Jock's alternative ID cards

Jock — Sun, 06 Aug 2006 01:07:40 +0000

The Observer today reports that Gordon Brown is already taking advice on how to expand ID cards into the private sector, such as plans to let shops share ID card data.

We predicted it wouldn't take long to extend ID cards into every area of our lives, but I want to confess that when we had our Civil Liberties policy working party, on which I served, if not very well, I did put forward a sort of alternative idea for ID cards. Only mine weren't fascist-state centered things keeping a track of our every movement.

No, mine were intended to be a sort of a "nuclear trigger" by which no organisation, particularly the apparatus of state but eventually possibly businesses, could store or access data about individuals without that individual's explicit consent. A sort of a key chain that each individual would be entitled to that would keep prying eyes of prurient civil servants away from any data they held about us. If someone wanted to access your data, they'd have to call you, tell you why, and get you to authorize it like you authorize phone banking call centre staff to access your information.

Now our working party was set against the background not of a fully enunciated if shambolically designed scheme for ID cards, but, if you remember, it was the time when the government were talking about allowing it seemed anyone from the dustman upwards in all sorts of public sector organisations access to our telecommunications data that phone companies and ISPs were forced to start keeping.

But now that we are faced with whoever wants to pay a fee getting access to some of the national ID database, maybe my idea's time has come.

I've blogged before about how the state will need to interfere ever more in our personal dealings simply in order to be able to collect taxes in a more globalised world, but I rather thought we had a few decades to plan action to prevent it.

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Jock's alternative ID cards