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purplecthulhu at 03:50pm on 20/02/2007
purplecthulhu at 03:50pm on 20/02/2007That nice Tony Blair sent all of us who signed the petition against ID cards a letter the other day.
Unsurprisingly I wasn't convinced, but didn't have time to go through it with a fine tooth comb.
No2ID's comments:
"The PM's claims on this subject are not exactly lies, so much as fact-free.
Endlessly repeating a fabrication doesn't make it real, Mr Blair."
There are also
No2ID also note that part of the PM's justification is based on function creep that which his ministers promised wouldn't happen! What he wants to do is to let the police search the National ID database for matches to scene of crime fingerprints. Apart from this being something they said they wouldn't do, claiming that its even possible makes Blair's technical ignorance blindlingly obvious.
ElReg goes into this in great detail, but the basic point is that you can't compare messy scene-of-crime fingerprints with those obtained under controlled conditions for biometric IDs without getting thousands of false positives - ie. its a pointless exercise. They also point out that Blair's claimed statistics for the costs of Identity Theft are at best unreliable and at worst essentially made up.
So they seem to be immune to either petitioning voters or actual facts. And this from the people who lauded 'evidence based policy making' back in 1997. Those halcyon days seem so long ago now - clearly these days 'evidence based' means 'whatever we can fudge to provide a justification for what we wanted to do in the first place'.
Unsurprisingly I wasn't convinced, but didn't have time to go through it with a fine tooth comb.
No2ID's comments:
"The PM's claims on this subject are not exactly lies, so much as fact-free.
Endlessly repeating a fabrication doesn't make it real, Mr Blair."
There are also
No2ID also note that part of the PM's justification is based on function creep that which his ministers promised wouldn't happen! What he wants to do is to let the police search the National ID database for matches to scene of crime fingerprints. Apart from this being something they said they wouldn't do, claiming that its even possible makes Blair's technical ignorance blindlingly obvious.
ElReg goes into this in great detail, but the basic point is that you can't compare messy scene-of-crime fingerprints with those obtained under controlled conditions for biometric IDs without getting thousands of false positives - ie. its a pointless exercise. They also point out that Blair's claimed statistics for the costs of Identity Theft are at best unreliable and at worst essentially made up.
So they seem to be immune to either petitioning voters or actual facts. And this from the people who lauded 'evidence based policy making' back in 1997. Those halcyon days seem so long ago now - clearly these days 'evidence based' means 'whatever we can fudge to provide a justification for what we wanted to do in the first place'.
(no subject)
Generally on the petition website they were asking whether the Government will take any notice of it (the answer appears to be 'no'). I do wonder whether it might be more appropriate to petition the Queen on these issues, - any subject can petition Her Maj, the procedure is simple, if archaic, and would cause a gratifying amount of extra work for the Home Office (in 35 years I only ever had to deal with one Royal Petition).
(no subject)
This hadn't even occured to me. Which makes me wonder whether it might have any effect. Hmm *goes to ponder*
In the meantime, now that El Reg has feeds for subjects, I set up