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Paranoid ravings

posted by [personal profile] purplecthulhu at 11:20pm on 02/04/2004
As far as I can tell, it seems that our glorious leader has been making up policy on the fly at press conferences, and now wants to push ahead with ID cards. Even if you agree with these in principle, there are a lot of problems with both this way of making policy and with actually implementing the system.

And, of course, as David Blunkett has admitted, ID cards will do nothing to fight terrorism, which is the current reason why Blair likes them.

A couple of sites for those who want to read more:

http://www.stand.org.uk who have a good long list of open questions on implementation

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/36748.html who have a rather cogent reporting and some suggestions about how this issue should be objectively investigated. Not that the current government of the UK actuially cares about 'evidence based policies', as they claim at election time.
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posted by [identity profile] purpletigron.livejournal.com at 09:51pm on 02/04/2004
As you know, Bob, we've managed to engage our MP in what seems to be a quite useful discussion on these issues. All it took was one hour visiting the MP's surgery and a pithy follow-up letter with a few pointers to carefully thought-out discussion of the problems. As with voting, I'm all in favour of everyone participating in this kind of lobbying, especially if you've done some thinking around your hot issues, and even if (!) you disagree with me...
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posted by [identity profile] alexmc.livejournal.com at 11:02pm on 02/04/2004
ID cards will help british residents get services from the government in a standardised way but I strongly doubt it will help in the fight against fraud or the fight agains terrorism.

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(no subject)

posted by [identity profile] purplecthulhu.livejournal.com at 12:07am on 03/04/2004
But we already have lots of other ways to get those services in a standardised way - NHS card, NI card/number, driving license, passport... Yes, they're all different, but that in fact is added security against identity theft. Just because I lost my passport in Canada last year (I did) doesn't mean whoever got it can pose as me with the tax authorities (for whatever reason they might have). If I'd lost my ID card, things might have been much worse.

Different, compartmentalised ID methods, as we have at the moment, are in fact a benefit to security, and the minimal extra inconvenience this provides is a small price to pay for this security, IMHO.
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