Liberty Alone

Those of us who signed up for No2ID’s pledge to resist ID cards got an email this morning asking us for the £10 we pledged to set up a legal fund for defense of anyone who is prosecuted for civil disobedience in this matter.

I hope everyone who has signed up does this, but I also think that they wouldn’t mind being sent money by those who didn’t sign the pledge.

So, send your cheques for £10 (or more) to:

NO2ID (Legal Defence Fund)
Box 412
19-21 Crawford Street
London W1H 1PJ

Send your contact details and they’ll also keep you up to date.

Also, you can join for £15 a year, and they have easy to set up regular donations through PayPal (starting from £2 a month, which they optimistically state is the price of a pint… I don’t know where they’re drinking, not round here that’s for sure)

Well done to the LibDems for being the only major UK wide party to be listed as a supporter (The SNP and Plaid are both listed as well, as are numerous minor parties), although I note neither Nick Clegg or Chris Huhne are listed as parliamentary supporters (good on Lynne Featherstone, Adrian Sanders, Simon Hughes, Alistair Carmichael, David Howarth and Matthew Taylor for being registered supporters though).

El Reg gives us the list of companies able to bid for the ID cards contracts.

They are:

• Accenture
• BAE Systems
• CSC
• EDS
• Fujitsu
• IBM
• Steria
• Thales

A thought just struck me. If ID cards are really about protecting our identities as is claimed by the government this method puts our identities in the hands of the state. The state is telling us who we are.
This amounts to the state owning our identities and therefore claiming ownership of us, or to put it another way the state nationalising us and taking the population into ‘public’ ownership.

This gives us a great insight into the way these politicians think. Perhaps they do have our best interests at heart, they do want to protect us against theft of our identity, but doing so in this manner shows how little respect they have for individual liberty.

The BBC is reporting the release of a new privacy report by the Royal Academy of Engineering.

The line Tony Blair and other technocrats should take on board is:

No technology is 100% perfect, and no engineer will tell you that any technology is 100% perfect

Another interesting idea is that the biometric data in new passports could be used to trigger targeted attacks. Since these passports use RFID for contactless reading, they are vulnerable to being read at a distance as has been demonstrated many times now.
This could be used to detonated a bomb when particular people are near it, or when people from a particular country are nearby.
The more data held on passports, or ID cards makes this sort of targeting easier, it also makes tracking of people far easier. Either by government services or by criminals or even private detectives (although such methods may be illegal, that will not stop people).

Privacy and identity have taken on a new importance recently. It used to be understood that the state and others would not pry into your private life, but today the state is seeking more control over our identities (and therefore our lives) and to reduce our privacy. We leave much more information about ourselves and our actions behind, although it is currently difficult to link all this together, new technology is being deployed to make the task of linking up our data and discovering habits and movements much much easier.

This may be of benefit to the state and its organs, but the benefit to individuals is at best hazy, at worst there is a large negative impact.

Liberalism needs to start taking these threats seriously and developing a response to such power grabs by the state. We need to articulate a vision of individual rights and responsibilities only regulated by the state to prevent harm to others to combat the vision of the ‘beneficial state’ which attempts to solve all our problems through technocratic measures and decreased individual freedom.

Rather predictably, the big government loving states of New Jersey and California (its not a coincidence these are Democratic strongholds for the most part) have expressed support for the US ID card system, REAL ID. This time the canard which has been trotted out is that it will ease the provision of services.
This has been trotted out by the UK government (the genesis of the current National Identity Database scheme seems to be ‘entitlement cards’ for provision of services) but seems to have been quietly dropped (for now).

In more positive news, Utah and Idaho are contemplating rejecting REAL ID. Those against the act include Bill Bishop, Director of the Idaho Bureau of Homeland Security, who is arguing that REAL ID will not help security but will actually harm security efforts.

I see that the Commonwealth of Maine has overwhelmingly rejected the Real ID Act which seeks to impose a Federal ID Card through drivers licenses. Both houses of the state legislature have approved a resolution stating that the state will refuse to force its citizens to use driver’s licenses which comply with the Real ID Act.

I wish all the anti ID card campaigners luck in the US, and hope more states follow suit.

This is an interesting battle from a constitutional point of view as well, the Act (which was tacked onto a Tsunami Relief bill) represents another power grab by the federal government. Driver’s licenses are issued by the states and are wholly a matter for the individual states, by seeking to tack on a federal ID Card to the licenses the federal government is taking more power, undermining the foundation of the Constitution even more.

Videos of some of the speeches are available here.

(links via Politech which has also had some very good coverage of issues like voting machines and free speech on the Internet).