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ID Cards once again

Everyone in Britain should be given a digital ID incorporating their passport, driving licence, tax records, qualifications and right to work as the cornerstone of a “technology revolution”, Sir Tony Blair and Lord Hague of Richmond say today.

Bugger Off, eh?

25 thoughts on “ID Cards once again”

  1. I’m glad I’m not one of them paranoid conspiracy theorists. Mandatory government ID will come in handy for the rolling climate lockdowns.

  2. The examples given are mostly for data government already holds. If you concede that the genie is already out of the bottle then organising that data into a single personal record makes sense.

    Yes, mission creep and all that, but still I can’t get as excited about this now as I was when Blair first wanted ID cards.

  3. The Times article says nothing about the present problems that a digital ID would alleviate or cure so these two ghastly attention-seeking old frauds can go and do the other thing.

  4. “Everyone in Britain should be given a digital ID incorporating their passport, driving licence, tax records, qualifications and right to work as the cornerstone of a “technology revolution”, Sir Tony Blair and Lord Hague of Richmond say today.”

    You can understand Blair’s motivation, though. Having gone to the trouble of giving everyone free qualifications, he now wants to ensure that they are properly recorded.

  5. Read that again:

    Sir Tony Blair and Lord Hague of Richmond

    You wouldn’t trust this pair of freaks to look after your cat, but they’re “knights” and “lords” with the ear of senior government officials.

    We’re fucked, aren’t we?

  6. @jgh – Digital Economy Act 2017 already saw to that by removing the block on government departments sharing data with each other (in the name of “enable better public services using digital technologies”)

    Fun example of that being that the Home Office can now directly create National Insurance numbers in HMRC systems (wonder why the department in charge of immigration may want to do that?)

  7. The country will never be free until the last Hague is strangled with the entrails of the last Blair.

    Figuratively, anyhow.

  8. As it goes, it ain’t the cards themselves that are the problem, it’s the control that goes with them. Which is why it’s been proposed by the master control freak and war criminal Tony B. Liar.

    Don’t forget the huge fines for refusal to participate or not updating your current address, but if you’re a billionaire, that’s fine, just pay the fines and come and go as you please.

    All of this is just an attempt to control the plebs, to unperson you for crimes of wrongthink. Sure, they’ll portray it as “Just a piece of plastic”, but it’s the authority and control that goes behind that which has got Tony B. Liar and the rest of the WEF crowd salivating like Rottweilers over a juicy steak.

    How else are they going to implement Social Credit and all the bullshit that goes with it if they don’t even have the basic framework of ID cards?

  9. Up to a point, it is the cards themselves. As Geoffers says, they already have a lot of the data. They want the cards (and the formal structures that go with them) to make collecting and using it easier. It should not be easier.

  10. The trouble with the old ID cards, as demonstrated in the iconic case of Willcock vs Muckle (yes really) was not having them, it was having to produce them to any organ of the state who demanded them. Papieren Bitte. There will be no option when the id is digital, when you are inevitably chipped or QR coded.

  11. OK, let’s say this goes ahead. The system* gets implemented** by the lowest-bidding contractor. Other than writing “we take data security seriously” all over their website, will that lowballer really give a toss about what happens when they leak everybody’s now centralised official government data all over the place? Who will be responsible for the resulting fraud? The experience of the Post Office franchisees probably answers that one: you will be responsible for their cock ups.

    Having dealt with public sector procurement a couple of times, I’m not that worried about digital ID cards and the government’s use of them. The chances of the scheme ever actually working to the point that the government can use the data in the way they get all moist over is slim-to-none. But… the aggregation of it makes it a juicy and almost certainly poorly-guarded target for every script kiddie on the planet.

    * As designed by the civil service, probably the parts of said civil service that struggle with “have you tried turning it off and turning it on again?”
    ** At least the parts of the system that the contractor thinks would get noticed if they were missing

  12. Can someone please highlight just ONE IT project dreamt up by UK government, that has ever come in in on time, on budget, worked as advertised and is still in use after operating in the real world for at least five years…….

  13. @jgh

    Managing identity sounds easy but it’s a very hard task. Arguably to hard for the government but way too political to be given to any private company. The tax record is there because it is one of the best identity sources. By linking all of the government identity sources into a “must have” identifier it makes it so much easier to draw the link between John Smith the passport holder and Jonathon Smith the tax payer who may or may not have the same birthdate in those disparate systems.

  14. Get the civil service to build a giant computer system that can monitor and control everything we do or say. No, I can’t think of a single thing that could go wrong with this idea.

    (my comment on The Times website)

  15. Bugger Off, eh?

    I would say “far, far, too polite, Tim” but there aren’t really any words that could do justice wrt to those two deviants, particularly that lying parasite Charles Lynton.

  16. I dunno, it may be a fair trade-off if they eject every immigrant, migrant and asylum seeker in return. But only if they do it first.
    I imagine they are moving the pieces in position for when digital currencies go live and they can link everything together.
    I pity my kids for the world that they’re gonna inherit. The only ray of light is that they are so incompetent I find it hard to believe they can make it work.

  17. There is one advantage of Tony B. Liar making such an announcement, which is that anything which comes out of his head is instantly treated is dodgy simply because he is in favour of it.

    About the only advantage of this war criminal still swanning around.

    Still rather him answering questions in The Hague though.

  18. Addolff,

    “Can someone please highlight just ONE IT project dreamt up by UK government, that has ever come in in on time, on budget, worked as advertised and is still in use after operating in the real world for at least five years…….”

    There’s lots of them, to be fair. I’d rather not name them, but I’ve worked on quite a few. Heck, one that I did for a local authority was ahead of schedule, below budget did more than was required and it still running.

    The thing with government is that a lot of management doesn’t care about what people do. Success depends more on people choosing to do a thing or not. There are some useless, lazy managers in government and they don’t get yelled at or booted out. But there are also managers who care a lot about getting things done, work hard, motivate their team.

    Also, the big glory projects have politicians behind them, who dream up a project on a whim without a whole lot of thought, then there’s a huge budget to do it, which gets wasted because no-one has really thought it through, then more gets wasted changing it.

  19. the aggregation of it makes it a juicy and almost certainly poorly-guarded target for every script kiddie on the planet.

    Together with pickpockets and other assorted light-fingered gentry.

    I don’t have a problem with ID cards per se having had one in various forms for about half my life; they are/were mere statements of basic identity. What scares me is having a card with all that highly sensitive information on it.

  20. BonM4, thanks for that. I was thinking of the NHS / MoD (Chinook and the Typhoon machine gun are faves) / Covid fiascos. As you say, maybe it’s the scale of the projects and politicians who get behind them.

    Rhoda @ 1.04. Thanks for the Willcock v Muckle info. Brings to mind the 1984 law used to impose the covid lockdowns. A law introduced to deal with one individual infectious person used to justify locking up the whole country.

    I appreciate there are other instances of the law being abused and that’s the danger with these bastards – No matter the honest intent when these things are written into law, they’ll twist whatever they can to get whatever they want.

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