Friday, April 02, 2004
A very good article from The Register with their take on Blair's sudden announcement of ID Cards for everyone. I especially liked:
So he's he's not saying that civil liberties objections have gone away, simply that the objectors have now been sufficiently isolated for the government to introduce cards without sustaining political damage.
[T]he British Government (alongside governments throughout the world) is proceeding on the presumption that it is manifest truth that ID systems are a cost-effective weapon against terrorism. It has conducted no significant research into whether or not this is in fact true, nor into how the specific systems it is currently devising will improve the effectiveness of the anti-terrorism, immigration control and crime prevention systems it already deploys.
Consider also the possible impact of a future ID card system on the most recent waves of arrests [following the events in the South-East of the past week]. We can reasonably presume that the security services had a fair idea of the identity of most of the luckless 500 before they pulled them in, and that any others who might have been collared in passing will have been IDed pretty swiftly afterwards. So there would have been little in the way of immediate benefit to be derived from any of these having ID cards. There would likely be a subsequent effect for these people, as a record of their arrest linked to their ID card would possibly affect their future arrest prospects, and would probably disrupt any international travel arrangements they might have. You could however say that this bummer of a deal (for the majority of the 500 who are surely innocent) would simply be an automation and global extension of the systems we've already got, i.e. the ones that don't work very well. They are the 'suspected of being Irish' de nos jours, and that's the price they pay in the War on Terror. (Emphasis mine)
So he's he's not saying that civil liberties objections have gone away, simply that the objectors have now been sufficiently isolated for the government to introduce cards without sustaining political damage.
[T]he British Government (alongside governments throughout the world) is proceeding on the presumption that it is manifest truth that ID systems are a cost-effective weapon against terrorism. It has conducted no significant research into whether or not this is in fact true, nor into how the specific systems it is currently devising will improve the effectiveness of the anti-terrorism, immigration control and crime prevention systems it already deploys.
Consider also the possible impact of a future ID card system on the most recent waves of arrests [following the events in the South-East of the past week]. We can reasonably presume that the security services had a fair idea of the identity of most of the luckless 500 before they pulled them in, and that any others who might have been collared in passing will have been IDed pretty swiftly afterwards. So there would have been little in the way of immediate benefit to be derived from any of these having ID cards. There would likely be a subsequent effect for these people, as a record of their arrest linked to their ID card would possibly affect their future arrest prospects, and would probably disrupt any international travel arrangements they might have. You could however say that this bummer of a deal (for the majority of the 500 who are surely innocent) would simply be an automation and global extension of the systems we've already got, i.e. the ones that don't work very well. They are the 'suspected of being Irish' de nos jours, and that's the price they pay in the War on Terror. (Emphasis mine)
