Pre-emptive Resistance

I need to add nothing but my support to the following passage from NO2ID:

"The government thinks it is being clever. It will be registering people on the ID cards database when they apply for a passport or other official documents. You may have heard that the ID card is "voluntary", but once your details are entered onto the 'National Identity Register' database they are there for life.

It is not just about a card. Once the details of your life are captured the government will be sharing them with and between an ever growing list of agencies and building an ever more detailed picture of your life. The HMRC disaster with child benefit records has shown just how dangerous that can be.

Millions of people now know that having their identity "managed" by the government is a bad idea. In just four weeks in 2005, more than 10,000 people pledged online to refuse to register for an ID card. You may have seen public figures declaring that they will go to prison rather than be registered.

The NO2ID Pledge is your opportunity to make a personal and public declaration that you will refuse to comply with government control of your identity. Keeping this promise means you avoid registration on the National Identity Register. It is a serious commitment. Though at the moment there is little to resist, the government is going to try and make life gradually more inconvenient if you don't comply "willingly". But with tens of thousands of others making the same declaration, life could get pretty inconvenient for the government too.

It is currently perfectly lawful to declare that you will not comply with the ID scheme. It is possible that refusal could be made a crime, but the government has shied away from that so far. If enough people say no, it will be impossible. There would not be enough courts to prosecute 100,000 resisters, let alone millions. Together, now, we can build a wedge of opposition that will jam the wheels of the ID scheme, and protect the personal privacy of everyone in the country.

The more people who commit themselves to resist, the more effective it is. Say no to ID and it becomes more difficult to put pressure on you and everyone else. Get your friends to pledge too, and everyone protects one another. If you say no, then ID cards will fail."


Download your certificate here.

And they want to introduce ID Cards?

The fiasco of 25 million people's details begin 'lost' by HMRC should be used as a case study in ignorance, stupidity and ineptitude.

Apparently, HMRC's information system was not flexible enough to cope with the transfer of selective data for their audit: at least there was an initial awareness from the National Audit Office that the data needed to be filtered. However, instead of establishing a secure encryption process for the appropriate data, the practice of burning the total data set onto cds began. This started to happen as early as March 2007.

This is absolutely shambolic. How many more cds are floating around with every single personal detail stored on Government databases? Who are the employees who think it is acceptable to share highly-sensitive data with outside parties?

I am tremendously opposed to the Identity Cards scheme primarily for this reason. I agree with the civil liberties arguments against the scheme but argued in my disertation that the security, integrity and functionality of the scheme are its weaknesses. This episode goes to prove that there are so many fundamental failings with the information management at the heart of government, that we should not even contemplate allowing the state to control our identity.