11 January 2007
John Reid's reaction
to the Home Office being caught doing nothing useful [1] with information on
Britons convicted abroad—an EU system for which it lobbied—was to suggest, in
answer to a planted Commons question [2], that if we had ID cards it could
never have happened.
“Even were the
government’s fantasy ID system to be built, costing billions and taking decades
to fill with everyone’s personal life, it still wouldn’t make a difference to
the sort of problem that the Home Office is trying to hide from, where messy real-life
data has to be processed by real people.
“Ministers seem to be
under standing orders to claim that giving them control of your identity is the
answer to every problem of policy and administration. All we have to do is
abolish privacy and submit to official approval over our existence, and it will
ensure that fraud and corruption will be impossible, no gangster will be able
to control a prostitute [4], and the Home Office will never make another
mistake. How patently absurd.
“If it can’t be
trusted to do a job that is wholly in its control now with the data of 1,000 convicted
foreigners in the UK or 27,000 Britons convicted abroad, why on earth should the
nation trust the Home Office to ‘manage’ the identities of 50 million law-abiding citizens?”
Guy Herbert, NO2ID’s
General Secretary said:
“Ministers assure us
that databases are magic. Maybe they believe it. If not, they are cynically
using popular fear, and real human suffering, to push an irrelevant programme
and grab power for the state in all our lives. A system that would be dangerous
even in saintly, inerrant hands is being built on untrustworthy excuses, and by
the Home Office.
“There is a proverb
among those who really do understand databases that has never been more
appropriate: 'Garbage in; garbage out.'”
-ENDS-
Notes for editors:
1) e.g. Daily Mail, ‘Scandal grows over foreign convictions shambles’,
10/1/07: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=428003&in_page_id=1770&ico=Homepage&icl=TabModule&icc=NEWS&ct=5
2) As reported in Hansard, 10/1/07: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200607/cmhansrd/cm070110/debtext/70110-0005.htm#07011053002227
3) NO2ID is the non-partisan national campaign against ID
cards and the database state. NO2ID is affiliated to by the National Union of
Journalists: http://www.nuj.org.uk/inner.php?docid=1595
4) cf. Liam
Byrne’s extraordinary claim that ID cards are “the solution” to people trafficking: http://www.labour.org.uk/index.php?id=news2005&ux_news%5Bid%5D=IDCards&cHash=7f1c3798bf
and front page news item on http://www.no2id.net
For further information, or for immediate or future
interview, please contact
The NO2ID Campaign
Box 412
19-21 Crawford Street
London W1H 1PJ
enquiries@no2id.net
Tel: 07005 800 651
Press: click here
