I bitterly oppose ID cards not just from a civil liberties viewpoint but because they are a tax on your very existence, a new poll tax if you like. When ID cards come in, you are obliged to pay for one, even if you don't really want one, because the government will try and shame you in to it by implying that you must have something to hide if you don't.
But worse is the system of penalties and extra fines that the government will get a nice little earner from if you make any errors or fail to notify them of changes. These were outline yesterday by the government, and The Thunder Dragon makes good points about it HERE on his blog.
Sadly there are lots of people in this country who care little for civil liberties, but they do care about the money in their pocket. The anti ID card groups need to use this more and point out to those people that ID cards are a new poll tax, a citizen tax, which means if you are alive , if you are a UK citizen, you will be paying an "Existence Tax", in order to have the right to prove you exist in this country.
But worse is the system of penalties and extra fines that the government will get a nice little earner from if you make any errors or fail to notify them of changes. These were outline yesterday by the government, and The Thunder Dragon makes good points about it HERE on his blog.
Sadly there are lots of people in this country who care little for civil liberties, but they do care about the money in their pocket. The anti ID card groups need to use this more and point out to those people that ID cards are a new poll tax, a citizen tax, which means if you are alive , if you are a UK citizen, you will be paying an "Existence Tax", in order to have the right to prove you exist in this country.
4 comments:
The only positive Nich is that Labour will lose the next general election, and seeing as both the Cons and the Libs have pledged to scrap this mad scheme.
Indeed.
I don't really understand why this government want to do this either. It seems like within a short time of being in power, politicians completely lose touch with the real world and suddenly decide they know best with authoritarian policies using the fig-leaf of "Terrorism" or "National Security".
The thing that bugs me the most is that if Labour were still in opposition, they would be opposing these policies from the highest rooftop. I remember their response when Michael Howard proposed something along these lines in the mid 90's.
That same thing makes me worry about what will happen if/when the Tories get in. Sure they oppose them at the moment but I get the feeling that the opposition is soft and once they have a year or two of government under their belt, suddenly the ability to track everybody's movements will suddenly not seem so bad after all...
I have expanded a bit on this on my blog here.
aID cards are nothing short of a tax on existence. We pay to pay them for the very privilege of having our personal data stored in one huge easy-to-hack database and have our lives reduced to a magnetic strip of piece of plastic - and to add insult to injury, if we change anything and don't tell them immediately, they're going to fine us!
On, and thanks for the link, Nich!
There's another problem with the cards; a very, very serious one. You know how people tend to believe what a computer or similar system tells them over the evidence of pretty much everything else?
Well, the ID cards will work mostly by checking biometrics presented with the copy of the data held on the card; i.e. the person being checked has control of both the evidence AND the check.
The cards will be encrypted to the highest standard the usual suspects (Crapita, Electronic Disaster Systems et al) can manage, which will be likely slightly better than ROT-13, but not much.
In other words, you have a system which will be piss easy to forge and claimed by the Government to be absolute proof of identity foisted on an unwilling public and handed to slug-witted jobsworths country-wide.
Stand by for a con-artist's dream come true.
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