Since the government first suggested compulsory ID Cards and the National Identity Register (NIR) some of us have been complaining about "function creep". Civil liberty campaigners and privacy advocates have argued that the use of ID Cards would seep into every facet of our lives.

Such worries have normally been dismissed as paranoid fears, with the government claiming that using ID Cards would in some way be "voluntary". Yet now we have official government recognition that our worries were and are justified.

Liam Byrne MP, the Minister of State for Immigration, Citizenship & Nationality, has made a speech entitled Securing Our Identity: A 21st Century Public Good. Before tackling the details of the speech, let's look at the key message. Byrne maintains he can already see how: "secure identity will suffuse working life, private life and our use of public services". In other words, the NIR will become the all-pervasive surveillence system many of us have been warning about.

According to Byrne:

"Like the railways in the 19th century and the national grid in the 20th century, I think there are strong arguments for thinking of the National Identity System as a modern day public good - that very quickly becomes part and parcel of everyday life in Britain."

How does he reach this bizarre conclusion? By some very dodgy arguments.

Most puzzling is that he seems to think the ID Card will somehow help prevent online credit card fraud - he sprinkles his speech with words like "internet", "online" and "e-commerce". Yet the government's proposed plan would do nothing to prevent online credit card fraud - or any other form of "customer not present" fraud.

He claims that some 282,000 people in the UK have been victims of ID fraud during the last six years - again failing to specify how many of those were victims of old-fashioned credit card fraud that would not have been prevented by ID Cards.

He trots out the discredited estimates for the cost of ID Fraud, estimates which were soundly demolished by The Register.

He states that "In the US there are already 120,000 customers registered to pay at checkouts using biometric technology". In a country of over 300 million people that number is insignificant. The UK government wants to fingerprint 100% of the British population - with or without consent.

Byrne's main argument for the National Identity Scheme appears to be that at the moment we have a number of incompatible schemes springing up for specific purposes - instead he believes we should have one vast central system. I doubt that many security experts would agree that setting up such a "honey pot" is a good idea. He complains about "Systems with different technologies and languages that don't talk to each other" - which from a security perspective is a good thing. Making it difficult to link up information from different systems is the best way to protect that information. Identity theft becomes much easier when every system is keyed on the same unique, lifelong personal ID number.

Byrne goes on to list three attributes that he says any ID system must have: it must be useful, accessible and accountable. The government's plan would certainly be accessible, but useful? Only to solve problems that the government is creating. As to accountable, the level of oversight proposed for the scheme is minimal.

A highly desirable attribute Byrne fails to include is a way of ensuring the individual remains in control of their own information. There's also no mention of personal privacy. The word "privacy" doesn't appear once in the speech.

Byrne concludes with this frightening prediction:

"In 20 years time, I suspect that the National Identity Scheme will be just a normal part of British life – another great British institution without which modern life, whatever it looks like in 2020, would be quite unthinkable"

That's not a Britain I want to see. Which is why I'm a member of NO2ID.


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Labels: ID Cards, Liam Byrne, NIR, privacy