26 January 2007

Campaigners NO2ID [1] branded the latest legislation from the Home Office “theatrical”. The UK Borders Bill [2] will give new powers of arrest to immigration officers, but it will also provide for a database of biometric information to be taken from all non-EU citizens resident in Britain.

The Government announced just before Christmas such a database would form part of the National Identity Register for the ID scheme [3]. At the same time, Home Secretary John Reid has unveiled new uniforms for the immigration service, which is to change its name.

Phil Booth, NO2ID National Coordinator said:

What with dressing up immigration officers in shiny new uniforms and ritually humiliating legitimate employers and legitimate foreign workers, this is “Doctor Reid’s Magical Security Theatre”. It looks flashy but can’t possibly work. Clearly desperate to give the appearance of being tough on illegal immigration, what this actually amounts to is diverting another bit of the Home Office budget to build the biometric bit of the ID database.

Guy Herbert, NO2ID General Secretary said:

It’s nasty and it’s stupid. In its haste to be seen ‘doing something’, the Government has forgotten that most foreign visitors don’t have to come here. Bully tourists and you’ll have fewer tourists. The City and the entertainment industries are full of talented foreigners who are earning and spending money that keeps the treasury afloat – and the property market. Dr Reid is casting them as suspected parasites. How friendly!

Did anyone think to ask Madonna how she feels about being fingerprinted? Will Roman Abramovich take kindly to reporting his whereabouts to the authorities, or will that feel a little too much like home?

-ENDS-

Notes for editors:

1) NO2ID is the non-partisan national campaign against ID cards and the database state. NO2ID is affiliated to by the National Union of Journalists:

http://www.nuj.org.uk/inner.php?docid=3D1595=20

2) Trailed by Home Office Minister Liam Byrne on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, 26/1/07 and reported, e.g. by Bloomberg – ‘U.K. Will Take Fingerprints From All Non-European Workers’: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=3D20601085&sid=3DaFZSpDGA_4SQ&refer=3Deurope

3) See the Home Office’s ‘Strategic Action Plan for the National Identity Scheme’:
http://www.identitycards.gov.uk/downloads/Strategic_Action_Plan.pdf [900KB PDF]

14 January 2007

In response to the news [1] that Tony Blair will be announcing a massive database of people’s personal details, NO2ID accused the government of
outright deception. When it was announced before Christmas that the Home Office would not to create a “new, clean” database behind ID cards but
cut-and-shut three existing ones, ministers insisted that the information would nevertheless be protected by security measures and the normal
confidentiality rules. This new scheme appears to overthrow that promise.

Phil Booth, NO2ID’s [2] National Coordinator said:

NO2ID’s warnings about the database state are coming true. Mr Blair doesn’t trust us, but he expects us to put absolute trust in all government
departments. By tearing down the fundamental safeguard of confidentiality, he intends to give them all the right to talk about us behind our backs,
which means more power to intervene in our lives when it suits them.

This will expose us all to a lifelong tyranny of petty bullying, jobs-worth officials and “the computer says NO” – the bureaucratic nightmare of Terry
Gilliam’s Brazil.

For a government that can’t look after its own employees’ personal information [3], and that is so plainly incompetent at linking computer
systems [4] to imagine this will increase efficiency is ludicrous. That it expects people to give up all privacy and just trust it is frightening. The
vast majority of people already don’t [5].

-ENDS-

Notes for editors:

1) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6260153.stm

2) NO2ID is the non-partisan national campaign against ID cards and the database state. NO2ID is affiliated to by the National Union of Journalists:
http://www.nuj.org.uk/inner.php?docid=3D1595 See NO2ID’s front page http://www.no2id.net for a list of ‘database state’ initiatives that the campaign is working to actively oppose.

3) ‘Tax credit fraud sparks 40 probes’, BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/5057956.stm
“HM Revenue & Customs closed the tax credits online portal in December after Department of Work & Pensions (DWP) staff had their identities hijacked… Of the 8,800 DWP staff whose identities were stolen, some 6,800 were used to make fraudulent claims.”

4) Not only, e.g. the Child Support Agency – scrapped due to its appalling record of IT and systems failures – but the Libra Court system (intended to
link together a mere 385 courts) whose costs overran from £146 million in 1998 to £487million in 2006 – http://www.computerwire.com/industries/research?pid=3D9980EA5E-043F-4F3E-B712-B52FB0616ECA, and which after 8 years and £390 million and was live in just 12 courts -

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200607/cmhansrd/cm061219/text/61219w0009.htm#06122012000096

5) 71% of people already believe that =93It is inevitable that the data [stored on people's cards] will sometimes be leaked, sold, hacked into or
used improperly in other ways; 61% think it inevitable that “data will sometimes be passed on without proper authorisation, to foreign governments and agencies”. Telegraph poll, just before the Identity Cards Act 2006 was passed:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/graphics/2006/02/27/nid27big.gif;jsessionid=3DMYWQFHC2KGLLDQFIQMGSFFOAVCBQWIV0=20

***NO2ID will be releasing further on this issue after the official announcement.***

For immediate release

John Reid’s reaction to the Home Office being caught doing nothing useful[1] with information on Britons convicted abroad – an EU system for which it lobbied – was to suggest, in answer to a planted Commons question [2], that if we had ID cards it could never have happened.

Phil Booth, NO2ID’s [3] National Coordinator said:

Even were the government’s fantasy ID system to be built, costing billions and taking decades to fill with everyone’s personal life, it still wouldn’t make a difference to the sort of problem that the Home Office is trying to hide from, where messy real-life data has to be processed by real people.

Ministers seem to be under standing orders to claim that giving them control of your identity is the answer to every problem of policy and administration. All we have to do is abolish privacy and submit to official approval over our existence, and it will ensure that fraud and corruption will be impossible, no gangster will be able to control a prostitute[4], and the Home Office will never make another mistake. How patently absurd.

If it can’t be trusted to do a job that is wholly in its control now with the data of 1,000 convicted foreigners in the UK or 27,000 Britons convicted abroad, why on earth should the nation trust the Home Office to manage the identities of 50 million law-abiding citizens?

Guy Herbert, NO2ID’s General Secretary said:

Ministers assure us that databases are magic. Maybe they believe it.

If not, they are cynically using popular fear, and real human suffering, to push an irrelevant programme and grab power for the state in all our lives. A system that would be dangerous even in saintly, inerrant hands is being built on untrustworthy excuses, and by the Home Office.

There is a proverb among those who really do understand databases that has never been more appropriate: ‘Garbage in; garbage out.’

-ENDS-

Notes for editors:

1) e.g. Daily Mail, Scandal grows over foreign convictions shambles, 10/1/07:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=3D428003&in_page_id=3D1770&ico=3DHomepage&icl=3DTabModule&icc=3DNEWS&ct=3D5=20

2) As reported in Hansard, 10/1/07:

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200607/cmhansrd/cm070110/debtext/70110-0005.htm#07011053002227=20

3) NO2ID is the non-partisan national campaign against ID cards and the database state. NO2ID is affiliated to by the National Union of Journalists:

http://www.nuj.org.uk/inner.php?docid=3D1595=20

4) cf. Liam Byrne’s extraordinary claim that ID cards are ‘the solution’ to people trafficking:

http://www.labour.org.uk/index.php?id=3Dnews2005&ux_news%5Bid%5D=3DIDCards&cHash=3D7f1c3798bf