Leaking Like a Battered Bucket

It seems that even the Guardianistas are waking up to the reality that is our control freakish, totalitarian New Labour government. Jackie Ashley starts by looking at recent incompetence in government and asks a pertinent question:

Here’s an easy question. What do the following have in common – people on housing benefit, people getting child benefit, people wanting to be RAF pilots or Royal Marines, people in hospital and people learning to drive? The answer is that they have all had their personal details lost through government incompetence. And here’s another question. With the national database for ID cards looming, just how much do you trust the government to keep your identity details safe?

I don’t and neither should anyone else. They have manifestly demonstrated their inability to manage information, they have also persistently lied about the supposed benefits of an identity card scheme. Every single “benefit” they have put forward is easily dismissed as twaddle. They want this monster, yet they have never given one single rational, pragmatic reason for having it. This is because we will not be the beneficiaries, they will.

Jackie Ashley mentions a staggering statistic:

Indeed, according to parliamentary answers HMRC had in the previous year been responsible for a modest 2,111 data-protection breaches.

These are the people dealing with your tax affairs, people. I wasn’t aware of this statistic, but I cannot say, in all honesty, that it surprises me. Nothing these bastards get up to surprises me any more.

Ashley may be being a little optimistic about the NIR getting under way this year, though:

Remember that this year the full national identity register, the essential core of a compulsory ID card scheme, will get properly started: from now, anyone aged over 16 applying for a passport has all their details, fingerprints, face or eye scans included, added to the register.

Um, actually, no, they won’t. At present, they may be called in for interview, but not necessarily. This, from NO2ID:

Interrogations are still ONLY for those applying for their first adult passport – and we understand that not everyone applying for their first adult passport is being called in for an official grilling.

At this stage, the NIR does not exist and no one is being fingerprinted and certainly the iris scan isn’t happening – the technology isn’t sufficiently mature. The only “biometric” information is a scannable photograph. Jackie Ashley does no service to the anti-ID cards campaign with such misleading information. Yes, this is the government’s long term plan, but it is not happening yet.

Jackie keeps up the misinformation:

And nobody has told us if carrying the things will be compulsory too – though plenty of the arguments in favour of them fall if you don’t have to carry them.

Yes, they have told us – repeatedly, that carrying them will not be compulsory. Of course, life without one will become so difficult, with every petty little official demanding to “see ID” at every tip and turn, that they will become de facto compulsory to carry; but that is another matter; ministers have, repeatedly answered this question, they will not be compulsory to carry. Jackie is a journalist, I would have thought a basic principle of journalism is to check one’s facts. It’s not difficult.

Things get back on track, though:

We know that millions of sensitive details will be lost.

Ah, well, that’s pretty foreseeable, given the precedent. We have no reason to suspect that the government’s data management skills will magically improve in the next couple of years; the incompetence and contempt for our privacy is endemic.

The government is going to introduce a single system for all our identities.

And this is the worry, a single point of failure and a honey-pot for criminals. Not only is it wrong pragmatically, they have no moral right to the information they seek. It is our information, not theirs.

And I promise, you can’t trust it. First, it will leak like a battered old bucket. Oh yes, there will be ministerial statements. Apologies. Inquiries. Expensive new IT consultants will be brought in. Tough and unbreakable procedures will arrive. And still it will leak like a battered old bucket – except that it will be the most expensive battered old bucket in the history of the world, and we will keep pouring in money to the IT industry in the years to come.

Again, a fairly predictable outcome, given past performance.

Second, it will be riddled with errors.

Ah, yes, that one, too. A colleague of mine was detained by US customs and treated like a criminal for several hours because her name was the same as someone on the most wanted list. That the wanted person was black and my colleague was white didn’t seem to register. When their mistake was uncovered, did they apologise? Did they buggery.

This is a fantasy of control. Whatever Des Browne says today, whatever promises he makes, however rare and unusual he says the loss of this laptop was, the truth is in the record. The national identity register will make us less safe, not more so. However late the hour, it should be scrapped.

Yes, it should be scrapped. Common sense says so in neon letters twenty feet high, but such is the hubris of New Labour ministers, they will plough on regardless. It is up to us to resist. To renew passports early to delay inclusion on the register, and, come that election, to vote for the candidate most likely to overturn the sitting Labour incumbent.

All of this reminds me of Monty Python’s apology to politicans:

We would like to apologize for the way in which politicians are represented in this programme. It was never our intention to imply that politicians are weak-kneed, political time-servers who are concerned more with their personal vendettas and private power struggles than the problems of government, nor to suggest at any point that they sacrifice their credibility by denying free debate on vital matters in the mistaken impression that party unity comes before the well-being of the people they supposedly represent nor to imply at any stage that they are squabbling little toadies without an ounce of concern for the vital social problems of today. Nor indeed do we intend that viewers should consider them as crabby ulcerous little self-seeking vermin with furry legs and an excessive addiction to alcohol and certain explicit sexual practices which some people might find offensive.

We are sorry if this impression has come across.

Which just goes to show that nothing has changed in the past thirty-odd years…