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ID cards and the snooper state

Sunday, July 26th, 2009

IT IS simply wrong of James Hall, CEO of the Identity & Passport Service, to suggest that the personal information stored on the National Identity Register is equivalent to the data already collected for passports.

The passport database requires only a single name and address at the time of application, together with a copy of the holder’s passport photograph.

Schedule 1 of the Identity Cards Act 2006 (http://tinyurl.com/IDsched1) describes 50 classes of information that may be stored on the ID database.

These data include every name by which an applicant has been known, every place of residence (in the UK or elsewhere), a photograph, signature, fingerprints and “other” biometric information (eg iris scans), national insurance number, driver number, passport and identity card numbers issued by other countries, and much else besides.

Anyone enrolling on the ID database will be subjecting themselves to lifelong reporting requirements. There are severe financial penalties for failure to keep the authorities notified of any change of detail.

Furthermore, the ID database will store information of a kind that no government department has ever had access to before, except where the security services have placed suspects under surveillance.

The national identity register’s audit trail will record every occasion on which an identity is verified, such as stays in hotels and visits to clinics, providing a detailed profile of every citizen’s life.

Dr Geraint Bevan, Glasgow

UNDER the Identity Cards Act 2006 the Identity and Passport Service has become a branch of the snooper state. Everyone registered for an identity card will subsequently have to report every change in their circumstances on pain of a fine of up to £1,000, and be forced to re-register every ten years or face more large fines. Greatly increased amounts of information about citizens will be kept on a new £6bn database, funded by inflated £77 passport fees. Logging ID card usage in the database will allow government to monitor citizens’ daily lives.

No democratic government has ever tried to track its population’s movements in this way. Whitehall’s identity cards scheme has no place in our country, and must be scrapped immediately.

Andrew Watson, Cambridge

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Big Brother in the electronic age

Sunday, July 26th, 2009

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US Troops Hiding in Iraqi Homes

Saturday, July 25th, 2009

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Guantánamo Bay: the inside story

Saturday, July 25th, 2009

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China’s police-state

Saturday, July 18th, 2009

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Israeli hires Internet soldiers

Saturday, July 18th, 2009

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U.S. carrying out “targeted killings”

Saturday, July 18th, 2009

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Extent of Iraqis’ torture revealed

Saturday, July 18th, 2009

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CIA ordered to speed up release of torture report

Friday, July 17th, 2009

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Bush, Cheney knew they were violating law

Friday, July 17th, 2009

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Freedom of Information Act to be extended

Friday, July 17th, 2009

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Obama on slavery

Friday, July 17th, 2009

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EU justice ministers call for more data protection

Friday, July 17th, 2009

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Indians to get biometric ID cards

Friday, July 17th, 2009

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Probe Into Bush Policies Urged

Tuesday, July 14th, 2009

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This entry was posted on Sunday, July 26th, 2009 at 6:23 pm and is filed under UK-News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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