24dash.com: National identity card to come with PIN number

The controversial new national identity card may come with a PIN number like existing bank cards.

The Home Office Minister, Andy Burnham, said a “chip and pin” style code number could be used to verify cardholders’ identities in some cases, rather than fingerprints, face and iris scans which will be encoded in the card.

So what does this mean? The biometric data readers have too high a failure rate? That they’re too expensive? Whatever the reason, this sounds like an “Oh shit, think of something quick” moment. It looks like the belt isn’t going to be enough to keep these trousers up - we need braces as well.

We’re told ID cards are going to be handy in that they’ll do away with having to carry bank cards and cheque books and drivers licences - you know, all those heavy, unwieldy items - in order to identify ourselves. They’ll also be handy in that as well as your bank card pin and your credit card pin and your work door lock pin and your bank account security pin you’ll now have to remember your ID card pin as well. No great shakes for most, I’ll agree, but then I’m not an 84 year-old woman with no grasp of technology and fading faculties, or a young man with learning difficulties, or a woman escaping domestic violence, fleeing to a refuge in the middle of the night and leaving the scrap of paper with my pin on it at home.

So you go to the doctor and if he’s affluent enough to be able to afford an iris scanner, you’re asked to present your iris. Ah, he can’t get a match. Never mind, let’s try the fingerprint reader. No? Tell you what, can you enter your pin number please? Cashback, sir? Are you collecting the schools tokens? You can’t remember your pin? Then I’m sorry sir, your baby daughter’s antibiotics will have to wait.

Aren’t ID cards supposed to be making our lives easier? It depends who you are and what you do with your life. If you’re a government bureaucrat then yes, ID cards are going to make your life easier. That’s if they work. At this rate, expect Andy Burnham to announce that ID cards will have to be accompanied by a utilities bill or a Blockbuster video card in order to prove your identity.

Biometric ID cards. Their time has come you know.

If you’ve got a spare hour, and if you didn’t watch it last night, I recommend you have a look at this week’s edition of Question Time online (it’ll be there until this time next week), if only to see the feckless Peter Hain taking a kicking.

At some points it was painful to watch, the other four panellists, the audience and even the arch establishment figure David Dimbleby queued up to lamp him. It was like a bunch of squaddies taking their frustrations out on an Iraqi teenager. He didn’t give up much of a fight.

You have to wonder what really goes through the mind of a former anti-Apartheid firebrand when he has to (half heartedly) defend ID cards, house arrest and extraordinary rendition. It doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to know what Hain’s reaction would have been had, in 1970, the South African government put Nelson Mandela on a plane to Algeria to have information beaten out of him.

But as fun as was to watch this abject turncoat take his licks, he was also guilty of peddling this to defend ID cards:

Look at the 7/7 terrorists, they had multiple identities, as many as 12.

I wonder where that came from because, try as I might, I can’t find any mention anywhere of the July 7 bombers having used multiple identities. The nearest I can find is this, from Andrew Marr’s interview with Gordon Brown on February 12:

I mean most of these terrorists we’re talking about have about 12 identities, they operate multiple identities and false identities.

And, as has been repeated over and over (particularly by me), Charles Clarke himself said that ID cards would not have prevented the the July bombings. I doubt whether Hain will ever be picked up on this but for thousands of people watching Question Time last night, the seed will have been planted. It’ll be interesting to see if it surfaces anywhere else, from whose mouth, and if anybody challenges it.

(I could quite easily spend a day dissecting the evasions, equivocations, misdirections and, yes, downright lies, that Hain put across last night - on glorification of terrorism, on how ID cards won’t be compulsory without a further act of parliament, on why the British government won’t help the British residents still in Guantanamo Bay - but you have to wonder what the point would be. I’d be that little bit more pissed off, you’d be that little bit more pissed off and it’s such a sunny day and everything. The level of deception at which this government operates that becomes apparent to even a halfway attentive observer is amazing. Just what Hain got away with in one hour of a TV show, despite his mauling, well, you have to salute him for it really.)

I guess the identity theft/fraud angle on ID cards has failed to catch the public imagination so the prevention of terrorism aspect has to be bigged up again. It went away for a bit - so much so that the Prime Minister did not use the T word once in his defence of ID cards at Prime Minister’s Questions on January 18 - but now it’s back. Fear sells - Gordon Brown, in his hard man speech to herald the arrival of the “dual premiership”, used the words “July 7″ seventeen times.

It’s said that the New Labour project lifted, wholesale, policies and their way of conducting business from the Clinton administration. In this technique of embracing the politics of fear, it’s obvious New Labour have picked up a few things from Clinton’s successors as well.

Bloomberg: U.K.’s Blair Wins Vote on Glorification of Terrorism
The government scheduled the terrorism vote for the same day that 20 people received honors at Buckingham Palace from Queen Elizabeth for helping to rescue victims of the July 7 terrorist attacks in London. When the Commons last took up the bill, in November, the vote was scheduled for the day after the memorial service for victims. Blair’s spokesman Tom Kelly described that as a “complete coincidence.”

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 increase—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 that—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 passports—I know that he agrees with that—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.

BBC News, July 8 2005: ID cards ‘wouldn’t stop attacks’

Asked by BBC Radio 4’s Today programme if ID cards could have prevented Thursday’s atrocity, Mr Clarke said: “I doubt it would have made a difference.

“I’ve never argued … that ID cards would prevent any particular act.

Guardian, 10 January 2006: Labour MPs oppose partial ban on smoking but back ID cards

Among Labour MPs there was strong support for… introducing identity cards…

“I may have been an opponent but 7/7 has had an influence on my opinion,” said one longstanding MP, Harry Cohen.

If Charles Clarke is announcing that ID cards are only going to cost £30, then the ID Cards Bill must be due back in Parliament any day now (yup, Tuesday), and Labour Party MPs must be looking for some threadbare justification for continuing to support it. And if that’s not quite enough (’Isn’t £30 pretty much what they said last time we bravely gave in?’) then Clarke also has a report demonstrating “strong public support for the scheme” and an “independent analysis” from KPMG backing him up on the scheme costs.

We now propose to demonstrate how Clarke, who announced the £30, the report and the KPMG analysis in a written answer to a parliamentary question on 13th October, was to all intents and purposes misleading the House. We should however note that he was not lying as such - he was merely giving his target audience on the Labour benches the tools to believe what they desperately want to believe, and the sad truth is that not many of them are going to be inclined to say, ‘Er, hang on a minute, Charles…’

read the rest

Four No2ID campaigners were ejected from Gateshead Metro Centre yesterday, after their attempts to protest against the introduction of a national identity register and identity card were deemed “inappropriate” for local shoppers.

…

No2ID argues that the Home Office is rigorously excluding opposing views from the tour. The campaign group complains that the details and locations of the tour are not being made public in advance, and that the public is only being given one side of the story.

No2ID ejected from government’s ID roadshow

The government was yesterday accused of packing the committee which will examine its controversial ID cards bill with Labour loyalists who will not join the search for a cheaper compromise that does not pose a threat to civil liberties.

read the rest

Campaigners say that a network of anti-ID card groups, ranging from hackers to anarchists, plans a series of assaults in the coming months to try to block the scheme. A £1 million fund is being raised to help pay legal fees if, as expected, prosecutions are brought once the cards become compulsory, probably in 2010.

The Guardian reports that Blair hits out over ‘absurd’ EU rules. Our great leader has decreed that the compensation culture has created an aversion to risk in the public sector. I thought it might be interesting to read the PMs speech while thinking about only one of our great leaders proposals. I decided to go for the National Identity Register and ID Card Bill. Please do try to play along at home. Do you have the bill in your mind? You do? Then we are ready to read selected highlights of: Tony Blair’s speech on compensation culture.

read the rest…

BBC News: Blunkett urges vote fraud action

The former home secretary described the case in which six Labour councillors were found guilty of postal vote fraud as “totally outrageous”.

He called for individual rather than household voter registration - backed up by a national ID card scheme.

See what he’s done there? If you oppose ID cards you now also oppose measures to prevent electoral fraud.

By opposing attacks on our democratic freedoms, we actually support attacks on our democratic freedoms.

As Keanu Reeves once said: “Whoa!”