Are you a "domestic extremist"?

See Magna Carta Plus News for details on how entirely peaceful, legal protest and merely attending political meetings could get your details recorded on databases of "domestic extremists"...

10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know

10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know is an informative look at how you can tailor your Facebook settings to protect your privacy. There's more to those Facebook settings than you might realise.

Online tax return system considered "too risky" for the famous

[Hat tip: Samizdata and Tim Worstall]

From a report in the Telegraph:

The security of the online computer system used by more than three million people to file tax returns is in doubt after HM Revenue and Customs admitted it was not secure enough to be used by MPs, celebrities and the Royal Family.

Thousands of "high profile" people have been secretly barred from using the online tax return system amid concerns that their confidential details would be put at risk.

And:

From this year, anyone wishing to file a self-assessment tax return after October will have to do so online or face stiff penalties.

However, HMRC has a list of those excluded from the new rules who must send hard copies of returns for "security reasons".

Hundreds of thousands of people are expected to use the electronic system to make the Jan 31 deadline this week.

Tax records contain bank details, national insurance numbers, salary and details on investments and savings - all valuable to fraudsters.

On Friday, senior accountants said they had concerns over the security of the system - apparently confirmed by the Revenue's secret policy.

Mike Warburton, of the accountants Grant Thornton, said: "Either the Revenue have a system which can guarantee confidentiality for all or they should defer plans to force online filing. It is extraordinary that MPs and others can enjoy higher security."

Mark Wallace, of the Taxpayers' Alliance, said: "This double standard is unacceptable. If the online system is not secure enough for MPs, why should ordinary taxpayers have to put up with it?"

This is of course the same HMRC who lost 25 million child benefit records. Why should anyone, famous or otherwise, trust these people or their online system to keep their personal data safe?

Renew for Freedom

With the passing of the Identity Cards Act 2006, the law enabling the creation of the national identity register (NIR) and accompanying ID card in Britain, No2ID has launched its Renew for Freedom campaign.

The idea is to get as many people as possible to renew their passports during the month of May (i.e. this month!). Those that do so will end up with a passport valid for 10 years and will do so before the point at which renewing passports will entail registering on the NIR.

The government has so far indicated that, from 2008 onwards, passport renewals will entail registering on the NIR and getting a card (though the card, but only the card, can be opted out of until 2010). They are keen to get as many people onto the system as possible. Clearly if the scheme is to be scrapped, it will help to ensure that as many people as possible refuse to register. If the numbers are large enough it will make compelling people to get a card unviable.

Renewing your passport now will therefore enable you to hold out against having to register on the NIR for longer than it would otherwise. Also, renewing now minimises the risk of being compelled to register on the NIR should the government move the timetable forward.

Tory peers cave in and let the Identity Cards Bill become an Act

Tory peers have accepted an amendment to the Identity Cards Bill allowing people renewing passports to opt out of getting an ID card until 2010. However they still have to register on the system, which means this "compromise" is nothing of the sort. So much for the Tory party defending civil liberties.

More details here.

ID card roadshow in Edinburgh tomorrow

Apparently, the government's identity cards "roadshow", a charm offensive the govt is using to try to win over the public on the proposals, will be hitting Edinburgh tomorrow according to the Glasgow No2ID website:

On Sunday 11th September, it was announced that the Home Office would be starting a 7 day "biometric roadshow" to try to sell the concept of ID cards to the British public. The roadshow started today with Andy Burnham MP, minister for ID cards, visiting Manchester Airport on Monday to show off the Home Office's dreams for biometric technology - BBC story (appeared Sunday afternoon).

The Home Office are trying to keep news of these events secret before they occur. On Monday afternoon they flatly refused to let me know if there were any plans for the roadshow to come to Scotland. The Home Office did not make a press release about the Manchester event public until it had already started.

Despite the Home Office refusing to tell us about future dates and venues, we have learnt that the roadshow will be at the Gyle shopping centre in Edinburgh on Wednesday 14th September. Andy Burnham will be there from 11:00 to 12:00.

If you can possibly get to Edinburgh on Wednesday to join in a small protest, hand out a few leaflets and challenge a minister to answer some of the questions that they have been avoiding, then please let me know. Or just turn up, if you prefer.

Sorry about the short notice, but the Home Office are trying to keep this quiet. We need all the help we can get - please get in touch: glasgow@no2id.net

UK government pushes for data retention across the EU

Following the 7th July bombings in London, the British government is pushing for communications service providers to retain data for upto 3 years for access by the police and intelligence agencies:

Under the proposals, telecoms operators and Internet service providers would have to keep records of emails, telephone calls and text messages for between 12 months and three years. Law enforcement agencies would be able to see who had sent and received these communications, although the content of these communications would not be stored.

Home secretary Charles Clarke claims that the powers would help to establish links between individuals.

This move is despite the fact that the European Parliament recently rejected these proposals, though because the proposal was put forward under the "third pillar" it has no power to stop the proposals if the member states push ahead with them.

An extraordinary meeting of the EU's Justice and Home Affairs Council called by Charles Clarke has given backing to these data retention powers. Yet, surely it would be trivial for any terrorists to circumvent such measures to try and spy on them. For example, each of the following methods would make data retention useless for monitoring who they communicate with:

• Buying and regularly changing unregistered pay as you go mobile phones.
• Using anonymous internet accounts and other anonymising services to hide your activities.
• Communicating face to face.
• Posting coded messages from newly created internet accounts to usenet groups, making it impossible to determine who the message was for, let alone who actually read it.
• Communicating via dead drops.
• Communicating via postal services.
  

So the end result is that all this data will be stored for the law abiding public and those who wish to circumvent it will do so easily.

The government's mass surveillance fetish

The British government seems to have a fetish for mass surveillance. Today it has announced plans to use satellite tracking of all motor vehicles as a means of road pricing:

Drivers could pay up to £1.34 a mile in "pay-as-you go" road charges under new government plans.

The transport secretary said the charges, aimed at cutting congestion, would replace road tax and petrol duty.

Alistair Darling said change was needed if the UK was to avoid the possibility of "LA-style gridlock" within 20 years.

Every vehicle would have a black box to allow a satellite system to track their journey, with prices starting from as little as 2p per mile in rural areas.

These plans have been in the offing for some time mind you. But it is in line with other proposals they've had that involve mass surveillance of everyone's activities:

• Their identity cards bill would involve recording all checks of people's identity in a centralised database thus enabling mass surveillance of people's activities -- opening bank accounts, accessing government services and registering with doctors would all (eventually) require identity checks and the information about who checks and when would be stored in the database.
• They want communications providers, e.g. phone/internet companies to store all "communications data" for a year or more. Compulsory retention of this data for 12-24 months is also being pushed at EU level. This is data about who you phone/email, what websites you visit, who visits your site, who phones emails you and even the location of your mobile phone.
  
• They have backed the use of automated number plate recognition to track those who visit petrol station forecourts as a means of preventing people from driving off without paying.

Note that all this surveillance will be directed at the population as a whole, not merely those who the govt suspects of wrong doing.

The Queen's Speech

Today, the Queen set out the government's legislative programme for the next parliamentary session. The full speech is available online here. As expected, the human livestock bill Identity Cards Bill has been reintroduced, as has the proposal to make "incitement to religious hatred" a criminal offence.

Both of these have implications for civil liberties. The former will give the government another means by which to interfere in people's lives and keep tabs on what people are doing whilst the latter is likely to make criticism of religious beliefs a risky affair and thus restrict freedom of speech.

A list of the bills being introduced can be found here. It is likely that the Identity Cards Bill and the incitement to religious hatred bill will not be the only legislation attacking civil liberties if this government's record is anything to go by.

Big brother proposals from EU and US

The Sunday Times reports that the EU and US authorities are planning to fit satellite trackers to all cars to monitor speed, location/routes taken and the wearing of seatbelts:

BLACK box recorders could be installed in all new cars under a European Union ruling.

The aircraft-style equipment would also act as a tracker, using global positioning satellites to record the location and route of a vehicle and to tell how fast a driver is going and whether seatbelts are being worn.

Data recovered from the boxes could give investigators important clues on how accidents are caused.

However, British motoring groups fear the technology could be used by government to introduce a national congestion charge or to keep tabs on people’s movements.

The European commission has asked the police forces of member states to look at whether the technology could improve road safety. Every year about 50,000 people are killed on European roads and another 3.5m are injured.

If, as expected, the police give their backing, manufacturers would be required to install black boxes in all new cars by 2009.

The National Transportation Safety Board in America also wants to make them mandatory by the same date. Already 15% of vehicles in the US are fitted with the palm-sized devices. Most new cars there have them fitted as standard. (Emphasis added)

Oddly enough, a couple of years back, the UK government was proposing similar stuff as a means of performing nation-wide congestion charging/road tolling.

The day when you're activities are continuously tracked 24/7 is not long off.

Glasgow night club chips its sheep customers...

Following in the footsteps of a club in Barcelona, the Glasgow night club, Bar Soba, has decided that its cattle customers can avoid the hassle of having to bring their wallets with them if they get a VeriChip stuck under their skin:

A Scottish nightclub is about to become the first in Britain to offer its customers the chance to have a microchip implanted in their arm to save them carrying cash.

The "digital wallet", the size of a grain of rice, guarantees entry to the club and allows customers to buy drinks on account. Brad Stevens, owner of Bar Soba in Glasgow, said his customers had responded enthusiastically to the idea.

The VeriChip is inserted by a medical professional and then scanned for its unique ID number as a customer enters the bar.

"There are a number of advantages, from instant access, to not having to carry money or credit cards, to letting bar staff know a customer's name and favourite drink," said Mr Stevens. "By the time you walk through the door to the bar, your favourite drink is waiting for you and the bar staff can greet you by name."

What's to stop someone else reading the chip without your knowledge, stealing its unique ID number and creating their own chip using your ID and your money to buy drinks at Bar Soba?

What's to stop someone using this chip to track your whereabouts at other times for more sinister purposes?

It seems that getting yourself chipped is the latest in a line of bad suggestions for what to do with these things, e.g.:

• A company in Mexico will chip your kids ostensibly as a measure to prevent them being kidnapped. Surely this simply means the kidnappers will now mutilate the kids to remove the things? Maybe they'll even get scanners in order to track the kids to kidnap them in the first place?
• A couple in the UK were reported to have decided to chipped their daughter after the murder of 2 girls, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, in Soham. This received the backing of academic Kevin Warwick.
  
• Schemes for chipping schoolkids' clothing, or in tags they wear around their necks to e.g. keep tabs on their arrival/departure from school have been proposed or are being implemented, e.g. in Japan and the US.
  

Spy.org.uk have this to say about such schemes (and I quite agree):

These so called "security" chips are the 21st century version of permanent cattle brands (indeed the original market for Verichips is for prize cattle and pet cats and dogs) or tattoos.

We find the concept completely unethical, bordering on actually evil. What is there to prevent this technology being used by exploiters of slave labour, pimps and brothel keepers, religous cults, abusive or paedophile parents or police states in order to control the movements of their victims and to prevent escape via actual alarm systems or the fear that "we will track you down if you try to escape"? (Emphasis added)

I'd add that the current uses of these chips for tracking children or allowing you to pay for drinks without having your wallet with you will tend to get people used to having technology in them/their clothing allowing them to be tracked 24/7.

Note that many of us already voluntarily carry around devices that can be used to track us -- our mobile phones. At least we can easily leave them behind or switch them off if we want to stop it. A chip under the skin will be a different matter -- fancy gouging it out just for some privacy?

Key features of the Identity Cards Bill

The Identity Cards Bill can be found online here, and its passage through the House of Commons is due to finish on the 27th January. As spy.org.uk points out at the previous link, with only 8 planned sittings and such a short timetable for a complex bill with 184 amendments to consider, it is unlikely this legislation will receive adequate scrutiny in the House of Commons. Once again it will be down to the House of Lords to debate it more adequately.

I shall summarise some of the key features of the bill here.

The National Identity Register(NIR)

Section 1 sets up the NIR, and together with Schedule 1 determines what information will be stored on it. The information to be stored includes:

• a unique National Idenity Registration Number(NIRN) for each person in the NIR.
• your date of birth, gender, full name and any other name you've had.
• your current address plus every address you've ever lived at.
• your photo, signature and biometric scans.
  
• your residential status plus every previous residential status you've had.
• details of any official identity documents issued to you,
  
• the history of all changes made to your NIR record,
• details of all ID cards issued to you, their validity, whether you've been ordered to surrender them, etc.
• details of all the information you've provided to register on the NIR and to apply for/renew your ID cards.
• details of every occasion on which the NIR entry has been accessed by others. Note that when it becomes necessary to have your ID card and NIR entry checked in order to access public services, this item will thus record your usage of those services, e.g. what medical services you've signed up for.

Access to the information on the NIR

Note that where the Home Secretary gets powers to issue orders, the orders must be approved by both Houses of Parliament, unless otherwise stated.

Section 14 allows the Home Secretary to disclose some of the information on your NIR entry to you, or to someone else acting on your behalf, for purposes of verification of the data if you apply to for such access. The information you can get includes:

• your name, date of birth, addresses and gender.
• your identifying numbers and the validity of your identifying documents.
• your photo and signature.
• whether biometric scans taken from you matched the ones recorded for you.

The information you can access under this section does NOT include the record of changes to your NIR entry or the record of who has accessed your NIR entry. However, section 14(8) does permit access to the NIR record using other legislation such as the Data Protection Act. It is thus not clear whether an individual can get access to the record of who has accessed their NIR entiry.

Section 17 gives the Home Secretary the power to allow a person providing a public service to access the NIR to verify your identity, where the person is also authorised to check your ID card before providing the service (see also Section 15 and 16).

Section 19 sets out which public authorities can access NIR information without your consent (see also Section 20):

• MI5, MI6, GCHQ and the Serious Organised Crime Agency (see the Serious Organised Crime and Police Bill) will get access to all of the information for the purposes of carrying out their functions.
• The Police, Inland Revenue and Customs and Excise, will get access to all the information, except the record of who has accessed the NIR, in the interests of national security, for preventing or detecting crime and for other purposes specified by order of the Home Secretary. In the case of the IR and C&E they also get access for carrying out their functions and investigating conduct that might incur the penalties they can enforce.
• Government departments get access to all the information, except the record of who has accessed the NIR, where the Home Secretary prescribes it for the exercising/carrying out of any powers or duties the deparment has by virtue of the Bill or for the issuing/modification of official documents.

Section 22 gives the Home Secretary the power to disclose specified information to a specified individual for specified purposes, by order.

The obligations the bill imposes

Section 6 gives the Home Secretary the power to compel individuals matching a specified description to register on the NIR and get a card by order. Failure to comply incurs a civil penalty of upto £2500.

Section 11 gives the Home Secretary the power to compel any person, by order, to provide information for the purposes of verifying information recorded, or due to be recorded, in the NIR, if he believes the individual has that information in their possession.

Section 12 requires ID card holders to notify the Home Secretary of any changes of circumstances that affect their information on the NIR and any error they become aware of in their NIR entry. The card holders may be ordered to attend a specific place at a specific time and have biometric scans taken and to provide any information required by the Home Secretary. Failure to comply can result in a civil penalty of upto £1,000 pounds.

Section 13 requires people to notify the Home Secretary if their card is lost, stolen, damaged, tampered with or destroyed. The Home Secretary can cancel a card if it appears to him to be lost, stolen, damaged, destroyed, tampered with, issued on the basis of incorrect or incomplete info, the NIR entry has been modified, a change of circumstances requires modification of the card or the card needs to be reissued.

A person in possession of someone else's card must surrender it as soon as practical. The Home Secretary can require the surrender of a card if it is possessed by someone other than the card holder, or the card has been cancelled, expired or is otherwise invalid or if the card is to be reissued or if was acquired invalidly.

Damage is taken to include the card or anything on it having become unreadable or unusable for any reason -- i.e. if the govt's card reader damages your card, YOU are obliged to report the fact.

Failure to surrender a card when ordered, or to notify the Home Secretary of the loss, damage, tampering with, destruction of or stealing of your card is an offence punishable by upto 51 weeks in prison.

Section 15 allows the Home Secretary to issue orders allowing those providing public services to require checking of the ID card before allowing access to those services.

Section 17 allows the Home Secretary to issue orders allowing those providing public services to access information on the NIR to verify a cardholder's identity.

Sections 27 to 31 make offences of:

• possessing either false ID documents or the equipment for making false documents, with the intention of using the documents for enrolment, on pain of upto 10 years imprisonment.
• possessing either false ID documents or equipment for making them without a reasonable excuse on pain of imprisonment for upto 5 years.
• disclosing confidential NIR information without authorisation on pain of upto 2 years imprisonment or a fine or both,
• providing false information to be included on the NIR or in order to modify information on the NIR. The offence carries upto 2 years in prison, or a fine or both.
• tampering with the NIR, including any conduct making it more difficult or impossible for the NIR information to be retrieved (e.g. NIR operators going on strike?! The same operators making a mistake that causes a crash?!). The offence carries upto 10 years in prison, or a fine or both. See spy.org.uk's comments on this clause.
  

Govt's information commissioner views ID card plan with "increasing alarm".

Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner has expressed "increasing alarm" at the govt's planned ID card scheme:

Plans for a national ID card scheme risk changing the relationship between the British state and its citizens, the information watchdog has warned.

Richard Thomas said he had initially greeted the plans with "healthy scepticism" but the details had changed his view to "increasing alarm".

One cogent point Thomas makes is that the scheme is not just about handing out cards to the population but about creating a detailed centralised database on every person in the country:

Mr Thomas told the MPs: "This is beginning to represent a really significant sea change in the relationship between state and every individual in this country."

It was now clear the scheme was not just about identity cards but about a national identity register, he said.

"It is not just about citizens having a piece of plastic to identify themselves.

"It's about the amount, the nature of the information held about every citizen and how that's going to be used in a wide range of activities."

Quite. The scheme is about creating the necessary apparatus for the government to keep tabs on us 24/7. And the government certainly seems keen on creating detailed databases of all and sundry when legislating in other policy areas.

Furthermore they seem keen on using blanket surveillance of the public's movements simply to introduce road charges:

The most radical vision for road pricing would see a satellite tracking-based system, with drivers charged variable rates per mile depending on how busy the route they used was.

They also back another blanket surveillance system for tackling drivers who drive away from petrol stations without paying:

For the stream of shoppers driving into the supermarket petrol station just outside Bradford, the CCTV camera has been such a familiar sight it may as well have been invisible.

But from this month, it is not just fuel-dodgers who the camera is there to monitor; up to 3,000 number plates an hour from the forecourt will now be fed into a police database.

This government clearly loves blanket surveillance of the public's doings (especially if linked into a database), and this extends to plans for recording who you phone, who you email, what websites you visit, and who phones/emails you or visits your website for a year for the authorities to be able to trawl.

Big Blunkett is watching you...

Police can keep DNA samples of innocent people

As noted on Samizdata, White Rose and the Spy.org.uk blog, and reported in The Telegraph, it has recently been ruled that the police can keep the DNA samples of those who are arrested and charged and who either had the charges dropped or were cleared in a subsequent trial. This upholds a change in the law introduced in 2001 to allow the police to retain DNA samples for use in "crime prevention or investigation".

Thus anyone who is arrested and charged can have their DNA samples taken and stored indefinitely, regardless of whether they're susbequently cleared or not thus entirely innocent people will have their DNA samples stored indefinitely by the police.

According to the Telegraph, Lord Brown said the only logical reason for objecting to samples being kept by the police was that it would make it easier for authorities to arrest someone if they ever offended in future.

This is quite simply false:

• DNA samples contain potentially very sensitive medical information such as whether someone has a predisposition to certain diseases or may indeed suffer from a genetically caused disease. The storing of such samples by the police opens up opportunities for abuse of this information by corrupt/unscrupulous officers. By retaining the DNA of the innocent, you expose them this risk.
  
• Retaining DNA samples will also open up opportunities to frame people by planting their DNA at the scene of a crime, knowing that their DNA is on file and likely to be checked. This possibility is not even restricted to unscrupulous officers. Anyone who knows that someone was arrested and charged for a crime will know that their DNA is likely to be on file as a result. Again another risk that the innocent accused would be exposed to.
  
• DNA matching is not a fool-proof process. Problems such as contamination of samples, or erroneously labelling of samples can lead to false matches being reported. Those whose DNA has been stored will be subjected to these risks and may find themselves in the dock again as result.
• As spy.org.uk points out, the retention of the DNA samples may even affect one's ability to get a job. Should an employer ask for an Enhanced Disclosure from the Criminal Records Bureau, they will be told that the police have some sort of record on you (though not the details). To assume that some employers won't hold this against you would be naive.
• The fact that DNA samples can be retained indefinitely also gives the police the incentive to arrest and charged people as a means of expanding the DNA database, thus offering an incentive to arrest and charge people that has nothing to do with whether they're guilty of a crime or not.
  

The judge also argued that the DNA database should be expanded. According to the Telegraph:

In 2001, the law was changed to allow the police to keep a database of samples taken from suspects, though the retained samples may be used only in crime prevention or investigation.

Lord Brown said the benefits of this procedure were so manifest and the objections so threadbare that the cause of human rights would be better served by expanding the police database rather than by reducing it.

"The larger the database, the less call there will be to round up the usual suspects," he said. "Indeed, those amongst the usual suspects who are innocent will at once be exonerated."

But is this true? The larger the database the greater the probability of the following:

* human error leading to a false match leading to an innocent person in the dock

* a false match occuring due to limitations of the technology used in DNA profiling (there's a non-zero probability of a false match regardless of human error).

* that planting DNA at the scene of a crime will result in someone else being put in the frame.

* that someone gets put in the frame because they innocently left their DNA at the scene of a crime.

* that criminals will know that leaving DNA around is risky and will adapt their behaviour.

All of these will reduce the value of DNA evidence. Indeed suppose we were to create a DNA database of the entire population (ultimately taking samples at birth). Then a criminal could be certain of wasting police time by dropping randomly collected DNA at the scenes of his crimes, and taking steps to ensure he does not leave his own DNA there (will the police consider that none of the DNA samples they find at the scene of a crime come from the perpetrator?) .

"The Times" and identity cards

Yesterday's issue of The Times contained a couple of interesting articles in favour of identity cards, a commentary by Michael Gove and a leader column. The quotations below come from the paper copy, which I bought, as I didn't have the URLs at the time I wrote the original version of this article.

Gove article

Gove's article is ludicrously entitled "Why David Blunkett is the real civil libertarian", but maybe that merely shows Gove has a sense of humour. Gove starts off talking about prejudices, with his main point being that many people, understandably after the experiences of the 20th century, have a prejudice against the state exercising arbitrary authority.

He then argues that given the changed circumstances of the 21st century we may need to reexamine this prejudice where, in the west at least, the main threat to individuals comes not from state power as it did in the 20th century, but from terrorists who have the will and may get the means to carry out slaughter on a horrendous scale. He writes:

Well, the world has changed dramatically in the past three years, and my mind has changed too. I'm no longer convinced that the liberal prejudice against ID cards, or against incarceration without trial, is a wise presumption. And I'm no longer convinced that the progressive consensus which denounces David Blunkett as an illiberal populist for rethinking our civil liberties is actually all that progressive.

To take the last part of that first, I'd respond that Blunkett has not merely "rethought" civil liberites, he (and Straw before him and Howard before him) has set out to dismantle them plain and simple. A "rethinking" would not have attacked every single protection across the board. The right to a jury trial, the presumption of innocence, the right to security of property, freedom of expression, freedom of association, doctor-patient confidentiality, lawyer-client confidentiality, freedom from arbitrary surveillance, the right to protest, all of these have been sytematically eroded. Every year since 1999 (before 9/11!), the government has produced bills with swingeing attacks on civil liberties. Only a small proportion of them could possibly be justified on the grounds they may help protect us from terrorism. Even where such measures can protect us from terrorism they've often been applied broadly weakening protections when the authorities are investigating crime in general rather than just terrorism.

Also, at no point in his article does Gove justify his contention that civil libertarians who've opposed Blunkett are not "progressive".

But Gove has a point about incarceration without trial -- it can, if carefully used, help in the fight against terrorism by enabling the detention of terrorist suspects where a trial that revealed the evidence against them would compromise national security and seriously undermine the intelligence efforts needed to deal with such groups as al qaeda. And as Gove points out it is applied only to foreign residents, who cannot be deported and who are free to leave if they can find a country willing to take them. Thus the policy is inherently limited in scope, as well as having some legal oversight. However where its value in fighting terrorism is clear, I contend it is not at all clear that ID cards will have any such value. Also extending detention without trial to British citizens would remove this limit and leave everyone prey to being locked up by the state without being proven to have done anytthing wrong, at which point the terrorists will have ensured that our government has removed much of our freedom. As it is the existing law is not one we would want to have on the books permanently, only for so long as the threat from al qaeda is real.

A better solution might have been to reacquire the legal ability to deport foreign nationals to their country of origin, regardless of issues such as whether they might face the death penalty, and given that those individuals threaten national security. This was given up when we incorporated the ECHR into our laws, but we need not have incorporated it in the form which prevents this -- other countries have managed to incorporate it without compromising that ability.

The State and the Individual

Regarding the point about the state no longer being the main threat individuals face in the 21st century, I'll make several points. Firstly, to the extent this is so, it is largely due to the protections that people insisted on placing in the constitutions of western democracies after the experiences of despotism of earlier times -- and the 20th century is far from the only period of history to warn us about excessive statr power and due to the cultural commitment to freedom in the west. The removal of those protections will expose people again to such dangers and may also both reflect and magnify a decline in the cultural commitment to freedom in western countries.

Secondly, even in western countries since WWII there have been times when governments have abused their powers over their citizens, or where citizens have fallen foul of the state. Think of all the miscarriages of justice, the West Midlands Serious Crime squad, the Watergate scandal, police beatings of suspects or protestors, etc. Whilst more the exception than the rule thankfully, such things do occur and demonstrate that democracy and a constitution that protects individual rights only reduce rather than eliminate the threat the state can pose to its citizens.

Thirdly, terrorists have yet to kill on a scale that states routinely manage when they go to war or decide to murder their own citizens en mass, though I suspect they would if they could and felt it would further their aims.

One might also ask what is the point of resisting being enslaved by terrorists only to be enslaved by our governments when they tear down civil liberties in the name of fighting terrorism? A government that succeeds in doing that may pose a more serious and long term threat than the terrorists.

Gove further writes:

"But I am increasingly exasperated with those civil libertarians who jeer at his proposals, while refusing to recognise the problem and conspicuously failing to offer any alternative."

The problem Gove is forgetting here is that Blunkett has been attacking civil liberties so outrageously and relentlessly that no one trusts him, and the civil libertarians are continuously on the defensive against this that and the other attack Blunkett proposes. There is barely time to catch breath and take stock of one policy that attacks if not removes a civil liberty, before Blunkett throws up another, if not 10 more.

But Gove has a point with this comment: civil libertarians do need to say how they would deal with the terrorist threat if they're to oppose Blunketts proposals more effectively than they've managed hitherto. It is time to go on the offensive, to point out the shortcomings of Blunkett's proposals when considered purely as means of dealing with terrorism, to put forward alternatives that preserve civil liberties and, yes where necessary, acknowledge that some proposals from Blunkett may actually help in fighting terrorism at the expense of erosions of civil liberties and there may need to be concessions. Unfortunately Blunkett's all-out assault on civil liberties has led to a situation where civil libertarians have been reacting to him, and grown to mistrust him (for good reasons), giving an appearance of knee-jerk opposition rather than trying to set an agenda where civil liberties can be discussed more calmly and are more likely to be preserved whilst dealing with the threat from terrorism. IMHO Blunkett has exploited the situation to destroy civil liberties, not to "rethink" or try to preserve them.

Gove and ID cards

And so to Gove on ID cards:

An ID card system will make it easier to identify those at liberty in this country who are here illegally. It would make it easier to deport those who have broken the law, easier to police access to services funded by the taxpayer and by showing that we could defend our borders, easier to defend the principle of managed migration.

Checking abuse of the asylum system could also help to choke off a route for terrorist activity. Past supporters of terrorism have chosen to claim asylum here, then disappeared from scrutiny the better to further their goals. Allowing the police to request ID papers would not , of course, stop terrorist activity but it could play a significant part in frustrating it.

If I believed ID cards could achieve all this, I might support ID cards myself or at least grant they could help and thus concede a need to balance the dangers of ID cards against such tangible benefits. But it is all mere assertion by Gove. He offers neither evidence nor argument to back up these claims. And I've yet to see any such evidence or argument offered by any other proponent of ID cards whether it's the government, or columnists in any of our media, or even posters to uk.politics.misc.

Moreover, there is considerable evidence to suggest they will not make the differences made above. Most of the EU have national ID cards, yet they all suffer from the same problems with illegal immigration, crime and even terrorism (Spain's problems with terrorism occur despite the presence of a compulsory ID card) as we do, as this report from Privacy International makes clear.

Surely any civil libertarian must demand that a weakening of civil liberties has demonstratable tangible benefits before conceding ground and allowing the protections of the citizen from arbitrary state power to be eroded?

Sadly, Blunkett has steam-rollered many of his proposals through in the face of objections and without explaining what the benefits are and how the proposals will ahcieve the benefits claimed. That is why it is ludicrous to try and paint Blunkett as "the real civil libertarian".

Leader column

Finally the leader column in the same issue, cautiously supports the experiments with ID cards and attacks some of the arguments raised against them. E.g.

Britain unusually has not issued any [ID cards] since wartime documentation --- a point of pride for some citizens who believe that they have the freedom to choose the information they share with the state.

To worry about losing this is understandable. Yet the belief is quaintly anachronistic It fails to recognise the ways in which the world has already changed as computerisation diminishes privacy. Any individual who pays for hhis shopping with a credit card or makes phone calls from a mobile leaves detailed records of his life. The introduction of an ID card would make it easier for officials to join the dots of this digital information -- it should also mean that opening a bank account or any other official transaction becomes simpler.

Firstly, there is a difference between leaving information with private organisations, in voluntary transactions that give us clear benefit and the state demanding and recording as much information it can about us. In the former situation, the information is held in a fragmentary manner across multiple institutions and we have the choice not to use the services and therefore not to divulge the information if we wish. These factors limit the dangers from having such information recorded -- though the dangers are yet such that we need data protection laws and they should probably be strengthened. One might add too that using an unregistered pay as you go phone only leaves anonymous records of your activities.

Secondly, this passage reveals one of the dangers of the ID cards, the centralisation of the information and the ability to connect all the information together at one point. A national ID card will facilitate such centralisation by the state and thus give the sate considerable power over individuals because it will know their detailed activities. "Joining the dots" is precisely what is difficult at the moment and what an ID card with an associated central database would enable -- though admittedly other trends are making joining the dots easier independently of ID cards. Still an ID card would magnify the dangers we already face from lax attitudes towards the data we leave around. It would also become a licence to live, in that without an ID card it would become impossible to lead one's every day life. This licence will be revocable by state officials at any time for any reason they deem fit.

Regarding the claims that ID cards may be ineffective for fighting crime and terrorism made by civil libertarians, the leader states:

The temptation of them is to propose absurdly contradictory arguments namely: a) "they" will know all about you all of the time; and b) "they" will inevitably get the technology wrong

Certainly, people doubt the cards on the basis of government incompetence with computer schemes, but the contradiction above is more apparent than real.

It can be the case that the cards enable the governemnt to exert more social control over generally law abiding citizens, including enabling surveillance of everyday acitvities and be the case that the cards can be easily circumvented, due to govt incompetence or any other factors you might name, by terrorists, criminals illegal immigrants and anyone else who wishes to avoid the inconvenineces the cards might cause.

The point is that the law abiding majority will tend to cooperate with the system for fear of punishment and expose themselves to such surveillance and other potential abuses of the system whilst those who have no qualms about breaking the law will subvert the system to their own ends.

Thus the state incompetence or inability to actually control would be terrorists and criminals and the odd clever civil libertarian via the system does not transfer to the state's ability to control the law abiding majority with the system. The cynical might suggest that controlling the majority is the whole point, whilst crime fighting and dealing with terrorism are just the sales packaging.

Satellite tracking of cars -- "when, not if"

The BBC reports that a govt appointed committee is considering fitting a tracker to every car in order to introduce congestion charging on all roads. Professor David Begg, leading the committee, is quoted as saying:

It is now a matter of when, not if. Six months ago it was on the shelf, but Mr Darling is now very serious about it.

It seems the day when everyone is under constant surveillance 24 hours a day no matter where they are or what they're doing is getting closer. Satellite tracking of cars, plus ever increasing usage of CCTV (still largely unregulated), plus agencies from MI5 to the Charities Commission able to monitor internet and phone activities, plus govt powers to spy on bank accounts, plus an ID card system tracking our usage of govt services and quite probably our purchases or movements, gets us pretty close to that day already.

ID cards and biometrics

Fiona McTaggart, a govt minister and former chairwoman of Liberty, defends ID cards in a Guardian article. An excellent rebuttal can be found at spy.org.uk's blog, and the Guardian's letters section also contains some excellent points. An interesting section from the spy.org.uk rebuttal is this:

Here we go again, the repetition of the false claim that biometrics are somehow unique. Not even the people with a vested commercial interest in selling the technology dare to make that claim. Your "biometric characteristics" may be reasonably individual to you personally, but that is not the same as saying that what ends up inside a Smart Card or database is "unique" or "unforgeable".

The specious reasoning goes along the lines of: if your Smart ID Card ever gets lost or stolen, there would be no need to worry, since, for example your fingerprint biometric would make it impossible for anybody else to use it, thereby crushing Identity Theft.

Leaving aside the statistics of False Positives, False Negatives, and the small percentage of people with no usable biometric at all (tens of thousands in a population of 60 million) the fact is that you leave your fingerprints all over your ID Card. There is a very high probability (around 80%) that latent fingerprints taken off your ID Card could be used to construct a "false finger" which is sufficient to fool the finger print scanner.

Emphasis added. The point here is that biometric identifiers are compared with each other in a manner that is probabilistic. The higher the number of data points compared, the more certain you can be that a match is a real match but the less certain you can be that you'll get a match. Thus you have to trade off the false positives, getting a match on biometrics from 2 different people, against the false negatives, failing to detect that two biometric readings are from the same person.

Now if someone claims that they've got a false positive rate for a particular biometric system, of 1 in a billion this might sound like it will give real certainty and allow a national identity register to be created in a manner that prevents people from applying from multiple identities. They'd reason that in a population of 60million, a 1 in a billion chance of a false positive is safe. They'd be wrong.

To compare every person's biometric with every other person's biometric (as would be required to create the database in this manner) would involve (60,000,000 times 59,999,999)/2 = 1,799,999,970,000,000
comparisons. For each comparison there's 1 billionth of a chance of getting a false positive. You'd therefore expect
1799999.97 of those comparisons to return a false positive match. That's roughly 1.8million false positive matches. Note that that does not involve 1.8million people, but rather 1.8million comparisons.

In other words, you can guarantee that there will be a large number of false positive matches as the database is assembled. Without a means of determining whether a positive match is a true or false positive, you won't be able to prevent people from creating multiple identities on the system. Worse, if you concentrate on getting such a low false positive rate, the false negative rate is likely to shoot up, making if even more likely that if someone did try to get multiple identities on the system, their attempt would not even show up as a positive match. And note that the false positive rate needs to cover software glitches, hardware glitches and human error too. Also, if you double the size of the population you roughly quadruple the number of comparisons.

It seems to me that without a solution to this, the idea that a national ID card can provide a secure and reliable means of verifying identity is simply a mirage.