Gordon Brown still clueless on ID Cards

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Gordon Brown still clueless on ID Cards and the National Identity Register centralised biometric database

Our unelected Prime Minister Gordon Brown still does not seem to have grasped the fundamentals of his NuLabour compulsory centralised biometric database the National Identity Register scheme according to this propaganda interview with The Observer newspaper this Sunday

Gordon Brown demonstrated how shockingly out of touch with the real world, by trying to justify the multi-billion pound compulsory national population surveillance and control infrastructure that is the National Identity Register, partly because of some small scale, unproven fingerprint biometric trials in some US and, allegedly, European shops, even though there have been no such successful trials in the UK, and no major UK retailer has decided that the idea is worth spending money on nationally.

The Yorkshire Ranter got in ahead of us, to point out some of the obvious flaws in Gordon Brown’s muddled answers to the rather soft and friendly questioning by The Observer regarding so called “ID Cards”.

Maybe when you go to a supermarket, as happens in some parts of the States and Europe, you are going to be safer, instead of carrying a credit card which can easily be stolen, to use your biometrics to shop.

This has to be some kind of record for biometric scienciness; the Government has historically always handwaved reality-based objections to ID cards away by claiming that we wouldn’t need them very often, whilst also floating insanely grandiose visions of biometric imperialism. Charles Clarke, we may recall, advertised them as “making it easier to rent videos”; as well as offering horrific new possibilities for total surveillance, this would have blasted the Government’s hazy costings down to nothing, demanding vast numbers of readers and numbers of transactions per second that even telecoms engineers would consider ambitious. To say nothing of insulting our intelligence.

This idea is both ridiculous, and, typically for Gordon Brown, a re-tread of a previously announced idea - see Gordon Brown - part 3 of the Chatham House speech on the 10th of October 2006, when he was still Chancellor of the Exchequer, trying unsuccessfully to pretend that he had a grasp on “security” and foreign affairs.

See also this NO2ID discussion forum thread on this latest spin by Gordon Brown.

See also Ideal Government, for another dissection of Gordon Brown’s ideas on “ID Cards” as outlined in the Observer interview.

We have not forgotten the other recent, dishonest and misleading attempts by Prime Minister Gordon Brown and by his “no longer a safe pair of hands” sidekick Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling, who tried to pretend that the ongoing missing HMRC data .privacy and security breach scandal , which has not gone away, for which they are personally responsibler, would somehow have been less serious, if the the wretched biometric National Identity Register had been in place and linked to the missing Child Benefit Award database.

These political lies were punctured elegantly by this open latter from leading academic experts, who described them as a “fairy-land” scenario.

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