Here's a selection of our previous front page articles:
NO2ID congratulates David Davis on winning the Haltemprice and Howden by-election. We hope his example will encourage MPs of all parties and the general public to take a closer look at the growth of the database state.
Friday 11th July 2008 saw the publication of yet another government review.
Perhaps it is no surprise that an enquiry led by Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner, and Dr Mark Walport, the Director of the Wellcome Trust, proposes more powers and funding for the Information Commissioner's Office and to make life easier for medical researchers. But this was supposed to be an examination of the principles of government handling of personal data.
It disgracefully fails to recognise the magnitude of the database state. Apart from a feeble couple of lines on "the potential hazards associated with ambitious programmes of data sharing", Thomas and Walport dodge any serious discussion of the National Identity Scheme, NHS Electronic Care Records and Secondary Uses Service (SUS), ContactPoint or any other 'Transformational Government' initiative - and, worse, propose weakening privacy protections by allowing ministers to fast-track data-trafficking proposals through Parliament with even less scrutiny than at present.
You might wonder whether that indicates any real concern about the 'hazards' to those whose lives are affected by such data.
If you want to see a truly positive approach, we recommend you read NO2ID's submission to the enquiry. We think we should take advantage of technology to deliver real protection and real privacy - and that we need new, clearer law to make you 'owner' of information about you.
Data protection isn't privacy. Regulation of officials by officials will always be inadequate. What is needed are ways for you to decide who to trust, and for you to keep control. Privacy rights that can be directly enforced by the millions of people whose interests are actually at stake will not be casually abused.
Only eight months after losing millions of families' financial details, and just before Parliament goes into recess... it is time to release the official reports, all at once:
Maybe these dense documents, some of which were done before the May elections, are appearing now as holiday reading for ministers. There are "serious institutional deficiencies" and "woefully inadequate" processes not just at HMRC but all across government. There's no point trying to blame isolated individuals. It is systemic.
The Information Commissioner suggests "formal enforcement action" for "deplorable failures" - departments should produce progress reports on Data Protection compliance. The criminal act would be for HMRC to fail to file yet another report in a year's time. It is like teaching small boys hygiene by sending them to play in mud.
None of the reports notes how more projects just add more risks. The ID Scheme, NHS Programme for IT, and ContactPoint (cataloguing the personal life of every child) - among others - will massively increase the information in government hands.
Nor does any of them address the most sensible solution: stop the database state. Government should collect less data. "Data minimisation" was the unambiguous recommendation of the MPs on the Home Affairs Committee.
Ministers blame officials. Officials blame procedures. But it doesn't matter who is to blame when the breakdown of huge systems is inevitable. Until "information sharing" is institutionally impossible, the only way to keep your privacy safe is not to let officials have your personal information in the first place.
With the publication of the Home Affairs Select Committee report: "A Surveillance Society?" the ID scheme gets its third official black mark in four months. The committee of MPs of all parties demanded that:
"The Government should give an explicit undertaking to adhere to a principle of data minimisation and should resist a tendency to collect more personal information and establish larger databases. Any decision to create a major new database, to share information on databases, or to implement proposals for increased surveillance, should be based on a proven need."
This is NO2ID's view too. We're glad they agree. However, it is totally incompatible with the conception of a National Identity Register that would store and control all essential facts about everyone for life, in order to support broader data-sharing across government. James Hall, the head of the Identity and Passport Service wrote last year:
[Joined-up government] will demand increased inter-departmental co-operation and will, by its nature, involve sharing more data about an individual between public sector organisations. The national identity scheme is being designed to meet that public expectation of improved services and joined-up government.
That is data maximisation.
Last month the committee of technology experts appointed by the Government complained [ISAP Report, 156kb PDF] that the scheme lacks "robust and transparent operational data governance regime and clear data architecture".
In other words, it is an insecure muddle.
And back in March, Sir James Crosby, commissioned by Gordon Brown when he was Chancellor to look into "identity assurance", laid out ten clear principles for the design of a universal identity system. The Home Office was already breaking every one, but had the gall to claim Crosby's report justified its scheme.
It's official: wrong in principle, shoddily built, and a threat to privacy. The ID card project must be stopped.
The Home Secretary has announced the government's 2008 'Delivery Plan' [PDF] for the ID scheme, a plan that NO2ID showed - with leaked documents [PDF] - in January to be little more than a marketing exercise. Nothing has changed.
On the same day, almost a year late, the Treasury published the review that Gordon Brown commissioned from Sir James Crosby in 2006. No wonder it's been kept under wraps for so long. The government's own advisor lays out ten broad principles for the design of a "consumer-driven universal ID assurance system" scheme - and the Home Office ID scheme breaks them all.
1. Any scheme should be restricted to enabling citizens to assert their identity ... BROKEN
2. Governance should inspire trust. It should be independent of Government ... BROKEN
3. The amount of data stored should be minimised. Full biometric images (other than photographs) should not be kept ... BROKEN
4. Citizens should "own" their entry. It should not be possible, except for national security, for any data to be shared without informed consent ... BROKEN
5. Enrolment should minimise costs and give citizens a hassle-free experience ... BROKEN
6. To respond to consumers and give benefits, it should be capable of being rolled out quickly ... BROKEN
7. Citizens who lose cards or whose identity is compromised should be able to get it fixed quickly and efficiently ... BROKEN
8. The scheme's systems should work with existing, efficient, bank systems to reduce risks ... BROKEN
9. To engage consumers enrolment and cards should be provided free of charge ... BROKEN
10. The market should play a role in creating standards, to ensure ease of use and minimise costs ... BROKEN
And finally - unless we've overlooked something - the Home Office published the results of its latest survey [PDF]. The Home Secretary bluffs and blusters that the benefits of ID cards are "undoubted", but her own department's research shows that while three-quarters of people consider the claimed benefits to be "very important", only just over one quarter consider them to be "very believable".
Unprincipled. Unchanged. Unbelievable.
[For an explanation of how each principle has been broken, see NO2ID's press release on the Crosby Review.]
Though some say Gordon Brown is putting off the ID scheme until after the next general election, the evidence tells a different story. Plans are racing onwards, and there has been a violent swerve in the policy. Officials across government are plotting how to bully and dupe people onto the ID database as quickly as they can. This is a radically different plan from those already published.
Out go fingerprints (for some), exposing the lie that "biometrics will secure your personal information". And out goes the pretence that this is all being driven by "necessary" changes to the passport. They are working on "various forms of coercion" for particular groups of workers, young people and students, people who need to open a bank account and anyone wanting to drive. (A campaign of intimidation has already started: employers are being frightened into demanding Home Office approved forms of ID from all job applicants, under threats of massive fines if they employ an illegal immigrant inadvertently.)
You don't have to take our word for it, you can read these leaked plans yourself, with NO2ID's explanatory notes:
Those building the scheme are preparing this new strategy for the Government to rubber-stamp. If the ministers are actually in charge, then it is not apparent.
The Government should:
You have been lied to. The scheme is not voluntary. It is not proceeding according to published plans.
Don't be fooled, fight back... Make the NO2ID Pledge.
Get informed – show the leaked document to your family and friends... Join the resistance. Join NO2ID.
"Information sharing" is supposed to sound nice. But think about it - gossip is information sharing.
There is still almost daily news of the government mislaying confidential personal information. Well over a month after HMRC lost 25 million people's records - including millions of unencrypted bank account details - you would hope that ministers and officials would be taking things seriously.
The flimsy 6-page official 'interim report' shows the reality. After four weeks of 'investigation', there's no clue that what happened is anything other than normal.
Meanwhile... evidence that it is normal: 3 million learner drivers' details lost in Iowa (why collect so much private information in one place, let alone pass it around?) and hundreds of thousands of patients' details go missing from nine seperate NHS Trusts.
Anyone receiving any sort of regular payment from the government (benefit, salary, or fees) should care as much about official information handling habits as they already do about hospital or food hygiene. So should anyone applying for a license or a permit.
So should anyone who receives a pension.
Hidden behind the headlines, HMRC has been steadily exposing the private details of tens of thousands of pensioners, giving away the keys to their pension funds. Just before 'Disc-gate', it was Standard Life customers - now it's Countrywide Assured's. In fact, HMRC has been forced to apologise for seven such breaches.
"Reviews" achieve nothing. They are intended to: the whole purpose is to let officialdom carry on as before.
The truth is that the main threat to the security of your identity is Mr Brown's "Transformational Government" data-sharing policies. You cannot keep personal information private if you give it to a government that is itching to pass it around.
The government cannot now be trusted. People across the country are deciding they can choose for themselves who they are and who they trust. The NO2ID Pledge is a way of declaring to your friends and neighbours that you will not cooperate with any further government seizure of your personal information.
Why not make it your New Year's Revolution?
With the news of yet another serious data breach, compromising the confidential details of over 40,000 people, coming less than a fortnight after HMRC lost the records of every family in the country, NO2ID renews its call for a complete and independent audit of all personal information held by government.
Who has what, who is it shared with, and how else is it abused? Demand answers from your MP - keep using www.WriteToThem.com. You have a right to know.
The separate reviews that Gordon Brown has proposed will inevitably be aimed at superficial failure of departmental procedure and not touch on the malignancy at the core of government policy.
Why hasn't the Ministry of Justice's upcoming legislative programme (paragraph A.5 of the recently-published Service Transformation Agreement), explicitly intended "to overcome current barriers to information sharing within the public sector" been axed? And why do ministers lie and lie again, saying that personal information on the proposed National Identity Register will be "protected by biometrics". It won't be. It can't be.
The men currently charged by Gordon Brown to look at data protection across government are the overstretched Information Commissioner - whose remit means he can only suggest more regulation of the sort that hasn't worked here, and which Whitehall will route around - and Dr Mark Walport, a strong advocate of "a national system of linked data" - one of the last people you'd want fighting for your personal privacy.
So it's time we did something ourselves.
The only way to stop them abusing your confidence is not to yield it in the first place. That is why NO2ID is giving The NO2ID Pledge to everyone in the country who wants to fight. If enough people publicly declare they will not cooperate, government seizure of personal identity will become impossible.
As the scandal around the HMRC Child Benefit data breach intensifies, even some sceptical Labour MPs are calling for a (temporary) halt to the ID cards scheme. This is not enough. MPs of all parties should be calling for the immediate and permanent scrapping of the Home Office's "identity management" programme.
Not just the card, not just the database, but also the mass 'data-sharing' that lies at the heart of government ID policy.
NOW is the time to write to your MP via WriteToThem.com asking that he or she demand an immediate and permanent stop to all development of ID cards and a National Identity Register.
If you don't already know his or her position, you can check how your MP voted on the ID cards legislation at TheyWorkForYou.com.
Be polite, be concise and make your points clearly — read NO2ID's lobbying guide (21KB PDF file) for advice on how to write an effective letter. Absolutely insist. The more MPs that receive mail on this from their constituents, the more the pressure will build to drop the scheme.
It's hard to know whether to laugh or cry. The cabinet insists we should trust them to manage everyone's life through a National Identity Register. Meanwhile HMRC has mislaid discs containing the names, dates of birth, national insurance numbers and bank details of 25 million British people — more than seven million families.
The package was sent in the state's internal post — and was neither recorded nor registered. The value to organised crime of the information on the two "lost" discs is incalculable — but certainly runs into hundreds of millions of pounds. The government, of course, blames junior officials for a failure to follow protocols.
But it simply should not be possible for junior staff — or the chancellor himself — to collect or copy such details in one place. That it is, is a direct result of the government's obsession with centralised databases and its contempt for citizens' privacy.
Something positive may come of it, though. With your help, NO2ID can use this a clear illustration of the real danger in state control of personal identity to defeat the ID scheme quickly.
The news comes just as NO2ID is raising desperately needed funds for a legal challenge to the database state. We have contacted all 11,000+ citizens who pledged to contribute £10 to a legal defence fund. If you didn't join that pledge, it's not too late to help.
If you're one of the 25,000,000 people who have already been exposed by the government, please help us make sure that this never happens again. If you're one of those lucky ones whose private information hasn't been lost in the internal post, please help us keep you safe.
To win the fight we don't just need funds for legal action. To keep up the pressure and battle the government's publicity machine costs money. If you haven't joined NO2ID already, or if you haven't given to our general funds recently, please do so now. Thank you for your support.
Remember the Poll Tax? In 1987 a popular Conservative government was re-elected by a landslide against an "unelectable" opposition. One manifesto commitment was a proposal to reform local taxation. Policy makers thought it was a pretty good idea. The public scarcely noticed.
Only three years later, the universally hated Poll Tax was causing mass disobedience, even riots. Many of those who paid it without fuss still hated it. They hated it particularly because of how it was collected. It was intrusive. The council wanted to know where you lived and who lived with you.
It was the end of Margaret Thatcher. Her successors swiftly replaced the policy, but could not regain trust. Everything that went wrong in the 80s, before the Poll Tax, the electorate forgave the Tories. For everything that went wrong after the Poll Tax, the Tories were blamed. Inventing the Poll Tax didn't do that. Implementing it did.
In 2005 a still-popular Labour government was re-elected against an "unelectable" opposition. One manifesto commitment, sold on that occasion as immigration control, was a National Identity Register. Policy makers thought it was a pretty good idea. The public scarcely noticed.
But when they are summoned to an official interview about who they are and where they live - they'll notice.
NO2ID has now called in the pledged donations of over 11,000 people who in 2005 committed themselves to donate to a legal defence fund to fight the government's ID scheme. Every one of those people has also declared that they will refuse to register for an ID card.
If you think you, not the government should own your identity, then please join the campaign. Every penny will be spent fighting for real liberty and privacy.
Gordon Brown talks about 'liberty' and yet is driving us towards a "papers, please" Britain with people more watched and supervised by the state than anywhere in the western world.
He lauds 'data protection'. But Britain has the weakest data-protection law in Europe. A third of the EU Data Protection Directive is missing or unenforceable here. Meanwhile, what commitment to 'protection' of your personal and family life is shown by creating open access to family and medical records for hundreds of thousands of public officials?
He talks about 'privacy' yet in the same speech acknowledges he is pushing ahead with an ID scheme that will build a detailed dossier on every resident of the UK. And he is actively removing what barriers there are to your personal information being shared by officials without your knowledge or consent.
And he trumpets "Freedom of Information". A free-for-all in Whitehall, maybe, but the Treasury is right now spending your tax money in court appeals against the Information Commissioner and Information Tribunal to keep the 2004 'Gateway Reviews' of the ID programme from the public.
Smokescreen 'debate' can't conceal the government's authoritarian agenda.
Mr Brown, you're fooling no-one.
NO2ID demands repeal of the Identity Cards Act 2006 and meaningful privacy protection. We need your support - now, more than ever.
If you think you, not the government should own your identity, then please join or make a donation. Every penny will be spent fighting for real liberty and privacy.
In response to comments by Lord Justice Sedley, the Prime Minister says he has no plans to put everyone onto the National DNA Database. We believe him. It would be impossibly expensive.
In reality, however, various interested groups are lobbying to expand DNA sampling by the police. There is always pressure for a bigger database, more powers. The current Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) review is seriously considering taking DNA from people stopped for 'non-recordable' offences, such as littering or traffic violations.
Both the new Chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, Keith Vaz MP, and the Nuffield Council on Bioethics say that it is "unjustified" to keep on the database people who have not been convicted of any offence. But now records are removed only rarely, with the special approval of a Chief Constable. You have no rights over your sample. The Nuffield Council says the law in England and Wales should be brought more in line with Scotland, with DNA profiles used in evidence, but kept only for convicted criminals.
Lord Sedley is worried that the current system is unfair. But the real proposals for expanding the database would make that worse, with more disproportion and more scope for errors. And a recent ICM poll shows a majority of people do NOT support the taking of DNA for minor offences.
DNA does have a vital function in some criminal investigations. But the Home Office line is that samples from innnocent individuals should never, ever be discarded - just in case they might come in useful one day. As a police tool it is weakened by making it just another pretext for the database state.
Desperate to be seen to be doing something, the government has finally got around to inviting expressions of interest from potential suppliers who might wish to bid for elements of its National Identity Scheme.
Those paying attention will note that no contracts have been awarded. No specifications have been issued. But over £72 million of taxpayers' money has already been spent.
And, far from a "£2 billion" total that the directors of the scheme are now trying to claim for the project, the formal notice in the Official Journal of the European Union clearly shows how the biometric visas budget and e-Borders (£1.2 billion) and the money creatively accounted as belonging to the Foreign Office budget for the last 'Dobson Report' (£510 million) are really part of the same grand plan. Add that to the admitted £5.75 billion estimate for passports and ID cards, and you can see - on the government's own figures - the scheme is already costing £7.5 billion. That's over £250 from every taxpayer to set up a card that's 'only' supposed to cost £30. No wonder the Home Office has been keeping its figures secret - and its not even counting what it will cost you in time and money to use, of course.
The latest spin comes straight after the BBC's File On 4 got James Hall, the head of the ID project to admit that:
Meanwhile a top biometrics expert who was a consultant to the IPS has revealed that using fingerprints can be expected to produce tens of thousands of false results by the time even 10% of the population are enrolled.
A massive cost in money AND unnecessary suspicion. For what?
Gordon Brown is talking nonsense. His assertion at Prime Minister's Questions that more and more people want ID cards doesn't match the facts. The truth is that the more people find out about it, the less they like the ID scheme.
The new Prime Minister has promised change. He says he wants to re-establish trust. To show a genuine break with the past he should drop the ID scheme, not try to paint it as more popular than ever when it just isn't. That sounds like spin.
It is time to take a serious look at the ID scheme, Mr Brown. It has been offered to solve every problem in Whitehall - but never explained how. Most people don't want ID cards, when they take time to think about the details.
Neither should you.
The Home Office has now quietly published its six-monthly report [108 KB PDF] (actually more of a seven-monthly report, despite the law that says it must be six-monthly) into the cost of the ID scheme, taking advantage of the fact that most media time this week will be taken up with assessments of Tony Blair's past and future.
It is fifteen pages long, yet contains more flannel than figures. The figures themselves show that the cost estimate is up again. And despite these being the Home Office's most optimistically presented, and entirely unsupported, projections, the total cost is up by nearly a billion pounds (£1,000,000,000) over the 10 years covered by the report.
It isn't stated as plainly as that. To find out you have to add together the sums shown separately for UK citizens and for foreign nationals, who also have to be registered with new visa arrangements and ID cards, AND £510 million pounds included in the previous estimate for the cost to ex-pats but now being ignored as belonging to the FCO, not the Home Office.
The tracking of everybody will be run through the same computer systems, but the pretense is that the fingerprinting and registration of foreigners and the fingerprinting and registration of UK citizens at home and abroad are somehow separate programmes, so the costs are independent. They aren't. Nor are the costs to you or to other branches of government of actually using the scheme. All the Report estimates is the administration costs of the scheme itself, fairly creatively accounted.
Perhaps it is worth remembering that when the scheme was first announced, as "entitlement cards", back in 2002 the cost was estimated at between £1.3 billion and £3.1 billion - over a longer period of 13 years.
Nor do we "have to do this for electronic passports". That's already been done. They have been being issued for 18 months. The only reason for the cost and inconvenience of the ID scheme is so the Home Office can keep a file on you, in case it comes in useful one day to know all about you.
Section 37 of the Identity Cards Act 2006 requires the Home Secretary to publish his estimate of the ten-year cost of the ID scheme "before the end of every six months". The first Dobson report [1] was published on 9th October 2006. The next is already more than three weeks overdue.
Is the timing important? It can't be lack of resources. There are dozens of highly-paid consultants doing nothing but planning the scheme.
But the latest cost estimates matter to local government. The Government is hiding the cost to councils - even from its own councillors.
The local elections and Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly elections on May 3rd were a test for policy. The ID scheme is unpopular. 1 in 3 people across the UK, if we are to believe recently-revealed government figures, are expected to resist it. Labour Party candidates, whatever their personal views on the scheme, suffer when public attention is drawn to it. Burying bad news?
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[1] Frank Dobson MP moved the amendment that created the report.
After over two years and four months of evasion, legal wrangling and appeals, the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) - a Treasury department - has been told by the Information Tribunal that it must publish its early Gateway reviews of the ID Cards Programme in full. Given 28 days to comply, the Treasury may yet waste even more taxpayers' money by appealing to the High Court.
The saga began in January 2005 when Mark Dziecielewski (founder of the Watching Them, Watching Us surveillance regulation campaign and member of NO2ID's Advisory Board) requested publication of the OGC's 'Stage Zero' reviews. Despite a Decision Notice in favour of full disclosure from the Information Commissioner in July 2006, the government has resisted disclosure at every stage - even engaging lawyers to fight a ruling under its own Freedom of Information Act.
What hasn't it been telling us? And why were Parliament and the public denied this (and other) information during the passage of the deeply controversial Identity Cards Bill? Someone obviously has something to hide...
The next phase of the ID scheme is about to begin. Already the PM has torn up 2005's promises to Parliament about how the ID database will work. Now he backs police 'fishing expeditions'. What next?
How do YOU fancy a 20-minute grilling by an official? Or a dossier on your private life built by bureaucrats? Do you know what official files say about you - what if they are wrong?
From April 2007 the UK Identity & Passport Service begins to open ID interrogation centres - 69 of them this year. New passport applicants - mostly teenagers - will be guinea-pigs for National Identity Scheme enrolment.
At the head of the queue are 300,000 young people. You, or your family... soon to be treated as suspects.
A passport is not a right. Soon when you apply you'll be asked for lots of information about yourself: official numbers, old addresses, your education, that sort of thing. It will be used to look up everything about you: school, social services, police, and credit records, perhaps family details... to grab all your private information. "Data-rape", some people are calling it.
You may - later, you will - be summoned, at a time to suit the IPS. Photos and fingerprints will be taken. An "intrusive interview" will check that your answers about details of your life agree with the official ones. If they do, you'll get your passport. If not... it is not clear.
It takes time to assemble a file on you. The UK IPS estimates 1 in 4 will have to cancel their travel plans, because they do not get a passport in time.
Get a passport NOW. Tell your friends, if you think their private lives should be their own. If you do before the centres open, your chances of avoiding data-rape are good. And by fighting you'll help stop it happening to others.
Before you go wandering for your gap year or on holiday, tell Tony Blair and his bullying government to "Take a hike".
Mr Blair is at last coming clean. The plan is to track every detail of your life.
Before Christmas the Home Office said it would not create a "new, clean" ID database. It would link information on three existing ones. Ministers insisted that private details would be protected by security measures and the normal rules of confidentiality.
The Prime Minister's new scheme repudiates that promise, just three weeks on. Give personal information to an official in future and you'll lose control forever - you won't know who else sees it. You won't know what use it could be put to when the government has a new idea.
The "database state" is near.
Government doesn't trust us - why else such endless cross-checking? - but it expects us to give it absolute trust, absolute discretion. But the reason we have law is because human beings cannot be trusted with absolute power. By scrapping confidentiality, ministers give all officials the right to talk about us behind our backs. It means more petty bullying, jobs-worths and "the computer says NO".
That it means "efficiency" is not credible. Government IT systems often fail*, and ruin people's lives daily - and that's when working separately. How much worse if they were all linked?
Railroaded?
A spin warning: according to the BBC,
"So-called "citizens panels" will gauge public reaction to relaxing privacy procedures so people do not have to repeat personal information to different public bodies - particularly at times of stress such as a family death."
No trust here either. Real debate is too unpredictable. By controlling the questions considered by his discussion groups, Mr Blair intends to make sure that "the people" only tell him what he wants to hear.
*Just a few recent examples:
It's New Year. What better time for a new pretext for the ever-changing ID scheme?
2007 begins with Home Office minister Liam Byrne telling us that ID cards are "the solution" to people trafficking. Another function for ID - and with an emotional hook to stop you thinking straight. Remember it also 'a solution' for terrorism and fraud. But not "the solution".
Let us think about this:
According to its 'Strategic Action Plan', the Home Office will begin collecting citizens' biometrics alongside those of asylum seekers some time in 2007 or 2008. It will also be introducing "biometric" visas soon: a fancy way of saying, fingerprinting some visitors.
With this scheme, if it works, once nearly everybody has a card or a visa, then you can find out who doesn't - by checking their number or re-fingerprinting them when they come into contact with an official. Making all public sector staff and many private sector employers into immigration officers, in effect.
Meanwhile people trafficking involves those who don't come into contact with officials. They are smuggled past borders, in unregistered work, avoiding checks - or in the worst cases locked-up as slaves.
It is these last we are meant to think of when Mr Byrne says "people trafficking". Particularly women enslaved by gangsters in brothels. It is disgusting the minister chooses to exploit them to sell the ID scheme.
Biometrics and ID cards won't 'catch illegals'. They just make illegal status rigid by removing grey areas.
The scheme wastes time for law-abiding citizens and visitors. It scarcely touches those trying to keep a low profile. It is wholly irrelevant to those who are forced to live in secret. (Except, if you can't live without a card, it is one more way to keep you captive.)
So, minister, you are spending billions on rebuilding three giant government computer systems, so that you can fingerprint Aunt Mabel and track her to her holiday home in Cleethorpes, and make Jack pass a hostile interrogation before you let him go on his gap-year. How does that help Marta from the Ukraine, who is not even sure which country she is living in any more?
...and a happy and peaceful, ID-free New Year. Click on the cartoon for our Xmas special animation.
Click here for NO2ID's Review of the Year.
Tuesday 19th was the last day of the Parliamentary term. So that's the day the Home Office chose to announce its delayed "Identity Management Action Plan", now called the Strategic Action Plan for the National Identity Scheme [pdf]. Mr Reid appears to have told Parliament, but his name doesn't appear on it. Ministers Byrne and Ryan, and Mr Hall of the IPS share the limelight.
At the weekend, we wrote, Parliament rises on Tuesday 19th, so it seems unlikely we'll hear anything new about the ID programme until 2007 - unless there is an attempt to sneak something out under cover of bad news.
And this looks like it. There's a sudden change of emphasis from ID cards to the Register and its use for data-sharing across government (chapters 1, 2 and 6).
Quote: "A really effective identity management scheme is essential in order to shape public services around the citizen and realise the goal of truly joined-up and personalised government." (the conclusion)
Which is what NO2ID has been warning about for two years. 'Personalised' government means more direct, unified, control over the individual citizen. The whole state on your case, the whole time.
Only now we are told that there won't be a single database containing the National Identity Register (NIR) after all. The information (s15, 16, 17) is intended to be held on several distinct departmental systems (which will be linked together), mixed up with other government information on citizens, some of it labeled as part of the NIR and part not. And the priority is to link other government systems (s86): criminal records first, then checking on your employment, then pensions, local authority services and proof of age in shops.
Curiously none of those facts finds its way into the UK IPS press release, which prefers to dwell on new powers sought by the Home Office to fingerprint foreigners.
Did they hope no-one would read the actual document?
Are we dreaming? Or did Liam Byrne, Home Office minister for immigration, not say on Wednesday 6th December: "We will next week make an announcement on our plans for ID cards and we want technology like this [the biometric scanning system at Heathrow] to plug into a national ID system."?
"Next week" has gone and there has been no announcement. We think he must have been referring to the 'Identity Management Action Plan', as announced by his colleague Joan Ryan MP back in October. She said ""We will bring forward a clear plan in the coming weeks." Is there a problem, Mr Byrne?
Parliament rises on Tuesday 19th, so it seems unlikely we'll hear anything new about the ID programme until 2007 - unless there is an attempt to sneak something out under cover of bad news. (Observers of the surveillance state should note that among the many, many things that happened on the day of the 'Diana' report was the resignation of Lord Warner - the minister responsible for the NHS patient records databases.)
According to the National Audit Office (NAO) on Monday 11th December, "Personnel records were difficult to locate and some could not be found at all... The Home Office does not have adequate controls to reconcile the payroll and personnel records to determine exact staff numbers". Perhaps it has not just lost the plan, but the people responsible for writing it. According to a recent response to a Freedom of Information Act request from Heather Brooke of 'Your Right to Know', the department now says "an Identity Card Team does not exist."
The Government has always failed to deal with informed criticism of the scheme. So it prefers to withhold information altogether. Don't hold your breath waiting for "a clear plan".
Two simple words sum up the casual indifference and arrogant ignorance of the Home Office when responding to Steve Boggan's feature in the Guardian G2, in which we demonstrated serious flaws in the security of the UK's new 'biometric' ePassports. Once the government gets a copy of your personal information, it seems not particularly to care who else can get hold of it.
Bureaucratic convenience trumps personal security and privacy yet again.
The assessment of EU information society 'Network of Excellence' FIDIS is rather more realistic and appropriate. Its recent Budapest declaration clearly states that "by failing to implement an appropriate security architecture" the UK and other European governments have "dramatically decreased [citizens'] security and privacy and increased risk of identity theft".
Even more surprisingly, the draft summary of a US Department of Homeland Security report says that RFID (the chip technology in the passport) "increases risks to personal privacy and security, with no commensurate benefit for performance or national security." This, from the very government that has halted implementation of RFID technology in its own passports, despite insisting that our government foist it upon us.
That the Home Office doesn't care about the privacy of British citizens is already quite clear - that it doesn't care about the security of your personal data (a photograph and D.O.B. now, in a year or so, your fingerprints and home address...) is a damning indictment of a dysfunctional department that wishes to be responsible for holding the master copy of ALL your most important identity information.
Some of the vulnerabilities have previously been demonstrated in other countries' passports - but, working with experts such as Adam Laurie of The Bunker and academics from Cambridge Computer Laboratory, NO2ID has now shown how terrorists, people traffickers and organised criminals could go about creating perfect digital copies of YOUR passport, without you even suspecting it had been stolen.
Our passport reader was created with little more than a soldering iron and a kitchen knife from cheap off-the-shelf components - and a paperclip. Using freely-available software he wrote based on the published ICAO standards, Adam was able to read the chip on a passport from 30 feet away, relaying the data through two walls.
This was just the beginning.
Watch the media and this site for further graphic demonstrations - starting on Monday 20th November, when you will be able to see the reader software in action for the first time on television in Henry Porter's 'Suspect Nation' at 9pm on More 4.
ID cards are not about 'being modern'. Technology does not supersede liberty. Tony Blair's fantasies of an all-seeing but benevolent database convince few.
The Prime Minister's recent Telegraph article and press conference said nothing new about the ID scheme - except further slippage (to 2009) for the issue of the first cards to British nationals. But it contained a great deal of 'magic thinking' about ID and biometrics.
He did admit that the multi-billion pound scheme is not a solution to the world's ills, but then went on to list a whole bunch of "public concerns" and assert that ID cards will help with all of them. The born-again technophile - who has only just managed to get on email - offers "biometric technology" as both the salvation of the public services and a way to "enhance crime detection"... by the very 'fishing expeditions' in the ID database that parliament were promised would not be allowed.
It is an odd contrast with the Home Office still lacking some convincing benefits for citizens, ten years hence - when, according to government projections, only just over half the population will have ID cards. After spending £50 million on consultants it has no real plans that it dare make public.
Mr Blair's case misrepresents and misleads again and again and again.
ID cards are far from a new idea. Biometrics have been with us, as fingerprinting, for over 100 years.
Imposing centralised "identity management" on everybody threatens to divert resources wherever it is used into yet more bureaucracy. It will expose every law-abiding citizen to crime and mismanagement, the whim of officials, administrative error and technical glitches.
And it will take control of who we are away from us all. Calling that "modern" doesn't make it less oppressive. Say "NO" now.
The ID scheme will give one government agency the master copy of your personal details. Who you are officially will be what the ID computer says. The government will pass that information around departments, to anyone else it likes - even foreign governments - and change it as it sees fit. If you believe it will be in any way 'voluntary', think again.
You'll have no choice.
Hundreds of thousands of officials will be able to check your details. The ID number will be a key to every compartment of your life.
You'll have no privacy.
Gordon Brown says he wants to extend data-sharing to commercial organisations. He is consulting banks and insurance companies mainly. How you spend your money will be under surveillance too.
You'll have no control.
You know already that "identity cards will inevitably contain wrong information and errors of one kind or another". 71% of people say they believe "it is inevitable that the data stored on people's identity cards will sometimes be leaked, sold, hacked into or in other ways used improperly". But the card is the least of it. The scheme is being designed for the vital facts of your life to be passed from hand to hand, computer to computer, almost without limit. All the information that builds up will be kept for ever.
It is already clear that the ID scheme is in chaos before it has been built.
But once there's a system to gather and manage ALL information about you, the government will use it more and more to interfere in your life, in ways it hasn't even thought of yet. Once your details are on record, that record will be you - whether it is right or wrong.
You won't decide who you are. The government will. Does that make you feel safer?
The government claims that ID cards will stamp out identity fraud. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Forget the hype. What is actually going to happen?
The plan is to use billions of pounds of taxpayers' money to set up a huge network of enrolment centres to interrogate every person over the age of 16 and record their details on a database. That will be used to create a government monopoly on 'identity management'. Who you are is to be nationalised.
Not only will you have to give up your private details, you'll be made to pay to be fingerprinted, numbered and tracked for the rest of your life. You will be forced to keep the information up to date, but you won't control it. It will be fixed by the state.
Then every time you use your card, the government records it. Over time the database will map everything you do. Worse, an ID check will tag your files on other systems (your bank, GP, insurer, etc.) with your ID number. So officials and anyone who gets into the system will be able to find out all about you. Even the bits they say they'll never store on their database, will be on someone else's.
It will be easier than ever to take over your life, and harder than you can imagine to get it back. When someone else is officially you and everything in life is linked to an official identity, how do you prove who you are?
It is the biggest ID fraud of all to say that government "ID management" will make us safer. You control who you are, for now. Don't let them take that away.
Please fill in the form on this page to get a FREE information pack and regular newsletter, or join NO2ID now.
* Whilst NO2ID heartily endorses practical advice on how to protect yourself against identity theft, we are disappointed to note that the Stop ID Fraud website is still referencing the Home Office's utterly discredited identity fraud figures as "fact".
With questions mounting about the exact nature of the scheme, the only people to have benefited so far from 'ID cards' are firms of consultants. You are paying.
Despite having spent £46.4 million by the end of May this year just planning 'ID cards', the Home Office has not announced what it is going to do next. It seems no closer to issuing a specification of its ID scheme to suppliers.
Vague mumblings from ministers suggest that the scheme they sold to Parliament to get it to pass the Identity Cards Act 2006 is dead. Instead the government may intend to build 'ID cards' using its existing shambolic databases, and issue some worthless bits of plastic so that it can say the job has been done within budget.
That will be a pretext for government departments and other public and commercial bodies to get on with the serious, and dangerous, business of "data sharing" - passing around your personal information as they see fit - which was the main purpose of the ID scheme for government anyway.
This, of course, begs a few questions for Monday 9th October when the first 'Dobson report' on the projected costs of the scheme are provided (late) to Parliament:
Ministers will say, "We're trying reduce costs... we always intended to build it incrementally". Do not believe the spin.
The original plan for a national ID scheme, laid out by David Blunkett in 2004, demanded two things: a new, 'clean' database and 'infallible' biometrics. Biometrics on this scale have become a joke. It seems the massive new database is in question, too.
'ID cards' were always a figleaf for the more sinister National Identity Register and "data sharing" surveillance. Now we will start to see the con-trick exposed.
But it doesn't stop vast consultancy fees piling up. YOUR money, YOUR identity - their control, their gain.
Tony Blair says that state management of your identity is 'modern' and beneficial. He is wrong.
21 countries in Europe have ID cards. Almost all got them decades ago. Almost all the systems were imposed by dictatorships or under Nazi or Soviet occupation. Almost all have been used to harass political opposition, bully minorities, or facilitate mass-murder.
Everywhere - without exception - the purpose has been monitoring the people for official purposes.
Tony Blair is not Hitler. But he is building the tools of totalitarianism. The identity scheme he is pushing is more controlling than any Europe has seen before. He can give no guarantee how it may be used in his lifetime, let alone the lifetimes of our children.
Some practical freedoms - personal privacy, confidentiality, anonymity, going about our business without need for official permit - are so familiar to us that they are unnoticed, like breathing. This ID scheme will choke them. It seeks to replace the trust in our society with formal validation by officials.
Numbered, indexed and tagged, your identity subject to approval, the simplest things in life will no longer be under your control. Tony may have faith in the future, but who else will have that power? In 10 years? In 20? In what back room?
Help NO2ID stop it, before it is too late.
Information given for one purpose cannot normally be used for another. Personal privacy, protection from identity fraud, confidentiality, and trust itself, rest on that principle.
Now the government wants to tear it up. It has declared that your private information should be shared by state agencies, bureaucrats and officials for any official purpose. This contrasts with its own, secretive, approach to making policy. The Nanny State excuses no longer hide Big Brother intentions.
In a new "Information sharing vision statement" [399KB PDF document] the government outlines how it wants to reverse the presumption of confidentiality and to revoke some basic Data Protection Principles when officials deal in future with people and businesses.
Against established good practice and its own past legislation, the Government has decided it need not have to follow the rules for everyone else. Departments will be empowered to swap information whenever useful for them - without the knowledge or consent of the persons involved.
This is the key to the ID card puzzle. Once you are numbered and fingerprinted, all official and almost all private information about you can be collated. From now on, assume that anything you tell to an official will not only go on your file, but may be sent on to anyone at all in 'the public interest'. And 'public interest' has just been redefined by the Identity Cards Act 2006 to mean 'official convenience'.
This is a plan to give hundreds of thousands of civil servants the keys to your and your children's lives. Yet, faced with the monstrous Children's Index and National Identity Register, the Information Commissioner seems to have thrown in the towel.
Please read the linked articles... and, please, if you value your own privacy or that of your family then write to your MP, and send a copy of your letter to your local paper.
NO2ID and its supporters continue to successfully lobby councils and public bodies across the UK to pass motions against ID cards. Bolton MBC recently resolved to:
(1) Take no part in any pilot scheme or feasibility work in relation to the introduction of National Identity Cards.
(2) Ensure that National Identity Cards will not be required to access Council services or benefits unless specifically required to do so by an Act of Parliament.
(3) Only co-operate with the National Identity Card scheme where to do so would otherwise be unlawful.
And Milton Keynes Council has just resolved, in addition to blocking the ID scheme, to "assist the local NO2ID campaign in educating the residents of Milton Keynes about the dangers to privacy and freedom the scheme will create."
The cost of the ID card scheme has increased massively since the costs were last published, with nothing so far to show for it.
New Home Office minister Joan Ryan gave new figures this August. The total so far is up from £32.05 million spent to the end of December 2005, to £46.4 million by the end of May. In those five months the Home Office spent almost £3 million per month on the Identity Cards Programme.
Back in February, papers reported that spending on the ID cards programme was £63,000 per day. Yet before the Bill had even been passed, this shot up to a staggering £95,000 per day. Why was the Home Office spending so much before gaining Parliamentary assent, and on what?
It certainly doesn't seem to have much to show for the almost £50 million it has spent so far.
Freedom of Information requests reveal that the programme was hiring 98 consultants. But it is hard to understand what they - and the additional 54 civil servants and 34 interim staff on the team - have been doing all this time. The actual building of the system has been put off. And the IT firms waiting to do the work have not been given any specifications.
The Home Office has always refused to give any total cost for the scheme. But it has stuck rigidly to its estimate that the running costs will be £584 million a year. The non-running costs of the scheme are (or were in May) £36 million a year. In other words, it costs over 6% of that budget for the Home Office NOT to tell anyone how the money is to be spent. Why should the bigger figure be trusted at all?
...but, as NO2ID predicted, the United Kingdom Identity & Passport Service (UKIPS) has this week announced that the price of an adult passport will be hiked to £66 from October 5th this year. A 'premium service' (one day) renewal will cost £108 for adults and £93 for children.
That's a 57% increase in just 10 months, and a DOUBLING of the price since October 2003 - which was when the government first claimed it was introducing anti-fraud measures including microchips and biometrics.
So what were these previous rises actually spent on?
A big chunk of the 2003 rise went to pay off the Passport Service's £26m debt to the Treasury after the 1999 computer crisis - a fact that Tony Blair seems conveniently to have forgotten in claiming that the passport system "worked extremely well". The most recent online application fiasco would suggest that UKIPS is still having problems managing its IT systems.
In reality, the British public are being made to pay for measures essential to the new ID cards programme - but entirely unnecessary and disproportionate for passports alone: compulsory interviews and background checks at one of 69 new 'enrolment' centres; further price hikes as fingerprinting and iris scanning are introduced; a massive new database to track everyone within the country, not just at borders.
It makes more sense than ever to renew your passport now, and buy yourself and your family 10 years' freedom from all sorts of risks, untold bureaucracy and punitive charges.
This summer, RENEW FOR FREEDOM.
The Home Office ID programme is in trouble. A series of e-mails leaked to the Sunday Times from OGC - the Office of Government Commerce, part of the Treasury - and (UK)IPS - the new UK Identity & Passport Service - revealed that senior civil servants believe the project to be yet another fiasco in the making.
Government spin has been predictable, first claiming that the ID scheme was 'under review', then "broadly on track", and now proceeding "at the same pace".
So what is fact and what is fantasy?
FACT: the ID scheme that the government has been selling for the last two years or more is a lie. With no clearly-expressed, evidence-based goal or justification, 'feature creep' almost every time ministers opened their mouths, and a complete unwillingness to listen to real experts in the field, the Home Office has lumbered itself (and us!) with something impossibly complex, horrendously expensive, and utterly unworkable.
FACT: they passed the Act anyway, wasting tens of millions in the process. The biggest threat to everyone's civil liberties is leaving a law on the statute books which permits compulsory registration, lifelong surveillance and population control by ID. But we also risk seeing billions of pounds of taxpayers' money (which could be far better spent elsewhere) being thrown away in pursuit of this authoritarian delusion. Even worse, a botched attempt could expose all our most personal information, including biometrics like fingerprints - leaving some with no control over their private affairs or identities for the rest of their lives.
FACT: the government will proceed regardless. This programme has been politically driven from the outset and will remain so. Tony Blair can't afford another U-turn, and the ID programme (or more accurately, the National Identity Register) is at the heart of government strategy. The bureaucrats would love for us to all be neatly numbered, so our data can be shared ever more 'efficiently' - and the suppliers still stand to make billions, whether they deliver or fail.
The danger from the ID scheme is greater than ever.
Now the government is looking at issuing cut-down 'early variant' ID cards that would 'protect' your identity with nothing more than a four-digit PIN. A gift to fraudsters. They will still fingerprint, iris scan, background check and interrogate you for a passport - but then simply store all your data in their database. No 'benefits' or services for the public. Just all the costs, risks and intrusion.
NO2ID is redoubling its efforts - and YOU can help. It is more important than ever that we get the message out to a public that may think 'ID cards' are off the agenda. Street stalls, leafletting - even going door-to-door. Now is the time to wake people up to the real and present danger of the ID scheme.
If you can't spare the time to get involved with a local group then please help support those who are fighting hard on your behalf. Join the campaign - it's just £15 per year - or send us a donation.
The battle continues...
Whitehall knows the ID system is doomed, according to emails leaked to the Sunday Times:
From: Foord, David (OGC)
Sent: 08 June 2006 15:17
Subject: RE: Procurement Strategy
This has all the inauspicious signs of a project continuing to be driven by an arbitrary end date rather than reality. The early variant idea introduces huge risk on many levels some of which mature in these procurement options.
How can IPS plan to do anything but extend existing contracts in the absence of an approved business case? The plan on page 8 shows outline business case approval in March 2007 (which incidentally I think is a reasonable target but by no means guaranteed). OJEU is dependent on this (as page 15 plan shows correctly) so Sept 06 is not an option for anything other than supporting business as usual.
And there's much more where that came from.
But how does it square with repeated ministerial statements that all was fine? For instance, Charles Clarke, Hansard, 18 October 2005, Col.800:
Since the debate on Second Reading, the project has been through a further Office of Government Commerce review on business justification. The review confirmed that the project is ready to proceed to the next phase. An independent assurance panel is now in place to ensure that the work is subject to rigorous, ongoing challenge by experts, as well as major period reviews by the OGC process.
It doesn't. NO2ID has said all along that the "ID card" scheme was a camouflage for the introduction of a national database. We've pointed out ministers misrepresenting the plan at every turn. And we don't think even now that they will abandon their control-freak fantasy of rule by database.
Which is why we want the Identity Cards Act 2006 and all its 'registration' powers repealed.
Meanwhile the scheme is still rolling. If you want to see it dead you can help kill it by renewing your passport NOW, to forestall a database built by stealth.
It is not too late. The UK IPS has not yet changed passport renewal procedures so, this summer, NO2ID and a growing number of other organisations* ask that you renew your passport.
Did you know that, from October of this year, as preparation for the ID scheme, ALL first-time passport applicants will have background checks and be interviewed by officials at one of the government's 69 new 'enrolment centres'? This will include your children as they reach 16. Before long it will include you too, when you renew your passport. And you will be fingerprinted as well.
So, unless you need it soon, you should renew your passport NOW. If you wait till autumn, you risk giving up personal data to be used for the government identity database. Pay £51 for a 10-year passport while you can. The charge for ID registration and a record for life will be at least £93. The website www.renewforfreedom.org explains in more detail. There's a fact-sheet there that you can download and pass on to others.
If you are put on the ID system, you will be exposed immediately to all the dangers, explained here. It could be sooner than you think.
Show the government how many people want to stay out of the ID scheme, and buy time while NO2ID works to abolish it. Say "No" now. Renew your passport this Summer.
*including the Liberal Democrats, UKIP and the Green Party; the Stop the War Coalition and the Countryside Alliance; Liberty, Privacy International, Our World Our Say, Globalise Resistance, The Freedom Association, Statewatch and the New Alliance.
The Home Office is considering plans that will effectively extend the National Identity Register (NIR) to include children under 16. The final report of the "let's just add this to the NIR" Citizen Information Project (CIP) recommends that the Children's Index database currently being developed by the Department for Education and Skills be turned into a full child population register, eventually giving central and local government shared access to a database of every citizen from birth to death.
The CIP was an Office for National Statistics project set up with private sector partners and backed by the Treasury. When it became obvious that the British public would be even less happy about paying for two National Registers than one massive one, it was decided to wrap CIP into the Home Office's ID scheme - at an additional cost of £200 million.
The 'significant' cost savings claimed in the report, £635 million, are measured over 10 years and do not start until around 2021 when the CIP expects the NIR to be fully populated.
Meanwhile, it appears that ID cards are to carry medical details, despite repeated assurances to Parliament during the passage of the Bill that this would never happen. There is no provision in the Act for such information, once added to the Register "at the request of the individual", to be removed.
Ominously, Home Office minister Andy Burnham is quoted as saying, when asked if HIV-Aids victims would be encouraged to disclose their status: "We are not considering that at this stage."
So what other highly sensitive personal information would the Home Office consider adding at some later stage?
Less than two weeks after the Identity Cards Act 2006 became law, the 'function creep' predicted by NO2ID, the London School of Economics and a host of other experts has already begun.
A Home Office spokesperson, reported in the Observer, says that the National Identity Register (NIR) which the Government claims is being introduced 'to back up ID cards' may be used to help gather more speed camera fines.
Pleased with this new money-making wheeze, the Home Office has also announced another - confirming that it will be making a charge every time someone checks your details on the Register. Even the CBI has begun to smell a rat...
Yes, you heard right. Not only will you be forced to hand over your fingerprints and lots of personal information, and be made to pay for the privilege. Not only will you be fined if you don't keep your records up to date, and made to pay for a lost, damaged or stolen card. But every time someone checks your details on the Register, the Government will make money.
Phil Booth, National Coordinator of NO2ID, said: "So much for tackling serious crime and terrorism! Clearly the ID card is intended to become nothing less than a spy in your pocket, and your record on the National Identity Register - rather than 'protecting' your identity - is to provide the Government with ever more convenient methods of screwing money out of you."
Mocking Parliament and the British public, the Home Office chose to set up a new government agency to run its National Identity Register scheme on April 1st - less than 48 hours after manoeuvring its Bill onto the statute books.
When completed, the Register will be a giant database storing 50 categories of officially "registrable fact" about every person over 16 living in the UK - who will be obliged to keep the UKIPS informed of any changes on pain of cash penalties.
NO2ID decided to pay a visit to the 'all new' United Kingdom Identity and Passport Service's offices near Victoria Station in London.
Phil Booth, National Coordinator of NO2ID, said: "Charles Clarke started by sneering at the public, saying anyone who opts out of the scheme is "foolish". Now the Home Office shows its utter contempt for the Parliamentary process by having a 'new agency' ready to open, and choosing April Fools Day - a Saturday - to do it.
This joke agency is going to nationalise you and rent your identity back to you with your passport. What a hoot for Mr Clarke! What fools we are to resent it!"
An anonymous UKPS - sorry, UKIPS - worker, on viewing Billy the clown's antics, said: "That pretty much sums it all up, really".
Photo courtesy of Jess Hurd, www.reportdigital.co.uk.
The government claims that 73% of people asked were in favour of ID cards, but two thirds of those same people were not aware of what the introduction of the cards actually involved. Here is a glimpse...
YOU WILL:
ATTEND an appointment to be photographed, have your fingerprints taken and iris scanned, or be fined up to £2500. Additional fines of up to £2500 may be levied each time you fail to comply until you submit to these procedures.
PROMPTLY INFORM the police or Home Office if you lose your card or it becomes defective, or face a fine of up to £1000. If you find someone else's card and do not immediately hand it in, you may have committed a criminal offence punishable by imprisonment for up to two years or a fine, or both.
PROMPTLY INFORM the National Identity Register of any change of address or face a fine of up to £1000 (you will supply evidence of your previous addresses, not just your current address).
PROMPTLY INFORM the National Identity Register of significant changes to your personal life or any errors they have made or face a fine of up to £1000. You may also be obliged to submit to being re-interviewed, re-photographed, re-fingerprinted and re-scanned, or face a fine.
PAY between £30 and £93 (or more) to be registered, with further charges possible to change your details and to replace a lost or stolen card.
When ID cards were introduced in this country during World War II, they had three functions. By the time they were abolished in 1952 they had 39 administrative uses. So what won't we be able to do without an ID card, according to Government plans? We'll be prevented from renting or selling a home or staying in a hotel. We won't be able to buy a car or a mobile phone; open or use a bank account; travel abroad; register with a doctor; get education; work or run a business; (officially) live or (officially) die...
Despite comprehensively losing the argument, the Government has won round one.
Yesterday, under cover of yet another meaningless 'concession', it managed to pass the Identity Cards Bill. If the Home Office has its way, you will be forced to register on its Big Brother database when you renew your passport or any other official document that the Government chooses to 'designate' (your driving licence, a police CRB check certificate, a student loan form...).
You may hear that you can 'opt out' of having the card until 2010 - the Government will charge you a penalty for doing this, and put all your details on the Register anyway.
Should New Labour win the next election, Charles Clarke says the ID scheme will be compulsory for everyone. Official control of your personal information with enforced charges. An Identity Tax wrapped up in a License to Live.
Expect more spin, lies, and broken promises. £30 to register? Think again - Clarke says he is going to have to 'reconsider' his figures.
NO2ID will be intensifying its activities in the coming weeks and months. We aren't going away. Now is the time to get involved. If we want to stop this, we can do it...
Polls say 8.5 million people are strongly against the scheme. Millions more are just waking up. You can spread the word... start a local group... gather support.
The fight goes on. Say NO to ID.
Lord Armstrong of the Crossbench peers has tabled an opt-out amendment - i.e. you choose whether you want to be entered onto the National Identity Register or not, when you renew your passport or other designated documents - that is expected to gain broad support in the Lords on Tuesday 28th March.
The Identity Cards Bill will officially join the ranks of the most controversial Bills of New Labour's time in office if the Lords bounce it back to the Commons. Only three other Bills have made it to round five of ping-pong, and these were the Prevention of Terrorism Bill 2004-05, European Parliamentary Elections Bill 1997-98 and the European Parliamentary and Local Elections (Pilots) Bill 2003-04.
In a heated debate on Monday 13th March, Charles Clarke was variously accused of being "flawed, fundamentally wrong, and trying to deceive us", "riding roughshod over common sense and justice" and "intellectual dishonesty on a grand scale". The Government Whips nevertheless managed to claw their majority up to 33, and the Bill 'pinged' back to the Lords.
On Wednesday 15th, after an equally passionate debate, the Lords reinstated their Amendments 16 and 22 - on allowing passport applicants to choose whether or not they wish to be entered on the National Identity Register - with a majority of 35. This represented quite a drop from the previous vote (maj. 61), however the focus of the debate wasn't really on ID cards but rather on the Government's insistence that the Lords just give it its way. They didn't, but quite a few Crossbench peers seem to have given the Government the benefit of the doubt when it comes to voting against the will of the elected chamber - please help us to try to change that at the next 'pong'. Write to your 'parochial Peers' this weekend.
On Thursday 16th, the Bill 'pinged' the Commons again. Described as "an exercise in elected dictatorship", the Government was accused of "ramming through illiberal legislation" and did just that. With a significantly reduced turn-out - almost 60 fewer MPs voted than on Monday - it achieved a majority of 51 to send the Bill back to the Lords again. This was, however, a slimmer margin than that it achieved on the 'glorification' of terrorism clause in the other Bill that it has decided to shove through alongside ID cards. Clearly the Government will try anything to link ID cards and terrorism in the public mind, now that they've lost the argument.
NO2ID's recent ICM poll was mentioned frequently in the debate. Finally, the Home Office admits that public support has fallen drastically - but, in an act of blatant hypocrisy, tries using this as a justification for pushing the Bill through!
So where are we now?
The Bill returns to the Lords on Monday, 20th March, when the Lords will vote on another 'pong' (something certainly stinks...) in their third attempt to remove "stealth compulsion" from the scheme. Only three Bills have made it to round five of ping-pong since Labour came to power - so expect even more pressure and a new 'compromise' amendment, as the Lords try to pin the ultimate falling of the Bill onto the Commons.
Shown up for lying in its manifesto, desperate not to lose any more ground, and with public opinion slipping, the Government is trying to steamroller the Identity Cards Bill through Parliament as quickly as possible.
The Bill hits the Commons again on Monday 13th March, and the Lords on Wednesday 15th. The stakes are high, and the Parliament Act threatens, but there is something you can do. Write to your 'parochial Peers'.
At Third Reading, the Lords insisted that entry on the National Identity Register should be genuinely voluntary by 186 votes to 142 - a majority of 44. This week, after NO2ID supporters had written thousands of letters to peers, the same vote was won by 227 to 166 (majority 61). Maybe not all the 41 extra votes against creeping compulsion were down to letters written, but we know that some of them were.
Peers are men and women of principle and wide experience, many of whom see themselves as defenders of our long-held and hard won liberties. We need them to know that the British public supports their stand against compulsory registration.
We have very little time, so please write now. Click here for details.
Some people have asked why NO2ID is encouraging peers and MPs to vote for an amendment to make registration on the National Identity Register voluntary, saying a voluntary ID card is as bad as a compulsory one. This is a good question.
NO2ID remains entirely opposed to the government's ID scheme. But few people understand that the Home Office idea of "voluntary" means compulsion via 'designated documents'. Making a stand on this exposes the fraud on the electorate at the very outset of the scheme.
At this stage in the Parliamentary process there are very few options, but we do know that the government cannot accept such an amendment without derailing their whole plan, which relies on hidden compulsion. Very few people will enjoy the interrogation of their entire life that the scheme requires, so to make it properly voluntary will quickly kill it as the guinea pigs tell their stories and rejection spreads. Meanwhile, each refusal by the Lords draws the attention of more people to the true nature of government plans.
Far from modifying or toning down our opposition, this is just one means by which we can build future resistance.
In yet another stinging defeat for the Government on ID cards, the House of Lords voted by 227 to 166 (a majority of 61) to sever the link between renewing or applying for a passport or other official documents and being forced to register for an ID card.
In the days leading up to the vote, NO2ID and its supporters received dozens of responses from peers stating their intention to vote against 'creeping compulsion'. The Tories, Liberal Democrats and other anti-ID allies kept true to their word, and some now predict a "protracted conflict" with the Government.
Our sincere thanks and congratulations to all of you who wrote letters or e-mails - literally thousands must have been sent in under two weeks. A fantastic effort that clearly has not gone unnoticed!
Monday's debate focussed heavily on the massive database behind the cards and the passport itself, not least because of the Home Office's 'convenient' announcement of the launch of biometric ePassports. The Bill, however, does not limit creeping compulsion only to passports. If the Government turns down the Lords' amendment again - which is extremely likely - it will be confirming its unswerving intention to use potentially any official document to force people to register for an ID card.
Home Office projections show that they already intend to 'designate' the police (CRB) check for employment, driving licences and possibly even student loan forms in the first few years of the scheme. This would deny ordinary law-abiding people and their families their right to travel abroad, drive a car, work or volunteer, even to study and gain qualifications unless they submit to compulsory Registration during what New Labour promised at the election would be an initially voluntary phase.
If the Government is willing to mislead the public this badly over the very first steps towards ID cards, can its ID scheme be trusted at all?
Despite his failure to show at the last vote in the Commons, and the slashing in half of his Government's majority at that vote, Tony Blair claims that he's 'won the argument' on ID cards.
Show us the evidence, Tony.
Two independent polls within a week, one by ICM for NO2ID and one by YouGov for the Telegraph show just how desperately out of touch the Prime Minister really is. Just 52% of the British public now support ID cards - a greater than 20% gap between properly-conducted public polls and the Government's claims of 73% or higher support. Mr Blair clearly can't be trusted on the simplest question about ID. Almost a year after they were originally asked, the Home Office still hasn't published the questions from the 'survey' on which his current claims are based.
ICM's poll indicates that over eight and a half million people now believe that ID cards are a very bad idea. Hardcore opposition has tripled since the Bill was first introduced, and the YouGov poll clearly shows that the massive majority now understand the many risks and dangers to law-abiding citizens inherent in the scheme, even if the Prime Minister doesn't. His credibility in tatters, Mr Blair tries telling us that he's not destroying our liberties.
Half the country begs to disagree.
This Monday, 27th February at 8pm, Channel 4's Dispatches will be showing 'Stealing Freedom' by political commentator Peter Hitchens. The programme documents how the recent avalanche of 'security' legislation has affected the civil liberties of ordinary people in Britain.
Ordinary people like those who joined our lobby outside Parliament just two weeks ago, to protest New Labour's draconian ID legislation.
In advance of the first broadcast, NO2ID asked Peter Hitchens what his programme would be saying about the ID card scheme. This is his reply:
"In the name of security and safety, the liberties of the British people are being salami-sliced away. We are more snooped upon, watched and recorded than ever before, and even our thoughts are policed, while crime and disorder continue largely unchecked.
The most dangerous of all these measures is the scheme for identity cards, which presume that we are all potential offenders against the parental state. Yet, while we are much less free, we do not seem to be any safer."
Essential viewing.
Just when the Government would have everyone believe that ID cards are a done deal, Charles Clarke has been forced to reveal the £32 million of taxpayers' money that he has already spent on them, before Parliament has even approved the scheme - let alone passed the Identity Cards Bill.
Even while the highly controversial Bill was receiving a battering from all sides in Parliament, Home Office spending leapt to a staggering £63,000 per day, as far back as the summer of 2005. This, as it is reported that over 200 police officers in Manchester alone are being made redundant due to budget cuts. No wonder the Home Office doesn't want to be made to account for itself, and point blank refuses to have its ID cost estimates independently checked.
The Home Office is financially out of control.
The National Audit Office has already said so and, in the context of these latest revelations, Baroness Noakes' amendment requiring a full set of properly audited estimates for the ID scheme to be placed before Parliament before it can proceed would seem to be pure common sense. Frank Dobson, and all those MPs who supported his watered-down amendment in the Commons last Monday, should be ashamed of themselves for acting so blatantly against the interests of the British people.
For if the Home Office has nothing to hide, what does it have to fear?
The Chancellor's last minute cheerleading attempts for ID cards were not only a transparent attempt to raise his public profile by posturing on 'national security', but a complete reversal of his previous position.
When first mooted in 2003, the most vocal Cabinet opposition to Blunkett and Blair's ID cards came from Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, the then Trade and Industry Secretary, Patricia Hewitt, and... Gordon Brown. Throughout the whole ID debate, Mr Brown has sat on the sidelines saying nothing more than, "they've got to pay for themselves". Now suddenly he's all for them.
The new 'gung-ho' Gordon wants to throw caution to the wind. The government hasn't yet passed the law that will nationalise our identities, when the Chancellor announces his plan to part-privatise them. And as Professor Ian Angell, from the London School of Economics, says:
"Any companies involved in IT should stick their snout in the trough now, because it's going to be a gravy train."
Mr Brown has obviously decided to let the British taxpayer foot the ID bill after all.
Gordon Brown was handed the poisoned chalice of ID cards on Monday, while Tony Blair conveniently found himself 'stranded' in South Africa. Desperate to redeem themselves after their recent humiliation on the race and religious hatred vote, the Government Whips pulled out all the stops to prevent the third in a series of civil liberties defeats for New Labour.
Despite losing every argument and breaking their manifesto promise, the Government were able to contain the rebellion from their backbenches and, with their majority slashed in half again, they reinstated the 'creeping compulsion' power to designate documents.
Using this convenient loophole, the Government would be able to force 90% or more of the population onto the National Identity Register and make them pay for an ID card when they renew their passport, or any other official document that the Home Secretary chooses. Head of the queue are likely to be those who require a CRB certificate for their job - such as teachers, nurses, carers, caretakers, hospital cleaners, even volunteers.
The Bill now returns to the Lords, where they will decide whether or not to insist on their original amendments. The Bill has not passed yet, and sustained public outcry may stiffen the resolve of peers as they come under increasing pressure from the Government.
Congratulations to the members of NO2ID Inverness who travelled to London to present the results of their Highland street poll to Number 10 recently. Mel and crew (not wearing their NO2ID T-shirts) asked around 400 ordinary members of the public to cast a simple vote for or against ID cards.
The result? 70% voted NO, and just 30% YES.
The Government has lost the debate on ID. Its only argument is 'Trust in me.' Yet it has lost the trust of the British public. And with its shifting excuses, blatantly spurious figures, evasion of valid questions, and outright deception, it deserves to lose the trust of Parliament, too.
Tony Blair and his Whips are doing all they can to force the Identity Cards Bill through and avoid a hat trick of civil liberties defeats. The opposition parties will be out in force, but it is vital that MPs of every party realise just how important next Monday's votes are to their constituents... i.e. YOU!
If you haven't done so before, please write to your MP now. If you have, write again. You can use our lobbying tool or WriteToThem.com to send a fax for free.
Just a few days before the Third Reading of the ID cards Bill in the House of Lords, the Home Office has made a surprise announcement of a new figure for the cost of 'identity fraud'.
The claim is it has increased from £1.36 billion (the much-debunked 2002 Cabinet Office figure) to £1.72 billion over the past four years. Actually, their total comes to a daftly 'precise' £1,726,078,564 - you can check out the official breakdown for yourself.
Significant sections of this are admitted as pure guesswork, but still offered to three-figure precision: £215 million for 'missing trader VAT fraud' and £395 million for money laundering are added to the total, despite the figures being unsubstantiated and "for illustrative purposes". APACS, the UK payments association, says the true cost of identity theft in banking is £36.9 million: the Home Office gets £508.4 million by saying all credit card fraud is ID theft. Debunked again!
Of course, we already know that the Home Office is no good with figures. The National Audit Office just found huge discrepancies in its accounts and refused to sign them off.
The fraudulent figure is there for the headline. To prop up ministers' wishful assertions that ID cards are value for money because they will prevent identity fraud. They won't. Biometric ID cards can do nothing to stop criminals from stealing your details and using them over the internet or phone. In fact, by collecting a large range of personal data and indexing them; and then supplying 'verification' to any organisation that asks, the Home Office is providing the tools for a much more serious identity theft problem. You can easily cancel and replace a misused credit card. Good luck cleaning up an official database.
It was possible to learn from the US experience, where the ubiquitous Social Security Number (SSN) has made identity thieves' jobs so much easier. But as the latest work shows, the Home Office has trouble distinguishing fact and fiction.
Government desperation to force the Identity Cards Bill through at any cost is starting to show. Now, with utter contempt for logic or decency, they play the "paedo" card in the tabloids.
In a transparent attempt to milk the scandal in the Department of Education for political advantage, Home Office minister Andy Burnham MP told the Mirror:
"The National Identity Register and the ID card could have a major role to play in improving how we vet and identify those who work with children. Our ID card system will bring extra security to workplaces across the country and give parents confidence that people in positions of trust are who they say they are."
But why should this have any advantage over existing Criminal Records checks? It wouldn't affect those without records. As one of the policemen among our supporters asked, "Does he seriously believe that every school is going to be equipped with an iris scanner or fingerprint experts so that every time they take on a teaching assistant, dinner lady or boilerman they can be checked against the biometrics on the NIR?
ID cards are not magic, minister.
As for making our children safer, this is contemptible spin from a government that is creating the Children's Act index - which will make details of the life of every child in the country available to tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of officials and IT staff - and with the National Identity Register wants to make sure anybody with a plausible excuse can find out reliably where you live.
SURVEILLANCE FEARS SURFACE
The media and MPs have begun to pick up on the contactless chip technology that will be part of ID cards and the new 'biometric' passports. What arouses concern is the idea that they may be scanned at a distance. But what's the risk of temporary snooping compared with the real threat? Let us hope the same people soon grasp that what matters is the database. A permanent record of every use of the card or its number, tying all official records together and tracing out your entire life - the US government idea of 'Total Information Awareness' in spades - would give anyone with access to the database extraordinary power: an all-seeing eye.
After refusing the Home Office a blank cheque for their ID cards scheme last week, the Lords have dealt another devastating blow to the government's plans - deciding by a convincing 186 votes to 142 that entry on the National Identity Register should be genuinely voluntary.
Peers also established that a separate Act of Parliament would be required before ID cards could be made compulsory. The votes were just two of a series of successful Conservative and Liberal Democrat amendments, also supported by cross-bench peers, aimed at making sure the British people have a choice over who controls their identity.
Applauding this continued carving up of the ID cards Bill, Phil Booth, NO2ID's National Coordinator said:
The Home Office is demanding the right to twist arms. It wants to force law-abiding citizens to surrender their privacy by refusing them passports, driving licences and other vital documents unless they "volunteer" to be numbered and tracked on a nationalised database.
The Lords are merely holding Tony Blair and New Labour to their own manifesto promise - a truly voluntary system to begin with. If the Government won't keep its word to voters even at this stage, how can it be trusted with control of our identities?"
Controversy continues to grow over the Government's refusal to publish full cost estimates for their ID proposals, or even a detailed breakdown of how they have arrived at their now almost universally derided "£584 million per year" figure*.
The Home Office have been forced to admit that this excludes setup costs - e.g. hundreds of millions or more to create the National Identity Register - and allows nothing for integration with other systems, representing even more billions that would have to be spent before other Government departments, Local Authorities or private sector companies could make checks on the Register or even read an ID card.
All of which is sweet music to the ears of the big IT suppliers.
A new report from Corporate Watch blows the lid on what promises to be one of New Labour's biggest ever gravy trains. The report analyses several likely prospects, uncovering some dodgy pedigrees: serious mismanagement, cost overruns and large scale system failures. For example, EDS (in trouble for the tax credits and CSA fiascos) and Siemens Business Services, who managed to screw up both the Passport Agency and IND systems.
It also reveals how deep in the trough PA Consulting (who recommended Capita for the disastrous CRB contract that had kids turned away from schools without teachers and which well over doubled the price of a police check, that ID cards are now conveniently supposed to 'make more efficient') already have their snouts buried. Awarded a £12 million contract in 2004 to help develop the 'business case' and tender it out, their contract had ballooned to over £18 million in just over a year. The Home Office obviously need a lot more help than they thought, and clearly aren't above spending tens of millions of taxpayers' money before they even pass the legislation.
So we thought we'd set up our own 'Home Office Watch', in an attempt track down and hold to account those responsible for the ID card scheme as they go around the country trying to drum up 'users', or schmooze with potential suppliers. Check out our 'Events' panel [right] for upcoming dates and locations. Some, if not most, of these will be paid entry only - the Home Office won't talk to just anybody, you know! - but if you hear of any ID-related conferences, seminars or meetings with Charles Clarke, Tony McNulty, Andy Burnham, Katherine Courtney, Stephen Harrison or anyone identified as a member of the 'Home Office ID cards programme team' advertised as a speaker then please send full details to with as much advance notice as possible.
It is, after all, our money that they are spending.
*You may hear ministers - when they aren't desperately trying to slag off the LSE report - refer to a 'KPMG review', which they claim verifies their figures. Unfortunately, as the extract published on the Home Office site makes clear, even KPMG only got to look at 60% of their costings and were asked only to comment on the cost methodology, not the figures themselves.
As predicted, Government plans to introduce ID cards were dealt not just one but a series of blows in the House of Lords on the first day of Report stage.
The first serious setback for the government came as peers voted 237 to 156 to force ministers to present fully audited cost estimates for their ID proposals to Parliament before any scheme can come into effect. Two further amendments, one demanding a secure and reliable method of recording and storing citizens' personal data and another limiting the potential for ID cards to be required for accessing public services, were passed by large majorities.
Responding to the defeats, Phil Booth, NO2ID national coordinator, said:
"The Government are attempting legalised identity theft. They want to take some of our most personal data and not only charge us for the privilege, but charge others for checking it. The Home Office's proposed scheme would create a huge new State monopoly, funding the systematic surveillance of the British people. We applaud the peers who have brought the Government to account."
Report stage continues next Monday, when peers will vote on more amendments, including several to eliminate 'backdoor' compulsion - preventing the Home Office from piggybacking registration for ID cards onto passports and other official documents. Despite New Labour's manifesto promise that the ID scheme would initially be voluntary, the Bill as it currently stands would give people no choice but to submit to being registered when they renew their passports, or face heavy fines. Driving licenses and other documents could also be 'designated', in order to force more people onto the National Identity Register.
Home Secretary Charles Clarke and Home Office minister Andy Burnham tried to bluster their way out of what can only be seen as humiliating defeats, but their excuse of "commercial confidentiality" and reliance on a KPMG report that they still refuse to release in full convinced no-one. Mr Clarke's insistence that support for ID cards has increased shows just how out of touch the government has become. Every major poll since the Bill was first introduced has shown the progressive collapse in public trust and rising opposition as details of the scheme emerge.
"The general public will rise up against it [the ID card scheme] when they see exactly what is involved. Whoever is in power then - if we have a government foolish enough to proceed with this idea - will feel the electoral backlash." - Lord Stoddart of Swindon, Committee Stage in the House of Lords.
With crucial votes due on ID Cards in a Report Stage that begins next Monday, Parliamentary opponents have been stiffening their resolve and sharpening their knives to carve into the Bill. Indications are that peers will challenge the Government on both the cost and the fact that registration will be compulsory for over 80% of the population from the outset, despite Labour's manifesto promise that said ID cards would initially be voluntary.
There is also serious concern that the Identity Card Bill allows for repeated 'civil penalties' of up to £2500 for refusal to register on the database. The Government - desperate to avoid the possibilities of 'ID card martyrs' - is weaselling around by insisting these are not fines, and denying that prison sentences could result. The fact is, you could have your house and valuables taken from you and still find yourself in prison if you continue to refuse to register for an ID card.
Politicians including Simon Hughes, president of the Liberal Democrats and potential leadership candidate, Matthew Taylor MP and Lynne Wood, Plaid Cymru Member of the Welsh Assembly, are clearly aware of this. In signing NO2ID's pledge refusing to register for an ID card, Hughes was adamant saying:"Sooner or later, they'll be driven to require people who refuse to go along with ID cards to go inside," he said. "If necessary, I am absolutely ready to do so."
The Scottish, Welsh and London elected assemblies have all passed motions against the identity scheme. There is entrenched opposition by members of all parties in all Houses and from every end of the land. The Conservatives' shadow Home Secretary, David Davis, has previously pledged that he would repeal outright any ID card laws in the event of a Tory government, and the new leader of the Conservatives, David Cameron, has expressed to NO2ID his rejection of the scheme.
Come on in ID cards... your time is up.
Scrutiny of the ID cards Bill has begun in earnest in the House of Lords, with some extraordinary statements being made by New Labour peers. On the opening day of Committee, and in a complete reversal of the Government's position that ID cards will not be a significant change, Lord Gould of Brookwood told peers:
"...it would help if they respected the fact that the Bill and the identity cards represent the future: a new kind of freedom and a new kind of identity."
Has he been reading too much George Orwell? This sounds like pure newspeak to us...
Tony Blair's former pollster then went on to claim that 73% of the public want ID cards, based on Home Office research done in January and February of 2005. He has obviously ignored every major opinion poll since then - they all show support for ID cards collapsing as details of the scheme emerge. The latest, published by ICM this week, shows that public opposition has now risen to almost 50%.
Celebrating the 400th anniversary of the most famous 'terrorist' plot in English history, the citizens of Lewes, East Sussex chose the Home Secretary as their 'enemy of the bonfire' for his leading role in the Government's assault on civil liberties. Tens of thousands of visitors and residents of the historic county town cheered on this massive two fingers aimed squarely at the deeply illiberal, unjust and unjustified ID cards Bill and the man now most closely identified with it.
The 20 foot high effigy of Charles Clarke 'ID branding' a citizen on the buttocks was paraded through the streets, before being exploded with fireworks as a part of the traditional bonfire celebrations.
Meanwhile in Parliament, the Government faced its biggest backbench rebellion to date - on anti-terror legislation. And Tony Blair's future began to look increasingly uncertain, after the
