This change of strategy on ID cards by the government might be a winner, I’m sorry and worried to say. The plan is for a phased introduction starting with three of the most hated groups of people in Britain: bloody foreigners, bloody students and bloody airport baggage handlers.

It’s perfect. When the scheme turns out to be the unmitigated carnage all right-thinking people believe it’s going to be, well, who cares. It was only bloody foreigners, bloody students and bloody airport baggage handlers whose lives were ruined. Go back to sleep Britain. Walk on by.

The only way to improve this plan would be to include Members of Parliament and nonces.

Still not so worried about ID cards and their attendant massive database? Then how about this. This week’s Private Eye publishes extracts from Nick Davies’ Flat Earth News, ‘[a]n explosive expose of the corruption entrenched in today’s media:

Reporters from the Mail to whom I spoke independently agreed that they had bribed not only police officers but also civil servants. For example, they targeted officials who had access to the massive database of the social security system, which registers the personal details of every British citizen with a national insurance number and every foreign national with a right to work in Britain - some 72 million private citizens. One reporter who has now left the paper recalled: ‘We used to use the social security computer as if it was an extension of the Daily Mail library. You phone your contact, have a chat, say you’re looking for such-and-such a guy, this age, rough location - is there any chance? Keep chatting. He says, “Oh, we’ve got five people of that name.” You say, “Well, givegive me all five.” You get home addresses, phone numbers, maybe workplace too. They get you information off the database, and you reward them with a dirty great meal or an envelope.’

Now, under the terms of the Identity Card Act 2006, if a person with access to the Identity Register who ‘provides any person with information that he is required to keep confidential’ can face ‘imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years or [...] a fine. or [...] both’.

Why aren’t similar safeguards in place for the social security database? If not, why not? If they are, why aren’t they being enforced or acting as an adequate deterrent? Unless these provisions are made to provide the illusion of security for the public (see also, the towers of anti-terrorism legislation). There do seem to be measures of some sort in place. Davies again:

At one point, according to one Mail source, a reporter in the newsroom was bribing a Ministry of Defence police office who could access several databases, including Scotland Yard’s. Mail reporters separately claim that they also had regular access to what is arguably the most sensitive of all confidential information, the health records of some of their targets. As one Mail veteran put it to me: ‘If the Mail‘ go for you, they get every phone number you have dialled, every schoolmate, everything on your credit card, every call to your phone and to your mobile. Everything.’ Even if it is against the law.

My emphasis. This isn’t rocket science. Proper security would merely mean having to log every access to the database. That will take huge amounts of computer storage but, frankly, tough. Do it right or not at all. Then, if a person complains that their personal details have reached the public domain, it’s a simple procedure to review the access logs to see who’s been looking at that person’s details.

If the accesser doesn’t have a good reason, then it’s suspension, a trial and possibly ‘imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years or [...] a fine. or [...] both’. You could sketch this idea on a napkin and have a small prototype system running in an afternoon. I should be in management consultancy.

The vital ingredient in this plan, of course, is political will. The will to implement the measures. The will to provide the resources to monitor and enforce the measures. And the will to prosecute transgressors. Oh, and a newspaper or two having the balls to a) shun these practices and b) blow the whistle on law-breaking rivals. Good luck.

Remember all this the next time you see a government minister defending the overall safety of our personal information. And remember all this the next time you see the Daily Mail bleating about the government losing our data and it maybe ending up in the wrong hands. We now know whose hands some of that data is ending up in.

The next time the Prime Minister or attendant flunkies tell you that ID cards are not going to be compulsory, just remember that, yes, they won’t be compulsory if you’re one of the 20% of us who doesn’t want to travel abroad.

And they won’t be compulsory if you’re a student who doesn’t need a student loan.

The document says: “We should issue ID cards to young people to assist them as they open their first bank account, take out a student loan, etc.”

You have to admit it’s brilliant. ‘We’re not forcing you to have one,’ said the minister, ‘just forget about that holiday or degree’.

What they should do is say that none of us will be permitted to breathe without an ID card. ‘Well, there’s certainly no element of compulsion,’ the Prime Minister’s spokesman will say, ‘but we find that ID cards would help in the provision of respiratory services’.

* Which is:
1. You can’t win.
2. You can’t break even.
3. You can’t even quit the game.

Gordon Brown is in the Observer today crapping on again about how ID cards are going to save us.

Alex Harrowell examines the Prime Minister’s argument with surgeon-like skill and efficiency. The patient does not survive. Great stuff.

Well, it didn’t take that 5.6 billion pound figure to be revealed as horseshit. With a speed of change that surprised even me, we find:

The report says that the latest estimate excludes the cost of the ID project to other government departments outside the Home Office, including card scanners for GPs registering new patients.

The report to parliament admits that the estimate is likely to change, especially as the tendering process, with eight private sector firms bidding to run the scheme, has just started.

I think, however, we can be confident that the final cost of the ID card scheme will be in the region of ’some pounds’.

You know you, right? Your public servants think you’re a bloody idiot. Run and get your chequebook. Go on, chop chop.

Here’s fun:

The projected cost of the identity card scheme will be £5.612bn over the next 10 years, the Home Office says.

Write that number down and put it somewhere safe. We’ll get together in a few months’ - maybe a year’s - time and have a good, long, hollow laugh at it.

Who says this government is lacking in new ideas? Here’s a stunning piece of innovative thinking from the Prime Minister on the subject of the much-hated ID card scheme.

[T]he PM was concerned enough about introducing such a huge multi-billion pound scheme to insist that the technology must work before it is introduced.

Sound thinking and it’s only taken ten years of a Labour government to come up with the plan. Makes you wonder if government ministers have been weeing before undoing their flies all this time as well.

This new initiative, however, is what’s known in the trade as putting the cart after the horse. And shutting the gate before the horse has bolted. It’s a tried and tested part of everyday life, making sure things work before you use them, else we’d still be living in caves or extinct. But it’s a new and bold step apparently in the development of government computer systems.

It does, however, prompt this thought. We’re up to our necks in schemes has the PM been unconcerned enough about introducing to not insist that the technology must work before it is introduced. Sure, some brave mavericks have taken risks in the furtherance of human understanding but at least they were only risking their own necks. And the likes of Orville and Wilbur Wright didn’t take the attitude of, ’sod it, it’s only got one wing but let’s try it anyway’.

…and it’s a doozy:

“I will boycott any company that wins a contract to deliver the National ID card but only if 500 other people will do the same.”

Sign it here, text ‘pledge ID-Boycott’ to 60022 (in the UK only) or share and sign the pledge in Facebook.

(via Tim W.)

Today marks another milestone in delivery of the National Identity Scheme with the start of the procurement process.

For the first time in the UK there will be a single safe, trusted way for individuals, business, and the State to prove identity securely, conveniently and efficiently. Through the Scheme, identity will be protected from people who might want to misuse or steal it. There will be independent oversight of the system and public accountability for how it is run.

read the rest

The Government, in the shape of the woeful Liam Byrne, beaten on every front in the argument for ID cards, make for their last refuge: Patriotism.

The identity card scheme will become a “great British institution” on a par with the railways in the 19th Century, Home Office minister Liam Byrne says.

With nowhere left to run, it’s suddenly, ‘Your National Identity Register needs YOU’.

It’s reasoning that would disgrace the drunkest of pub arguments. I demand, and get, more respect and intellectual rigour from my two children (7 and 3). Why are our leaders the only factor in our lives from whom we accept such intellectual and moral retardation?

I’m quite (but vaguely) fond of the idea of a written constitution for the United Kingdom. But when you see just what these yahoos think constitutes ‘Britishness’, the more I’m sure I don’t want a single one of them anywhere near the drafting process.

Section 37 of the Identity Cards Act 2006 requires the Home Secretary to publish his estimate of the ten-year cost of the ID scheme “before the end of every six months”. The first Dobson report was published on 9th October 2006. The next report is now more than two weeks overdue.

Phil Booth, NO2ID’s National Coordinator said:

“What’s the big secret – why the delay? It can’t be lack of resources as there are dozens of highly-paid consultants doing nothing but planning the ID scheme. These latest cost estimates matter to local government and yet the Government is hiding the cost to councils, even from its own candidates.

“The elections on May 3rd are a test for policy and the ID scheme is unpopular. 1 in 3 people across the UK, if we are to believe recently-revealed government figures, are expected to resist it. Labour Party candidates, whatever their personal views on the scheme, suffer when public attention is drawn to it. Is this yet another attempt to bury bad news?”

read the rest

Gordon Brown is planning a massive expansion of the ID cards project that would widen surveillance of everyday life by allowing high-street businesses to share confidential information with police databases.

read the rest…

(see also here and here.)

According to a recent survey only around five per cent of businesses are using biometrics. But as projects such as the ID cards scheme start to be implemented, the use of biometric security systems is likely to become more pervasive.

read the rest…

Although the fat lady (or possibly more appropriately, the portly former Home Secretary) has yet to sing on the subject, yesterday’s statements from the Home Office to make it a racing certainty that ID cards are dead in this parliamentary administration. The portly former Home Secretary meanwhile has been busy singing denunciations of John Reid’s misdeeds in other areas, but will no doubt warble on the sad end of ID cards just as soon as he gets a minute in his busy schedule.

read the rest…

TONY BLAIR’S flagship identity cards scheme is set to fail and may not be introduced for a generation, according to leaked Whitehall e-mails from the senior officials responsible for the multi-billion-pound project.

The problems are so serious that ministers have been forced to draw up plans for a scaled-down “face-saving” version to meet their pledge of phasing in the cards from 2008.

However, civil servants say there is no evidence that even this compromise is “remotely feasible” and accuse ministers of “ignoring reality” by pressing ahead.

read the rest…

Update: More at The Register.

For those interested in such things, Andy Burnham, the government minister previously responsible for cataloguing the population, was promoted in the recent reshuffle to become one of Patricia Hewitt’s understrappers at the Department of Health.

His successor (if you can call her that) is Joan Ryan. Time to get to know her. Anybody following this craptacular in the making can find her most recent utterances on the subject at They Work For You. TWFY also has a natty email notification feature to let you know when she (or anyone else for that matter) speaks. For those who understand such dark technologies, there’s also an RSS feed of her pronouncements.

Already, she does “not anticipate that the number of people choosing to renew early in order to delay enrolment on the National Identity Register will be significant in the context of the overall number of applications”. Prove her wrong.

In other news, Frank Abagnale has said he thinks ID cards will be cracked and forged within six months.

“silicon.com has been tracking the development of the ID card project since the beginning - and over the following pages we’ll take you through the A to Z of identity cards. We’ll tell you everything you wanted to know about the scheme… but were afraid to ask…”

read the rest…

This from the current Private Eye (sadly not online - come on Hislop) - click on the image for a larger view.

The gravy here is this:

“…the £3.9bn figure quoted in 2003 was an internal estimate untested in competition, and was calculated using a different price base to the £8bn.”

They might as well have just picked a figure from thin air. It’s like doing the weekly shop with only twenty quid in your pocket but being heedless of the price of the things you’re buying. A case of Stella Artois. Some fillet of beef from the butcher’s counter. A Simpsons DVD box set. You get to the till and of course you don’t have enough money. With a queue of people peering over your shoulder, one by one your little extravagances are knocked off your bill.

Not with this Government though. They hit the supermarket and go mental. Truffle oil. A whole tuna. A case of bourbon. Champagne. Cakes, loads of cakes. One of those stupid Terence Conran toasters. All seven Simpsons DVD box sets. They get to the till and on finding they don’t have enough money, instead of putting back what they can’t afford, they phone their mate. He’s put upon this mate, he works all hours and he’s knackered. But he never fails to turn up and empty his wallet. And he never complains. He’s never once said “no”. You know who this doormat is? This self-loathing shade who’ll do anything he’s told? The little guy of the gang whose always pushed around? It’s you, you dickhead.

During the ID card debate, Charles Clarke said this:

Our estimate of the average annual operating costs of issuing passports and ID cards to British citizens was published last year and at present is unchanged at £584 million.

Is that an “internal estimate”? Yes. Is it “untested in competition”? Yes again. Have you got your wallet handy? I think I hear the phone ringing. Run along.

A written parliamentary question from Norman Baker to ID Card myrmidon, Andy Burnham:

Norman Baker (Lewes, Liberal Democrat): To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department whether he has ruled out use of DNA material as part of his proposed identity card scheme.

Andy Burnham (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Home Office): There are no powers in the Identity Cards Act 2006 to require an applicant for an ID card to provide a DNA sample.

Update: I meant “that’s not a yes”, obviously.

New Statesman: John Pilger sees freedom die quietly
The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill has already passed its second parliamentary reading without interest to most Labour MPs and court journalists; yet it is utterly totalitarian in scope.

more…

It’s later than John thinks. The Bill has passed not only its Second Reading but also its Committee Stage in March. It is due for its rubber stamping, sorry, Report Stage and Third Reading before it proceeds to the House of Lords where, it is hoped, it will be eviscerated.

Update: Thanks to Davide for this: Via Spyblog…

Financial Times: Blair backs down over regulatory reform bill
Jim Murphy, the cabinet office minister, said the government would back down from the highly contentious plans to cut the bureaucracy burden on business and amend the proposed law, which has been dubbed a shortcut to dictatorship.

And from The Guardian there’s this:

He added: “We always said we would listen, and for the last couple of months we have been looking at drafting amendments to do two things: deliver better regulation agenda but also take the constitutional debate off the table.

“It will make it impossible, not just difficult, to do the sorts of things which some people have raised.”

Call me cynical, but this is going to be like the proverbial game of Find The Lady. Watch very closely and don’t look away even for a second. It should be noted that during the Report Stage of the Bill, not one opposition amendment was accepted. At this stage any amendment, however slight, can be painted as a concession.

Giving a veto to a parliamentary committee likely to be stacked with placemen doesn’t sound like much of a concession to me. And if all these laws are not made exempt from the bill, then any other amendments would be worthless and Murphy’s assurance that changes to the bill will “deliver better regulation agenda but also take the constitutional debate off the table” will be exposed as a lie.

There’ll be enough pairs of eyes on this that you would have thought any sleight of hand will be exposed pretty quick. You also have to think, however, that the number of amendments required to make this Bill acceptable are legion. I doubt we’ll get them all and it wouldn’t be beneath this Government to paint the opposition as unreasonable and impossible to please once it’s surrendered an inch or two of ground.

In the slipstream of the ID cards bill, a very desirable item has come up for sale on eBay.

More news from the Home Office for those wondering whether ID cards will ever see the light of day:

BBC: Home Office accounts under fire

The National Audit Office said it had not had the evidence to form an opinion on the accounts for 2004/5, and there were fundamental problems with them.

…

There were such “such fundamental problems” with the Home Office’s accounts that he had to issue a “disclaimer of opinion” because of the lack of audit evidence needed to assess whether they were truthful and fair.

Without dwelling on the penalties that would be meted out to an individual who submitted such accounts (ie, severe), this is good news. On this evidence you couldn’t trust a Home Office official to go to the shop to buy you a newspaper and expect him to come back with the right change. And the reason for the shonky accounts? Yep, another sub-GCSE standard computer system.

Watching these clowns try and run an ID card system costing (before the inevitable overruns, revision of estimates and all the other expected incompetence) half a billion pounds a year is going to be spectacular. Pull up a chair.

So much of what this Government does is predicated on the fact that by far the vast majority of its subjects are yoked - incontrovertibly - to the rules expressed in Ginsberg’s Theorem:

1) You can’t win.
2) You can’t break even.
3) You can’t quit the game.

Alternative version: Don’t like it? What you going to do about it? Shouldn’t you be watching Eastenders?

We now, after the cynically termed “compromise” on the part of the House of Lords over ID cards, can add Burnham’s Theorem to our canon of wisdom:

1) You can have a passport
2) You don’t have to have an ID card
3) You still have to go on the ID card register. And pay for it.

The disgusting, disgraceful fudge that opponents of the ID card bill in both the Commons and Lords shamefully accepted is that from 2008, when applying for a new passport, you can opt out of having an ID card until 2010 but cannot opt out of having your details recorded on the National Identity Register, the massive database that will hold detailed information about everybody. Not only that, if you do opt out from having an ID card you still have to pay the same amount as if you were accepting your card. From Hansard:

Lynne Jones: I thank my right hon. Friend for giving way. Will he tell the House something about the charges for the passport and the identity document? In particular, will those people who decline to receive an identity card be exempt from paying the charge of £30 or thereabouts?

Mr. Clarke: No, they will not—[Interruption.] Let me make two points. The overall pricing strategy for these documents will be determined after the Bill has received Royal Assent, as we have made clear all the way through. We have given a variety of indications about unit costs, and we have made various commitments in the House that will be honoured, but the actual pricing strategy will be determined on that basis. Secondly, concern was expressed in the other place—I cannot speak for this place—about the principle of whether a person should be required to have an ID card, as opposed to being on the national identity register. We are accepting the proposal from the other place for an opt-out on the principle of accepting an ID card, though not on the issue of the national identity register. In respect to the other place, its Members were very clear that the cost issues were not a matter of concern for them.

Which is final proof of what those of us opposed to ID cards and the National Identity Register have been saying all along: this is all about cataloguing the population and the intrusive, abusive, and not to mention lucrative, uses to which this information can be put. The ID cards themselves are a side issue. This sham compromise inconveniences the Government not one inch. Shadow Home Secretary David Davis summed it up during the final debate in the Commons with a story from his army days:

The officers’ mess had given the sergeants’ mess a barrel of beer and the commanding officer asked the sergeant-major what they made of it and whether they liked it. He said, “It was just right, sir.” The CO said, “Just right?” He said, “Yes, sir. If it had been any worse we couldn’t have drunk it, and if it had been any better, you wouldn’t have given it to us.”

This despite Charles Clarke’s bleating that “[t]he date of 1 January 2010 adds a little bit of uncertainty to the Government’s plans for implementing the scheme”. While we’re on the subject of Clarke, he was a fragrant as ever during the debate: “Consistency and idiocy are characteristics of the Liberal Democrats”. John Wilkes he ain’t. His mother must be terribly proud.

The “Honourable” Gentleman has also gone on the record to say:

I don’t think there is any benefit in opting out at all. Anyone who opts out in my opinion is foolish.

For one, teeth-sucking, fist-clenching moment, I am forced to agree with the Home Secretary for the first and, please help me, last time. Thanks to a cynical government fix masked as compromise and a craven (or credulous) opposition, the game is well and truly afoot and the doors have been bolted. Can we solve, give lie to, Ginsberg’s Theorem in time? Given that the Theorem was Ginsberg’s take on the Laws of Thermodynamics, the precedents aren’t good.

With ID cards, like all the other government IT equivalents of homework done on the bus to school that we didn’t ask for but must suffer, innocent lives will be blighted, possibly, like with the Tax Credits system, to a terrible extent. Tough luck if your details are wrong or the technology won’t scan your card. And obscene Krakatoas of cash will go to line the pockets of those who neither need nor deserve it, and maybe will not even notice it.ÂÂ

As Longrider says over at Europhobia: “incompetence is now our most valuable ally“. We must now hope that the procurement and implementation of the National Identity Register is as cack-handed, expensive and late as the rest of the technocratic turds this Government has to seen fit to foist on us in its rudderless quest for a subjugated Utopia.

In that, at least, the odds are in our favour. We democrats grudgingly placed our faith in the hands of the unelected Lords. We must now, reluctantly yet with hope, put it in the hands of big business.

So much of what this government does turns on the sixpence of semantic deceit. Why else are city academies allowed to select 10% of students by aptitude in a given subject but not ability. I’ve yet to hear a clear explanation of the difference that did not um, er and wriggle.

No logical contortion is too ridiculous. It’s this most malleable of mindsets that allows the likes of Jim Murphy, sponsor of the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, to acknowledge the concerns people have about the bill but still refuse implement adequate safeguards against the new law being abused.

It’s the same deal with ID cards. It’s being sold as a voluntary system but from 2008, when renewing your passport, you will be automatically issued with an ID card. It’s a voluntary system where you must have a card.

I offer this exchange, from the most recent debate on ID cards in the House of Commons, between Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, and his Tory opposite number, David Davis:

David Davis: Does the Home Secretary think that foreign travel is voluntary for diplomats, soldiers and other Crown servants and their families?

Mr. Charles Clarke: It is not compulsory.

Six impossible things before breakfast? When it comes to believing utter rot, New Labour make the White Queen look like Richard Dawkins.