, not checking the complete profile, although the public does not understand this.
This is like saying Jean Charles de Menezes ticked some the boxes for a suicide bomber, and deserved to be shot:
He lived at a known block of flats, was dark(ish) skinned, got on and off a bus, did not look at the police on entering the station. 4 ticks. Now imagine he had ran for the train, as millions of us do each day: another tick. Or wearing a bulky coat due to a bad head cold, or going on holiday to Iceland that afternoon. Another tick. (obviously these last two were simply the lies of Sir Ian in the original aftermath of executing an innocent civilian).
We have already see the damage done when police rely on “he ticks some of the boxes” in preference to the hard and expensive slog of thorough investigative police work. Now expand that methodology to every person in Britain and their DNA profile…
Politicians and police claim DNA testing is some sort of gold standard, when it is simply one, sometimes fallible tool. This is dangerous to us all. Testing could be better; for example if DNA is fully and thoroughly compared to a standard high above the 16 point system; and ill-trained monkeys employed by private companies for £6/hour were not the ones doing the testing. Even ignoring the important civil liberties arguments against collecting all our genetic codes, with recent research discovering our DNA profiles may not be as unique as previously though, is it really safe to start a DNA database without further research?
We cannot waltz silently into a compulsory and untested scheme, where when mistakes can be made and we have no method of ever proving ourselves to be who we are ever again. How this new and undiscussed police tactic will be used against the public in the future depends on how badly your tin hat is buzzing. The sky can be the limit if a police state is your game.
* Apologies for going on so long; this has been a pet topic ever since “the blooding” of 1987.
evilweeble
Police are already identifying and convicting criminals on the basis of relatives’ DNA being on file.
A DNA sample was found at a crime scene, and put through the DNA database. Although no total match is found, there may be samples on the database that are very similar, if not the same. In the above case, 25 people with similar DNA were contacted, and it was luck that meant the killer was at the top of the list.
But just imagine the police knock on your door one night, say someone with similar DNA has committed a heinous crime, and they want to swab your mouth to compare your DNA to see if you committed the crime. You are compelled to comply as it is your only way of proving your innocence. Now your DNA is on record for ever. And you may be still be convicted for a crime you did not commit, if your DNA profile cannot be instantly labeled as not a match.
DNA has been a miraculous breakthrough, from the early days of the first “blooding” in 1987 of 4,000 men in Narborough, Leicestershire, which led to the conviction of Colin Pitchfork, who murdered 2 schoolgirls. This mass testing of local males was only accepted by the public on the explicit premise that all DNA profiles would be destroyed after the murderer was found. Today, we are not so lucky – our DNA can now be taken and retained for dropping litter.
Now there are doubts being aired over DNA profiling, once hailed as foolproof, but has now been exposed to doubts about its validity. Human error, wrongly reading the profile and mix-ups with samples in labs (vastly more likely to occur in the race to privatize the Forensics arm of the Home Office and Police forces) and the recent discovery that people with no biological link can have the same, or remarkably similar DNA profiles, has raised many concerns about the rush to enshrine all our DNA profiles forever in one all-powerful database.
Worries over the foolproof nature of DNA testing has also been raised by the very man who won a Nobel prize having pioneered DNA technology used in the Pitchfork case, Professor Sir Alex Jeffries. Sue Reid in yesterday’s Daily Mail article quotes him and others:
He is profoundly concerned about how the police use DNA data and about the widespread collection of DNA from the “bystanders” of a crime.
He said: “If you are taken to a police station and interviewed even in the context of a crime investigation (ie, a witness), the police have the right to demand a DNA test from you. That profile will go on the database and stay there. We are facing a potentially serious threat to civil liberties”
She continues:
Scientists have warned that the larger the database, the greater the chances of finding two samples that look the same but are not from the same person. Even the Home Office has admitted no system is “100% foolproof”. It has become an oft repeated axiom that there is a 37 million to one chance that someone unrelated to you possessing the same DNA profile. But statisticians say that, in reality, more than 80% of people have a DNA twin who is not from within their own family.
At least two errors have happened in UK. In one case a man with advanced Parkinsons disease, unable to drive or walk more than 10 meters or dress himself, was imprisoned for a robbery 200 miles away, and “caught” thanks to a relative’s DNA being on the database. Police were insitent they had their man. It was only when the sick man’s lawyers put his DNA through more rigorous testing the police were proved wrong. By this time the sick man had spent 4 months in prison.
If memory serves me right (and I’m a bit rusty), this is because DNA testing profiles are incomplete matches, a reason Sir Jeffries was so insistent at the time it not be called fingerprinting. I think they only look for 16 points of similarity (in US they only looked for 9) to call it a match, not checking the complete profile, although the public does not understand this.
This is like saying Jean Charles de Menezes ticked some the boxes for a suicide bomber, and deserved to be shot:
He lived at a known block of flats, was dark(ish) skinned, got on and off a bus, did not look at the police on entering the station. 4 ticks. Now imagine he had ran for the train, as millions of us do each day: another tick. Or wearing a bulky coat due to a bad head cold, or going on holiday to Iceland that afternoon. Another tick. (obviously these last two were simply the lies of Sir Ian in the original aftermath of executing an innocent civilian).
We have already see the damage done when police rely on “he ticks some of the boxes” in preference to the hard and expensive slog of thorough investigative police work. Now expand that methodology to every person in Britain and their DNA profile…
Politicians and police claim DNA testing is some sort of gold standard, when it is simply one, sometimes fallible tool. This is dangerous to us all.
Testing could be better; for example if DNA is fully and thoroughly compared to a standard high above the 16 point system; and the government was not enthused to sell off police forensics labs to the highest bidder, with ill-trained monkeys employed by private companies for £6/hour doing the testing.
Even ignoring the important civil liberties arguments against collecting all our genetic codes, with recent research discovering our DNA profiles may not be as unique as previously though, is it really safe to start a DNA database without further research?
We cannot waltz silently into a compulsory and untested scheme, where when mistakes can be made and we have no method of ever proving ourselves to be who we are ever again. How this new and undiscussed police tactic will be used against the public in the future depends on how badly your tin hat is buzzing. The sky can be the limit if a police state is your game.
* Apologies for going on so long; this has been a pet topic ever since “the blooding” of 1987.
evilweeble