The UK Government ID Scheme
May 9th, 2008This is something that is starting to really disturb me.
Our government has tried several times to get bills and schemes past the House of Lords (don’t they know that the first sign of madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results?) and public opinion is clearly against this scheme yet they continue on.
There’s a great website here that attempts to explain everything that the (many) proposal(s) are trying to do, including the ID card, the public database, information sharing among government offices (and subsequently with private sector companies - someone has to actually implement this stuff), the criminalisation of the citizenry etc.
One of the phrases that gets repeated in this debate is “If you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve nothing to hide” but that rather assumes that the government’s thoughts are aligned with our own and that is quite often not the case - passing an ID scheme that nobody wants, for instance. Not only that, it also assumes that we have a moderate government but in these turbulent times all it takes is an evil act of violence like 9/11 around election time and suddenly people start looking at extreme political parties as a way of avoiding similar problems on home turf.
