19 Feb 2007
In a further attempt to draft support for the beleaguered identity cards proposals, the Prime Minister has sent an email response to the almost 28,000 people who signed a recent online petition against the scheme.
The petition, which closed on 15 February and attracted thousands of supporters, purported that the introduction of ID cards would not prevent terrorism or crime, but would instead be a form of indirect tax.
According to the email from Tony Blair, the petition attracted one of the largest responses since the service was set up. “So I thought I would reply personally to those who signed up, to explain why the Government believes National ID cards, and the National Identity Register needed to make them effective, will help make Britain a safer place,” he added.
Blair used the email to reiterate the role ID cards and biometric technology would play in securing national borders, countering fraud, and tackling international crime and terrorism. The Prime Minister also attempted to play down concerns about the controversial National Identity Register, which he argued “will contain less information on individuals than the data collected by the average store card”.
Benefits such as speeding up checks on those wanting to work with children; potentially helping to crack around 900,000 unsolved crimes; and preventing illegal immigration were also outlined.
On the issue of the cost of the scheme, the Prime Minister argued that some estimates were deliberately exaggerated. According to government figures, 70 percent of the cost would be accounted for by biometric passports, which Blair claimed would become obligatory anyway for any foreign travel, with the additional ID cards element adding £30.
Tony Blair may have a bigger job on his hands trying to convince the UK public about the benefits of the proposed road pricing scheme, however. A similar online petition set up to urge the government to scrap the road charging plans had attracted more than 1.6m signatures ahead of the 20 February deadline.
Biometric ID documents would work perfectly in small organisations where everyone concerned would be on the database and every point of transaction would have reading equipment.
Nationally it is virtually impossible to satisfy both these conditions and hence the system will fail.
Fraudsters will be tempted to use fakes of these documents as IDs where reading equipment is not present. It is thus obvious that these biometric ID documents will encourage more identity fraud.
Posted by: Yogesh Raja 20 Feb 2007
Several of Tony Blair's key claims have been refuted many times over. He is even now trying to "sell" the system on the basis of "feature creep", which ministers promised Parliament would never be allowed to happen.
Tony McNulty, then Home Office minister for Immigration, Citizenship and Nationality, clearly stated in Standing Committee on 6 July 2005: "There are safeguards not only against state agencies, for want of a better phrase, **going fishing in the database** but against misbehaviour and abuse of the database by those who manage the system." - reported in Hansard, but clearly no longer the case, since the Prime Minister's e-mail directly contemplates 'fishing expeditions' and both data-sharing within UK government and passing information on citizens to foreign governments.
The "70% would be spent anyway" is a complete fabrication. Blair is repeating an arbitrary piece of creative accounting as if it were meaningful. The truth is that passports are only being re-engineered in this hugely expensive and bullying fashion in order to provide cover for the ID scheme.
The government refuses to detail how it intends to spend £378 million per year ("70%" of its current 10 year estimate for the Home Office costs of the ID programme, divided by 10) for the next 10 years on "improvements to the passport" - let alone the "additional" £162 million per year, that it says is for the stand-alone cards themselves. If these changes are required anyway, what is it hiding?
FYI, a few other pseudo-facts used by the government in ID propaganda include:
- £1.7 billion as the annual cost of 'identity fraud' - see Andrew Gilligan, Evening Standard, 20/6/05: http://www.spy.org.uk/spyblog/2005/06/evening_standard_andrew_gillig.html or Silicon.com, 2/2/06: http://www.silicon.com/publicsector/0,3800010403,39156140,00.htm
- 900,000 crime scene *marks* (which might be multiple, or indistinct - leading to false 'matches') are misrepresented as separate crimes.
- Changes to the passport are required due to "international obligation". UK passports are already ICAO-compliant, and continue to qualify for the US Visa Waiver scheme, due to the inclusion of RFID chips and machine-readable data on the photo page. The NAO reports that the total cost of this "upgrade" was just £61 million.
Posted by: Phil Booth 19 Feb 2007
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