Voluntary identity cards are a myth

There is no radical change in this identity card announcement. If you want to travel outside Britain, ID cards will be compulsory

What's weird about the latest Home Office announcement on ID cards is not the mendacity. One gets used to that. It is its pretence simultaneously at calm and radical change.

Let us be clear: there is no radical change in this announcement, a compulsory identity card trial for airside workers due to start in September has been abandoned by the new home secretary but for the rest of us the Home Office line remains the same. No compulsion (as the Home Office means the term) was going to be applied until almost everyone had volunteered, and it was only a matter of rounding a minority of resisters and marginalised people.

The Home Office's idea of voluntary is not the same as yours and mine.

Since 2004, and in petto before, the object of the exercise has been for the scheme to have "parasitic vitality", for it to be a vampire on the body politic. It was – and is – to proceed by one-by-one "designating" under the Identity Cards Act other documents issued by official bodies, primarily passports.

Once a document has been designated, you won't be able to apply for one without also applying to be entered, for life, on the national identity register. If you don't it won't be that you have been refused (say) a passport; you'd have voluntarily decided not to apply. There's no compulsion to have a passport. It is useful for travelling. But you aren't compelled to travel.

Or to drive. Or to work as a security guard. Or with children. Or in healthcare. To get parole from prison. To practice as a lawyer. Any official licence, registration certificate or permit can be designated, and – by the home office's lights – handing control of your identity to the Home Office's Identity and Passport Service will be entirely voluntary.

That they were due for a confrontation with the airside worker's unions over designating new passes at Manchester and City Airports is an illustration of just how voluntary "voluntary" really is. But the fact they have now ducked that fight for political convenience suggests we can say, no. We just have to unveil the fraud of no compulsion first.

Source: The Guardian

ID card U-turn under fire

The Home Secretary has come under renewed fire from civil liberties campaigners for distorting the truth about the compulsory introduction of Identity registration.

This week new Home Office supremo Alan Johnson backtracked on a proposal to force around 30,000 airport workers in Manchester and London to carry ID cards following the threat of legal action.

He announced however that the government was pressing ahead with and accelerating the voluntary roll-out of ID cards, while stating that the cards would not be compulsory for British citizens.

All foreign nationals in Britain are to be forced to carry identity cards and the Home Secretary said he wished to see this scheme fast-tracked.

But Mr Johnson did not mention that, under regulations due to go before Parliament, anyone renewing or applying for a British passport will have their details recorded on the National Identity Register.

The regulations would make passports a designated document under the national identity card scheme.

The regulations would also give the government the power to fine people up to £1,000 if they failed to inform the authorities of a change of address or change in personal details within three months.

When contacted by the Morning Star a Home Office spokesman confirmed that, “from 2011 anyone aged 16 or over applying for or renewing a passport will be enrolled on the on the National Identity Register.”

Critics of the scheme argue that this is just compulsory registration by another name.

Responding to the new Home Secretary’s announcement on ID cards, Liberty Director of Policy Isabella Sankey, said: “However you spin it, big ears, four legs and a long trunk still make an elephant.

“And this white elephant is as costly to privacy and race equality as to our purses.

“As long as entry on the National Identity Register is automatic when applying for a passport the ID scheme will be compulsory in practice.”

Paddy McGuffin

Source: RINF News

Johnson has his card marked by Brown

The home secretary wanted to ditch ID cards, but Gordon Brown vetoed that. So a Conservative government will kill the scheme

What a fiasco. The government has announced it is abandoning all compulsory elements of the ID cards – while accelerating the implementation of a voluntary scheme. The government is playing party politics with our civil liberties – and that's not on.

The rumours have been running round ever since Alan Johnson became home secretary. It's a classic Labour trick – and one he's always been keen on. Scrap ID cards – remove one of the key issues of difference between the government and the opposition and, in doing so, reduce their political room for manoeuvre.

Oh, and save a few hundred million pounds in doing so, which will help fill the gap in the Home Office budget following Gordon Brown's raid around Whitehall departments to find the cash to pay for his latest relaunch.

The trouble is, No 10 didn't buy it. Despite the best efforts of Mr Johnson and his Home Office team, the word on the street is that the prime minister wouldn't let them get rid of what is still one of the government's flagship schemes.

Apparently, the PM wants to hang onto ID cards because he wants to be able to look tough on terror and paint his opponents as weak liberals who don't take the security of the country seriously.

So Alan Johnson's plans were scuppered at the last minute. Instead of being greeted by a ground-breaking new announcement, the assembled Home Affairs correspondents found themselves listening to something rather more anodyne.

No more compulsion ... that is, no more compulsion for airport staff at Manchester or London City airports. And, er, well, that's it!

So the new home secretary has fallen at the first hurdle. What he's been left with is neither fish nor fowl. The ID card scheme is now purely voluntary for British citizens. And for now, it's only happening at all for airline industry workers at a handful of airports and, bizarrely, for the residents of Manchester.

As if any sensible Mancunian is seriously going to wake up one morning and say to themselves, "I think I'll skip the curry tonight, go down to Boots and spend the money on an ID card instead." Or realise that the airside security card that they have already been issued with isn't good enough, and that it might be useful to spend the cash on an extra form of ID as well.

It's just pure fantasy – and it comes at a price of hundreds of millions, if not billions, of pounds. And it's another example of why this government has run out of steam. Introducing ID cards isn't a matter of great national security importance. Since becoming shadow home secretary, I have talked to numerous experts on the terror threat we face. Not one has argued to me that we are wrong on ID cards. Not one has tried to persuade me to change the Conservative party view, and adopt ID cards as a policy.

ID cards have become a totem for the prime minister – against the wishes of many of his colleagues. A former home secretary, David Blunkett, now says the project is too ambitious. Chancellor Alistair Darling has cast doubts on the scheme. Now, we know the current home secretary would like to ditch the plans. But he isn't being allowed to, on strict orders from the Downing Street bunker.

So people will have to wait – just a few months – for the chance to vote in a Conservative government that will scrap the project immediately.

And if you live in Manchester? Well, personally, I'd rather spend the money on a pint of lager, some poppadoms and a prawn biryani.

Source: The Guardian

ID cards test Johnson's political skills

The announcement today that a compulsory ID card trial for airside workers has been dropped makes clear that the new home secretary, Alan Johnson, a good union man, is not going to take on the British Airline Pilots' Association and other unions in the runup to the next election. For the same reason, he is not going to annoy the rail workers who were also fingered as a test bed in the Home Office's megalomaniac ID plans. This speaks well of Johnson's political skills but not of his principles as democrat.

He is clearly trying to take some of the poison out of the debate by emphasising that identity cards will be voluntary (until MPs vote for a compulsory scheme). He says he will issue £30 cards to young volunteers across North England, and he is thinking of making it free for people over 75 years old.

It's all mood music: we are still stuck with a wasteful and invasive scheme. The really imaginative and bold action would have been for Johnson to conduct a review and announce a swift termination. But that would have meant confrontation with his department, which is wedded to its identity management strategy, trying to sell it to an increasingly sceptical public as a means of empowerment – " to make it easier for citizens to prove and manage their identity" in the words of Sir David Normington, the permanent secretary at the Home Office, and James Hall, chief executive of the Identity and Passport Service.

This is nonsense. The ID card is primarily a scheme that enables government to identify you, and that is made clear in a dubious little paper called Safeguarding Identity, produced by the Home Office last week, which describes how the ID card and the transformational government scheme mesh together in one glorious structure where data about the individual passes between departments. That is the prize and why they will use any argument and spend any amount to achieve it. Every case mounted in favour of ID cards has been convincingly knocked down. It will not protect us from terrorism, as Johnson concedes, and it won't do anything to stop crime. Its effect on benefit fraud is limited. The unions have rejected it, Sheffield city council refuses to take part in a pilot scheme, and politicians from all parties despise it.

The ID card is a dead duck: it's just that no one in government has the guts or sense to read the last rites.

Source: The Guardian

Real ID: A Real Warning on the Danger of Government

By James Bovard

The REAL ID Act may be on the verge of receiving its final coffin nails. Unfortunately, the Obama administration is pushing a replacement bill that poses many of the same threats as REAL ID. The history of REAL ID should inspire friends of freedom to once again vigorously oppose any and every federal grab for their personal information.

The feds had sought legislation to create national ID cards in the 1990s but were rebuffed by a Republican Congress. But, after 9/11, "everything changed" -- at least in Washington. Regardless of the reasons why the CIA and FBI failed to stop the hijackers, the solution was far more snooping and the potential creation of hundreds of millions of dossiers on American citizens. Almost overnight, it became widely accepted that the government must have unlimited powers to search anywhere and everywhere for enemies of freedom. The worse the government's failure to protect Americans, the further it permitted itself to intrude.

There was scant opposition when the House of Representatives initially considered REAL ID in early 2005. The Senate unanimously approved the bill, attached as a rider to an appropriations bill for military spending. Rep. Ron Paul was practically the lone Republican sounding the alarm. At the time the bill passed, he warned, "This REAL ID Act establishes a massive, centrally-coordinated database of highly personal information about American citizens: at a minimum their name, date of birth, place of residence, Social Security number, and physical characteristics."

REAL ID provided a blank check for the feds to demand more information at any time in the future. The new law granted "open-ended authority to the Secretary of Homeland Security to require biometric information on IDs in the future. This means your harmless looking driver's license could contain a retina scan, fingerprints, DNA information, or radio frequency technology," as congressman Paul warned.

Back in 2005, it was not fashionable in Washington to be afraid of federal surveillance. Luckily, in the subsequent years, civil liberties activists have raised Cain around the nation. More than half of all the state legislatures have passed resolutions or laws restricting REAL ID’s bite in their state. But in order to understand what the feds may try next, it is important to consider how REAL ID was sold, how it was expanded, and why it remains a threat.

At the time REAL ID was being promoted, advocates of federal surveillance claimed that national identification cards were necessary to make Americans safe. In reality, national ID cards would do far more to control than to protect Americans. Savvy foreign terrorists could find ways to evade the requirements for such cards -- the same way that they easily evaded ludicrous airport security systems on September 11, 2001.

REAL ID was intended to greatly increase federal levers over the movement and lives of Americans. In 2008, Homeland Security czar Michael Chertoff announced that Americans who lived in states who had not revised their drivers licenses to meet REAL ID mandates could be banned from boarding an airplane within the United States. Since the Transportation Security Administration was part of Chertoff's fiefdom, he could snap his fingers and the TSA would block anyone who did not present the proper papers from catching a flight. (Chertoff's attempt to bludgeon state legislatures into submission backfired).

If the feds had been upfront about claiming a prerogative to arbitrarily ban any American from air travel at the time the bill was initially considered, far more people would have protested before REAL ID became law. But this is typical of the "camel's nose in the tent" style of surveillance.

REAL ID was also used to railroad through a vast expansion of the definition of terrorism. As Rep. Paul noted, the law "re-defines 'terrorism' in broad new terms that could well include members of firearms rights and anti-abortion groups, or other such groups as determined by whoever is in power at the time. There are no prohibitions against including such information in the database as information about a person's exercise of First Amendment rights or about a person's appearance on a registry of firearms owners."

Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) complained that REAL ID "defined the term 'terrorist activity' so broadly that it basically covers anyone who has ever used a firearm." REAL ID's expansion of the definition of terrorist activity is especially perilous considering the hostility that some congressmen have towards gun owners.

And the danger is compounded because some Homeland Security Department officials have already labeled individuals who invoke the Constitution or support candidates like Ron Paul as radicals and extremists. This past April, a Homeland Security report entitled "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Environment Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment" defined as "right wing extremism" groups and individuals who are "mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely." Thus, anyone who firmly believes in the Tenth Amendment could be classified as a threat to public safety. Once the groundwork is laid, the feds could exploit REAL ID to block people to travel to political protests. (The federal No Fly list was exploited in a similar fashion in 2002 to block Wisconsin nuns from traveling to an antiwar protest in Washington).

Now, Obama's Homeland Security chief, Janet Napolitano, is urging Congress to enact what is portrayed as "REAL ID-Lite" -- the PASS Act (Providing for Additional Security in States' Identification Act of 2009).

But this bill contains many of the same risks as the REAL ID. And Napolitano is promoting requiring state drivers’ licenses to contain RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) chips with unique numbers for each individual. Katherine Albrecht, author of the bestseller Spychips, warns that this scheme could make it easy for the government to identify anyone who attends a gun show or an antiwar rally. Albrecht asks: "What happens to all those people when a government operator carrying a reading device makes a circuit of the event? They could download all those unique ID numbers and link them." And it would be a small step from this to putting all the names on watch lists.

But PASS ID sounds more innocuous than REAL ID. However, from another perspective, it sounds reminiscent of high school - when students had to get a hall pass from their teacher before being permitted to step out of the classroom.

Many REAL ID advocates insisted that there was no risk of the government using the new law as a launching pad to go further into people’s lives. But the experience with other federal surveillance efforts proves that things can get far more worse than even paranoids suspect. In the 1980s, when cell phones became popular, many people saw them as a way for people to enjoy a new freedom and mobility. But, in 1999, the Federal Communications Commission bowed to FBI demands and required that all new cellular telephones be de facto homing devices. Cell phones must now include components that allow law enforcement to determine the precise location of any caller using the device. As Electronic Design magazine noted, "Unlike the location feature being created for 911 emergency services, this capability will apply to all calls and users won't be able to turn it off."

There was no reason to pass Real ID, and there is no reason to enact a replacement after state legislatures shot REAL ID to pieces. Nothing has happened since 2005 to make the government more trustworthy or to make liberty less valuable. It is vital that we never permit our rulers to treat all Americans like criminal suspects all the time. The government's incompetence at protecting Americans must not be converted into a political entitlement to destroy all privacy.

Source: Campaign For Liberty