WRITTEN ON November 15th, 2006 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Identity
Here’s the more sensible letter I’ve just sent to Siobhain McDonagh
Dear Siobhain McDonagh,I was really offended by your comments on BBC Radio 5 about information required for the national identity register.
I have a deep professional interest in identity management and a serious concern about public trust in the ID management necessary to make e-enabled society, and specifically e-enabled public services work.
You stated the information required for the register was name, address, DoB. You suggested it was paranoid to think otherwise and that Tesco etc hold far more.
My reading of the act suggests the register will hold the info set out below. I choose not to shop at Tescos, but I respect their efforts to do business in the way their customers want. That’s the stated intention of “Transformational Government” but is quite evidently not the way in which we’re approaching ID management.
I’d really like to know: are your officials keeping you in the dark about his, and allowing you to go on live radio with a misleading brief? Or did you know how economical you were being in the truth and think you could get away with it?
If the former there are many people who’d be pleased to help. If the latter I think there are many people, and first among them Phil Booth of No2ID, to whom you owe an apology.
William Heath
Vann South, Vann Lane, Hambledon Surrey
(PS sorry for using the wrong post code but I didnt have an equally convenient way of contacting you) [full list of NIR contents listed yet again below, for 3rd time]
ends
If I thought all these important people read Ideal Gov I’d be polite and sensible the whole time. But they never leave any comments so I suume they dont.
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Data required for the NIR: full name, pseudonyms, date and place of birth, “his gender” (all the entries refer to a man, in an offensively authoritarian-lagalistic way) , all addresses, photo, signature, fingerprints, other biometric information”, nationality, entitlement to remain in the UK, National Identity Registration and card number, national insurance immigration document and passport number, non-UK ID cards numbers, ref number about permission to enter or to remain in the UK, work permit, driver number, the number of any other designated document, date of expiry, right of abode in UK or EU, immigration document, registration card, driving licence, information previously recorded, changes, date of death, the date of every application or change, reasons for omissions in the entry , details of every ID card issued to a person (one will be too many) and whether it’s in force, details of countersignatories, lost, stolen or damaged ID card notifications, times the Home Secretary asks you to surrender your ID card, information provided with any applicant, any steps taken to ID the applicant or verify the data, any PIN, password or other code, questions used to verify identity at application or on changes, particulars of every occasion, person and other detais about whan all that data above is shared.
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5 Responses to “On reflection (but still cross) a more polite and respectful letter to John Reid’s PPS”
Indeed. And I’m really intrigued by the ones in Hawaii, Iceland and Vanuatu. Do you think we can “reach out” to them and invite them to identify themselves and speak to us?
Re. This myth about ID cards being the same as “loyalty cards” and web registrations:
1. Signing up to a “loyalty schemes” is entirely optional.
2. Most “loyalty schemes” are less than rigorous!
3. Most web forms don’t verify your details, so you can decide which items to make accurate and which to omit or to conceal. (I often used to leave the “country” selector set to Afghanistan…)
4. With Tesco’s, only your address needs to be accurate, otherwise you won’t receive the vouchers they post to you. These vouchers are usable only with your card, but your name isn’t checked, just that your card matches the vouchers.
5. Like many people, I have “disposable” email addresses: Very useful for these registrations.
6. I also have “disposable” forwarding phone & fax numbers, in both UK and USA.
The more I trust an organisation, the more accurate the details I give to them.
Obviously, none of this would stop a determined searcher, but it does provide some privacy.
All is spoilt by the Royal Mail: Junk mail with my disguised address often reaches me quicker than real mail with my correct address!
(Maybe *THEY* know where I live!!)
The truly paranoid should view: “[url=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6474169875352273382]You are what you say[/url]” video and “[url=http://norfolk.cs.washington.edu/htbin-post/unrestricted/colloq/details.cgi?id=478]All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Google[/url].”
Respectful? More like stinging!
One assumes a response is likely?
Anybody who is set up to defend the government case for their ID scheme should be fully aware of the facts and not rely on the marketing pamphlet for their information. I fail to understand how anybody with even the vaguest passing familiarity with the scheme could ever have been under the impression that it was so minimal.
Several years ago someone took a look at the computer systems and realised it was all going to get very messy. Instead of the unglamourous “we need to fix this” they went for the hare-brained version and made it ‘exciting’. If they had stuck to a proper ‘fixing’ mode of ID management we might even have seen some progress.
All they had to do (heh) was
1) own up to the disarray of the government databases and just get on with the fixing
2) make a card that was a copy of the back page of a passport and make it available to anyone who actually wanted one
Opposition to the scheme as it stands continues to grow as the public become more aware of the full facts, with an entirely likely end result of having to throw it all out and start again from scratch. A total waste and would be the final nail in the coffin of public trust.
I’ve heard of at least a few people being ‘converted’ or at least knocked off the fence simply by getting sight of Schedule 1 after hearing the ‘official’ version.
Sorry. Slight touch of the soap-box there. Feel free to edit (or even remove) in the interests of good taste!.
Today, the young woman in front of me at the supermarket checkout was buying alcohol – actually she was buying it for her even younger friend.
She produced a much thumbed passport as “proof of age” to the young cashier; obviously relying on the photo.
(In reality this was probably a charade to meet licensing regulations.)
None of them knew or cared that fuzzy digital photos in “biometric” passports and hence also on ID cards will make human recognition harder.
The combination of government spin, the State broadcaster and the tabloids will continue to convince many people.
>> [i]“If I thought all these important people read Ideal Gov I’d be polite and sensible the whole time. But they never leave any comments so I suume they dont.”[/i] < <
They’re easy to identify: Just look at your ClustrMap: The red dots from the former Eastern Block?