UK's Blair Dismisses Online Anti ID-Card Petition 377
An anonymous reader writes "Prime Minister Tony Blair has responded personally via email to 28,000 online petitioners opposing the UK's planned identity card scheme, and has closed the online petition. The email reads: 'We live in a world in which people, money and information are more mobile than ever before. Terrorists and international criminal gangs increasingly exploit this to move undetected across borders and to disappear within countries. Terrorists routinely use multiple identities — up to 50 at a time... ID cards which contain biometric recognition details and which are linked to a National Identity Register will make this much more difficult.'"
Well let me decrypt that email for you.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Slaves,
When your masters gives you something, you take it. I'm giving you a nice
new collar so you can't hide or run away. The global plantation has
grown to such a size we just have to have smart chains and collars.
Here's a sample (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Downfall of Europe (Score:5, Insightful)
The point of the petition (Score:5, Insightful)
Note the difference.
Incresingly difficult, yes. (Score:3, Insightful)
So do we have any evidence. (Score:4, Insightful)
What are all those unidentified terrorists? (Score:5, Insightful)
Paranoia with national ID cards (Score:1, Insightful)
Why the paranoia? Nordic countries have had such cards (and citizen registrars) at least since WW2...to help with issues such as arranging voting (no need to "Register as a voter"), social security, taxes, etc.
The biometrics part of the UK id card is of course another issue - fingerprints, retinal scans, DNA and all that is not proven secure. Unique to every human being, yes, but hardly secure. You leave your fingerprints all over the place. You leave your DNA all over the place. Somehow the advocates of biometrics seem to be lulled into a sense that biometrics is absolutely secure method of authentication - this is the primary problem.
Re:Downfall of Europe (Score:1, Insightful)
The idea of welfare is that one gets ones rights back, namely the right to live even if every capitalist asshole out there denies you a job and then says you should die because you are job- and therefore worthless.
If it had anything to do with welfare he would say that he needs it so he can make sure that if anyone doesn't deserve welfare (namely, everybody who either works and therefore doesn't need it and everybody who doesn't work and therefore is too lazy to live) he doesn't receive it.
The idea of a national ID card, however, serves to control the populace by always knowing who is where, facilitating easier arrests of unwanted elements like protesters, liberals or pro-welfare people (and doesn't work at all against terrorists, because they tend to come from another country and thus are not in the national database - what is he going to do, shooting all tourists?).
Re:So do we have any evidence. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:And another one... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not a vote.
1.5 million out of roughly 60 million population have gone to the website, and made their views shown. More than enough *TO* put it to a vote if required.
Inconceivable! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Paranoia with national ID cards (Score:5, Insightful)
1) You don't currently have to have a passport and I believe you can travel in the EU without one.
2) You will be forced to have an ID card which you will need to pay for yourself and pay for its renewal every 10 years or so
3) A huge database will be created linked to the ID cards which will be accessible to every branch of government and even private companies such as banks etc. The government refuse to say what kind of information will be in this database but it will be extensive
4) ID cards cannot be shown to help in the fight against a) immigration, b) terrorism, c) crime, d) benefit fraud
5) All of this will be very very expensive, a nuisance to deal with and useless in most practical terms.
Re:Paranoia with national ID cards (Score:3, Insightful)
Monkey Bush, Monkey Blair. They just don't get it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Just like no one ever questioned if DNA registers could at least theoretically be useful.
This is not what the petition is about. It's about the fact that all registers can and will be mis-used "for the better".
And that's an awful lot of lets-be-afraid-of-terrorists mumbo-jumbo. I'd say, let's understand what makes terrorists do what they do. Let's analyze and talk about that. Perhaps is it linked with the gigantic abuse of poor people in poor countries led by todays imperialistic crusades.
Re:Not that I think he's lieing persay (Score:3, Insightful)
I am one of those people who love to pose uncomfortable questions and defend unpopular ideas. I might be one of those people who suddenly spend hours checking into a flight overseas. At first it might be considered a coincidence but perhaps I'll rethink that when suddenly every routine traffic inspection takes, like, an hour until I can resume my travel.
Terrorists will not have that problem because they will hail their target governments with every breath they have. They will be model citizens. They will go to school or work every day, never be late, read all the 'right' papers and magazines and they won't do a single thing that will get them 'Sauron's attention'.
The difference lies herein:
I want to live my life as a free man. I want to make myself heard when I ask for the rights that were supposed to be given me. I want to raise awareness that something is amiss. I WILL draw attention to my person.
The terrorsit has other goals. He doesn't care that much about awareness. He doesn't believe that the people will change anything anyway. He has his plan in his head that he wishes to complete with every fiber of his being. He will lay low, lie about his beliefs and do all the things he hates so much for effing YEARS if he has to until his great day comes when he walks into a government building, yells his trademark warcry and pushes the trigger that takes 15 people along with him to hell.
THAT is why this whole fuck-up will do crap to stop any terrorism. If anything, it will mute the part of the society that tries to bring up alternative points making society as a whole more balanced in their dealings with the group he 'represents'. If anything, this will make the whole situation worse because the terrorists will use this regime like treatment of its people to point at the governments and say 'See?! They're showing their true colors. THAT is the beast we are fighting!'
Since I cannot believe that any politician can be stupid enough to not see this I have to ask myself: What do they gain from this... really?
trust (Score:2, Insightful)
The reasons for implementing this may be noble now, but laws change and what will the data be used for then?
This governent treats the public like its children (Score:5, Insightful)
Your job is to represent our views, not to decide what is best for your self and explain to us why you think it is right.
Honestly, I don't think you have the understanding of security issues to grasp why biometriecs are a very bad choice for personal security, nor do I think you have the imagination to forsee the abuses that could come of this. Combine these two things with your governments record on large scale IT projects and anyone can see that we are heading for disaster.
Dear People of Great Britain, (Score:4, Insightful)
Fuck you all.
We know best, and you know how to pay for it.
Sincerely,
HM Government.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Is this a democracy? (Score:1, Insightful)
False positive (Score:5, Insightful)
This won't work for two reasons :
So searching for matching biometric data won't detect terrorist keeping low profile and is at risk of harassing innocent people who had the bad luck to very much look alike some criminal idiot at the other side of the country whom they've never heard about.
ID cards proponents should stop pushing it as "the" miracle solution to terrorism, and only present it as what it is : a ID which is marginally more difficult to abuse compared to previous solution, and which will be handy (in countries lacking one before) as a quick solution for everyday usage when you need to show someone else your identity (like giving your age before entering in a night-club, before buying alcohol, while using a credit card, when going to the administration, etc.) A single standarised card is more convenient than having tens of different type of picture ID and seeing the one you handled refused because "Sorry, I don't know the ID. I can't determine if it wasn't tampered with. Do you have any other ID ?". But I'll never magically remove terrorism
Re:And another one... (Score:2, Insightful)
28000? how about TWO MILLION? (Score:3, Insightful)
Downing Street to send Blair emails to 2 million road pricing protesters
Furious minister resists policy concessions
E-petitions site creator hails changing democracy
Will Woodward, Patrick Wintour and Dan Milmo
Wednesday February 14, 2007
The Guardian
Downing Street will respond to a surge of support for a petition on its website condemning its road pricing plans, which could reach 2m signatures by next week.
With Douglas Alexander, the transport secretary, resisting concessions, No 10 sources acknowledged they had to deliver a gesture to the protesters. That is likely to take the form of an email to each signatory from the prime minister, explaining the pricing plans in greater detail.
Two million people, in a country of 60 million, sign the petition. Discount the children, the elderley who haven't voted, and consider the demographics and percentage of people in the UK who don't use a computer or wouldn't generally use one to sign a petition.
This is why we think Blair = Bliar
It's not about the card (Score:5, Insightful)
Concerns include:
1. Records might not be accurate.
2. People might commit crimes using other people's identities.
3. Records might be used to build criminal cases against people when the police have little evidence (see 1 and 2).
4. Records might be data-mined for "patterns of suspicious activity" to detect criminals. This might produce false positives.
5. People might end up having to prove their own innocence, rather than the onus being on the authorities to prove guilt.
In addition, any database specialist will be able to suggest concerns about the security of the system, especially as it will have a large number of users, throughout the civil service and private business.
Worse than that (Score:5, Insightful)
In US terms this is the pork barrel to end pork barrels, and a way to ensure a continued revenue stream to Blair Inc when he leaves office. Because I'm sure that:
He will be "advising" those companies for a fee
She, as a human rights lawyer, will be deriving fee income from (a) civil liberties groups challenging aspects of the scheme and (b) Government departments on the other side.
This is a wonderful earning opportunbity for the Blairs, and they will not let it go without a huge fight.
Re:No big surprise (Score:1, Insightful)
Contempt? Really? I know it's going to be tough to look at this with a logical perspective for many folks (pick your side), but this event is incorrectly represented. Since there was no precedent for these types of attacks, if the US Govt. shot down these planes, then they would be chastized by everyone for being to reactionary. So they made a choice, right or wrong I don't know. If these planes were shot down over New York where would the debris land and how many would it kill. Then it would be stated when the best time to shoot the planes out of the air? Downward sprial kind of thing here.
Anyhoo, aside from the fact that Bush, Blair, Chavez, Putin, Jong, etc, etc, etc. are all crappy leaders IMO, I think it is the simplest thing to do is be critical without all of the facts. I suppose it is easier to lead from our couches then from the Oval Office itself. Any leader (take your pick) is there for one reason and one reason only. Power. The rest of us are pieces on the board. Now it could also be said that Big Business/Global Elite are moving the pieces, but you get the drift.
And this brings us to 2008 when Bush is gone and folks will magically stop complaining. The Democrats want to have Bush hand over a clean and no issue Country to them. Now that's a good one. A truly good leader takes on problems and solves them, not require they all be solved prior to their arrival.
Re:Better link (Score:5, Insightful)
Tony Blair is exceptionally intelligent man with absolute faith in his beliefs. He believes in the identity card system. He also believed that Afghanistan was now Taliban free and invading Iraq was a good idea to solve terrorism.
He seems to ignore the frequency with which the existing Police National Computer system is abused by both civillians and force members. He also seems to ignore the existing government success rate with major IT projects. Lastly he seems to ignore the problems with biometric ID card systems.
Absolute conviction in your own beliefs is extremely dangerous in a politician. It makes you blind to better counsel.
Re:We asked for slavery (Score:4, Insightful)
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." If its not people forget about it, they ignore it and the threat is no longer real to them. People have always been more than willing to give up freedom for security, imaginary or temporary or even false. Most either don't see or don't care about the threat of doing so, the inevitable loss of security that they will suffer in the long term.
We are a blind, greedy and irrational species. Maybe after another dozen centuries of dictatorships, monarchies, torture and servitude we will again fight for true freedom.
Petitions still have value! (Score:2, Insightful)
In the news the politicians never comment on issues like this - we have an election coming and all I see is how everyone will magically give me more money if I vote them. The worthless press never ask politicians questions that the politicians actually have control over. Instead we get questions like: Will you give more money to starving college students? [YES] Will you sneak Finland in to NATO agaist the opinion of the population? [NO] Will you get more jubs for unemployed people? [YES]
So if the petitions are just a way of telling the polititians what the people are most concerned about and getting a response, it is still valuable. At least they cannot believably claim ignorance after that. Neither can they say that it was a decicion for someone else if they have commented on it.
Re:Monkey Bush, Monkey Blair. They just don't get (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not suggesting that they're the "good guys," just that they are at odds with much of the world not because of a lack of communication or understanding, but of capitulance, and I really don't think any amount of diplomacy is going to change that. They are not negotiating. They are demanding.
The "War on Terror," however, is a farce. Terrorism works because people allow themselves without reason to be terrified. If you took away the fear, terrorism would lose a lot of its effectiveness.
Personally, I suspect that to a rag-tag bunch of men running around in the desert, it's really not about how many of us they can kill. It's about reducing our quality of life. And they're doing an admirable job of that.
Not that I agree with Blair on this, though. Knowing who people are only goes so far. And biometric ID systems, as he claims, make it extremely difficult to fake your identity. The only remaining problem arises from the words "extremely difficult." It's not impossible. And once you DO have a new fake ID, it becomes impossible to identify who you really are. And if you should manage to successfully duplicate somebody else's biometric data, identity theft takes on a whole new meaning.
Misused already (Score:5, Insightful)
Blair already plans to misuse the data. Suddenly he regards a measure that was meant only to stop terrorists and illegal immigration as a means to solve every open crime of the last 50 years!
Compared to Tony Blair, Big Brother was a piker.
Some guy has already submitted a petition to reopen the "scrap Id card" petition. [ReopenIDpetition]
Re:Who asked me? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sorry, when did I vote on that? I don't recall ever being asked!
June 2001. The year Labour were returned to power. And again in May, 2006. We don't get to vote for single issues.
The little shit will go, or the people will remove him
As though Gordon Brown is particularly innocent? The people didn't remove Blair in 2006, and while Labour might loose the next election (which will probably not be until 2011), it's far from guaranteed. If they're not removed, then we'll have much the same as before. Worse, even if they are removed, the people most likely to replace them are exactly the same - they just wear different colour ties.
Not America
Then how come it's so often called "Americas War, that we were dragged into"? The government, that we elected, was not dragged - they wanted to go in. And we voted the wankers back in. It's as much our war as it's America's, whether we like it or not.
Re:We asked for slavery (Score:4, Insightful)
Negative equity [wikipedia.org] trumps any conservative:liberal argument, especially in the UK which has one of the highest home owners per capita in the world. It's not "greedy" to want to be able to clothe your children AND keep your home. CF. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs [wikipedia.org].
So long as Blair doesn't cock up the economy, he'll have pretty much a free hand to do what he likes. One of those two things will have to change before Labour are voted out; either Blair going away, or the economy failing. Blair has already said he's going to quit sometime this year.
Re:Car Tracking Petition (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is the whole idea of petitions is flawed.
Put bluntly, if I were PM I'd either shut down or ignore such petition sites and try and arrange a decent forum (slashcode based?) for online debate instead. The quality of insight into an issue (and peoples feelings) I derive from discussions on Slashdot is way higher than from reading a random bunch of petitions ... and when I check the facts behind peoples comments I generally find them to be accurate. At least, more accurate than a typical petition justification.
Re:Better link (Score:5, Insightful)
it is clear that if we want to travel abroad, we will soon have no choice but to have a biometric passport.
This is a red herring that is repeated with annoying frequency. ICAO requirements [icao.int] state that the only required biometric is a digitised photo, which new UK passports already contain [bbc.co.uk]. There's no need for fingerprints, retinal scans, etc.
Secure identities will also help us counter the fast-growing problem of identity fraud. This already costs £1.7 billion annually.
The majority of fraud reported as "identity fraud" is credit card fraud. ID cards will be no use at stopping this, unless you require people to show their ID when buying anything. In particular, the "£1.7 billion" figure is nonsense [spy.org.uk].
I also believe that the National Identity Register will help police bring those guilty of serious crimes to justice. They will be able, for example, to compare the fingerprints found at the scene of some 900,000 unsolved crimes against the information held on the register. Another benefit from biometric technology will be to improve the flow of information between countries on the identity of offenders.
Nice to know that the Government has already gone back on its assurance in 2005 [telegraph.co.uk] that the ID register wouldn't be used for "fishing expeditions" - also nice to know that our details will be shared with some unspecified other countries.
The additional cost of the ID cards is expected to be less than £30 or £3 a year for their 10-year lifespan.
Not according to an independent report [lse.ac.uk].
Re:Better link (Score:1, Insightful)
At the end of the day, it doesn't matter what he believes, it doesn't matter what his "real" intentions are, it doesn't matter whether he is faithful to those beliefs. What matters is reality. What matters is the actual resulting interaction between him (the ruling class) and you (the subject class).
Let's put it this way. If you or a loved one (an innocent human being) were kidnapped and locked in a cage by this man (the ruling class), for whatever reason, would the thought even cross your mind that "maybe he's just acting in his best intentions, being true to his beliefs"? Would his rationale, whatever that may be, matter to you for even a split second?
If it did, I dare say you're not human.
The bottom line is that this politician will act in his own personal self-interest, just like every other politician, king, tyrant, or otherwise ruler before him since the dawn of organized coercion. After all, what would a man want with power (this "right" to employ coercion against innocents like yourself) if he didn't intend to use it?
Destruction of Rights and Freedom from fear. (Score:2, Insightful)
Mr. Blair, rights and freedoms cost, not just on the battlefields of our nations' wars, but in the daily lives of our citizens, and when we no longer have the strength to support our rights, when we become too cowardly to accept those costs, we can have no rights or freedoms.
How many British citizens are there today? And how many will there be over time? How many British citizens have died due to terrorism? A vanishingly small number in comparison. Rights and freedoms destroyed now from fear are deprived to all through time.
You may say that one life lost to terrorism is one too many. I say, no right or freedom can survive the save-the-last-life philosophy. A frenzied alteration of freedom and rights to save the last life or catch the last criminal will surely destroy those freedoms and rights, but it can never save every life, or destroy crime. Furthermore, the destruction of rights and freedoms by a government out of fear, frustration, or mere convenience is severely disrespectful of the those preceding generations who sacrificed so much personally to create those freedoms and rights. It proves a government faithless.
Mr. Blair, you disingenuously say that the information required for a national identification card is little more than that required for a department store card. Maybe true, but a department store does not have the force of a government behind its card. It has no police. It has no prisons. It has no chains. It has not the instruments of coercion, and correctly so. What a national ID card does is turn every citizen into a probable criminal who has to constantly present his "papers" to a representative of the government to prove he is not.
As an American citizen I'm concerned at what I've seen in recent years as a cowardly fear growing in Great Britain, a fear of your own rights and freedoms. I'm concerned because recently rights- and-freedoms-destroying mindsets are making their way across the Atlantic and infecting my own government. I know that government, naturally jealous of its citizens' rights and freedoms, constantly tries to gather them to itself, but, until recently, under cover of opposing terrorism, I've not seen so much success by government at doing so. A little "Battle of Britain" defiance of those who would steal freedoms would be much appreciated I think by many on this side of the Atlantic. We're watching.
My response (Score:2, Insightful)
I suppose this is what the "10 Downing Street" E-Petitions site is all about: not only they know who you are (and probably where you live), but they can write back to you to tell you how good war, surveillance and tyranny really are.
I won't bore you with Tony's entire missive -- here are just a few interesting lines:
(my emphasis)
Last time I was offered a store card was at Marks and Spencer's. I accepted the offer (although I've never used it again) because it reduced the cost of the suit that I was buying. I don't remember having my fingerprints taken. Nor were my irises scanned. And, as far as I remember, they didn't threaten to put me in prison if I didn't accept it.
Re:Better link (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:And one thing he forgot.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Which sound like something fairly easy to fake - once it's broken, teens will be lining up for fake IDs.
the Police will know the kids had to have got it from an adult and that's where they can direct their enquiries, so it'll be easier to police than today.
How does it make it easier? All the police will know is that some random adult was involved. Just walking down the street I get asked by random teens to buy them alcohol or cigarettes - so the kids may have no who bought them the drink, nor is it in their interest to give an accurate description.
I know a lady who lost her job
She shouldn't have - if the DTI sent somebody in, who deliberately looked overage then she did nothing wrong. If the DTI wanted to really sting the guilty, then they should send somebody in who is obviously underage.
Think about the other side of the coin too. i.e. those people who look younger than 18 but aren't. Physical appearance is unreliable so why should they by penalised?
But they can already get "proove it" ID cards from the portman group, assuming they don't have a student ID, a passport or a drivers licence.
There isn't a single positive benefit to letting underage kids drink. It's usually very destructive, both for them and the people around them.
I don't think there's much benefit from cracking down on them either. The more you make them feel like criminals, the more they're going to tend to criminal behaviour. Also, how do you explain why it's so destructive to go drinking on my 17th birthday, but not destructive (at least, not considered destructive enough to warrant being illegal) on my 18th or any birthday thereafter? I never found drinking to be destructive, either before I was 18, or after. What I did find destructive was certain people or groups of people - who tended to be destructive, whether they were sober or drunk (though a lot of them mellowed out when stoned).
Re:Better link (Score:5, Insightful)
There was a "Have your say" board running on the BBC News web site a few days ago, after the Metropolitan Police were once again criticised over their bungled "anti-terror" raid on the home of some dark-skinned men with beards. The raid was based on bad intelligence, and one of the men was shot. And yet, on the BBC board, a chilling number of commenters essentially said "If a few people have to suffer for the greater good, that's a price we have to pay." I bet their views would have been different if their loved ones had been the ones being shot by the police, too.
The thing about all of this ID business is exactly what you said: what matters is not intentions, it is reality. In reality, the system will be abused. More subtle, but probably more damaging, is the fact that innocent mistakes will be made by those using the system. What will it take to get someone's benefits suspended, or for them to fail a background check and be denied a job, or for them to be arrested on suspicion of committing a crime five years ago? One tired operator mistyping the hundredth update they've done that day? One bad communications link where parts of the database get out of sync? One false positive or false negative on a statistically unreliable biometric test? If these things are possible, surely there must be an immediate, effective, easily accessible mechanism in place so that individuals can get the mistake Fixed Right Now(TM)? Strangely, I've never seen any mention of such a mechanism. Bizarrely, but based on personal experience, it is actually this "genuine mistake" problem that I fear most about the NIR and ID card scheme. (This is not to say that deliberate abuse, civil liberties, costs and so on are not also legitimate objections.)
Re:And one thing he forgot.. (Score:3, Insightful)
However, most of the incentive to (binge-)drink is because of the taboo around it. The harder it gets for them to get drink, the more 'cool points' they'll get for doing so. Making it harder to get access to the drink won't stop them, it'll actually encourage them even more. The proof of age cards are already as good as they can be. Using ID cards instead wouldn't help at all. There's no way to stop it completely - at the very least they'll be able to just hang around outside an off-licence until they convince/bribe an adult to buy it for them.
I agree it doesn't do them any good, but the long term way to solve it's to solve the problems that are making them drink, not to make it harder to get access to it.
Re:Better link (Score:3, Insightful)
So what you're saying is, he's a man of contradictions.
First Past The Post (Score:3, Insightful)
Right. Problem #1 for both the UK and the US is fixing the bent electoral system. Until you fix that, you won't get any substantial change.
Re:no choice ?!? (Score:2, Insightful)
Government to English Translation:
Dear crackpot,
We're the government and we've decided to do this. A bunch of other countries are doing it, so it can't be so bad, can it?
Screw everybody who signed this petition. We don't care what the people want or that half the planet thinks we're out of our minds. We've made up our minds, and no amount of facts are going to change our planet's descent into fascism, so you might was well get used to it.
Sincerely,
Tony Blair