Thursday 7 May 2009

Papieren! The ID Card system draws nearer.

The trial begins in Manchester. Thankfully, a few useful idiots aside, most people do not like the idea.

Some moan about the cost and I suspect the price will be waived later to give the impression that the public are being listened to and to buy off the dim-witted.

There is a good site explaining how we have been salami-sliced and frog-boiled into this situation. Old Holborn recommends we apply for multiple ID cards and pollute the database with false information.

In a way I would rather we, as in an NGO, set up a private ID card system to maintain our identity. The database shall not be accessible without a warrant, so all those prod-nosed Council bods who are bunged a wad of tenners by some scumbag will not have access. Break the Government monopoly, that is what we should do.

I'd rather trust a company openly competing in the market for IDs, where I "lend" my data for safe keeping so it is NOT owned and cannot be a) retained if I leave the service, b) be passed on or used without my permission. The Government is convinced that we are its chattel, its property, either as a dependent voter farm or as revenue milk cows to feed the voter farms.

By setting up a parallel service, we expose the bloated cost of the State alternative and the Government agenda while not being "against" all the "uses" they openly talk about. Of course it is not the open uses, but the hidden ones that they are after. By providing a system outside their control, not procured by them, funded by revenue that does not pass through their sticky fingers and holding information not immediately available to their bureaucrats, yet still providing all the benefits to the population of an easy to carry verifiable identification card, we can out-flank them. All that will be left will be the Autocracy and surveillance.

I am quite certain that it will be almost impossible to clone or steal the ID on our system. I bet the biggest theft will be by the State!

Remember - Making OUR lives more convenient is not their game - making THEIR lives more convenient most certainly is.

All Your Identity Are Belong To Us

9 comments:

Mark Wadsworth said...

I'm sure I left a comment pointing out it was "Papiere!" without the "n".

Roger Thornhill said...

maybe you are right - plural not singular.

Chemist said...

A private ID card?

Already operating at Zero cost to the consumer, in fact they pay you to use it.

Hands up who has either a Tesco Clubcard, or one of those Nectar cards?

Thought so.

These companies have your Name, address and D.O.B. They also have a very intimate knowledge of how you spend your money, and your shopping habits. Hell from this they probably know more about you than MI5, MI6, and all the other spooks put together.

So tell me again why I have to pay £30 taxation to prove who I am?

Roger Thornhill said...

To be pedantic, Tesco and nectar are not ID cards, because I use my wife's card all the time (i.e. the household card) as it has no real ID verification, but your general point is there - banks and other entities have much of the infrastructure in place already.

There is no reason for the State monopoly unless they have ulterior motives.

JohnM said...

Hmmm!?

A bit like the idea of setting up private, church and charity schools so that we don't get state education.

Given that a main reason for objecting is that we don't trust the buggers, I would suggest that trusting them not to "nationalise" your private scheme (in the interests of efficiency/because private companies are making a profit/etc etc) is pie in the sky.

Roger Thornhill said...

JohnM,

The scheme would have the data held in trust, not owned by the company, so any nationalisation would deliver servers and no data.

Steven Moss said...

Look to Facebook for a permissions model/interface. You can permit/deny access to anyone with as much granularity as you like, you can set up group permissions to make it easy (friends lists), you can kick people out at any time. Presumably you stipulate that if companies etc copy the data they can't hold it for long or pass it on.

Steven Moss said...

PS: did you get Picard on that Star Trek test? Me too, rarest result if I remember rightly.

Roger Thornhill said...

In my model I have a means to deal with that, yes.

p.s. Picard was from the Star Trek test!