19 February 2007

Tony Blair has written to everyone [1] who has signed an anti-ID cards petition on the notorious Number 10 website, reiterating claims that have
been refuted many times over [2], and trying to sell the system on the basis of ‘feature creep’ which ministers promised Parliament would never be
allowed to happen.[3]

Phil Booth, NO2ID’s [4] National Coordinator said:

‘70% would be spent anyway’ is a fabricated figure. Mr Blair is repeating an arbitrary piece of creative accounting as if it were meaningful. The
truth is that passports are only being re-engineered in this hugely expensive and bullying fashion in order to provide cover for the ID scheme.

The PM’s claims on this subject are not exactly lies, so much as fact-free. Endlessly repeating a fabrication doesn’t make it real, Mr Blair.

-ENDS-

Notes for editors:

1) The full text of Tony Blair’s e-mail is reproduced on NO2ID’s forums, here: http://forum.no2id.net/viewtopic.php?t=15378

2) Other pseudo-facts used by the government in ID propaganda include:

* £1.7 billion as the annual cost of ‘identity fraud’ – see Andrew Gilligan, Evening Standard, 20/6/05:

http://www.spy.org.uk/spyblog/2005/06/evening_standard_andrew_gillig.html

or Silicon.com, 2/2/06:

http://www.silicon.com/publicsector/0,3800010403,39156140,00.htm

* 900,000 crime scene marks (which might be multiple, or indistinct – leading to false ‘matches’) are misrepresented as separate crimes.
* Changes to the passport are required due to “international obligation”. UK passports are already ICAO-compliant, and continue to qualify for the US Visa Waiver scheme, due to the inclusion of RFID chips and machine-readable data on the photo page. The NAO reports that the total cost of this ‘upgrade’ was just £61 million.

The government refuses to detail how it intends to spend £378 million per year (“70%” of its current 10 year estimate for the Home Office costs of the ID programme, divided by 10) for the next 10 years on ‘improvements to the passport’ – let alone the ‘additional’ £162 million per year that it implies is for stand-alone ID cards. If these changes are required anyway, what is it hiding?

3) Tony McNulty, then Home Office minister for Immigration, Citizenship and Nationality, clearly stated in Standing Committee D on 6 July 2005: “There
are safeguards not only against state agencies, for want of a better phrase, *going fishing in the database* but against misbehaviour and abuse of the
database by those who manage the system.” – reported in Hansard:

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmstand/d/st050706/am/50706s07.htm

but clearly no longer the case, since the Prime Minister’s e-mail directly contemplates ‘fishing expeditions’ and both data-sharing within UK government and passing information on citizens to foreign governments.

4) 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=1595

Scroll down NO2ID’s front page http://www.no2id.net for a list of ‘database state’ initiatives that the campaign is working to actively oppose.

17 February 2007

NO2ID [1] has dismissed claims from the Identity and Passport Service (“IPS”) [2] that its new programme of interrogating applicants based on
detailed personal dossiers is a necessary procedure for passport security. They say it is only a pretext for building up centralised official files on
individuals as the basis of the planned National Identity Register.

The scheme is to be rolled out at 69 new interrogation centres during 2007 and used first on new applicants for passports, who are mostly teenagers
contemplating travelling alone for the first time. Prior to interviews described as deliberately “intrusive” by Home Office documents, large amounts of information will be collected on passport applicants, who then be cross-questioned on personal details. Those seeking their first adult passport will be asked to provide many more details =
about themselves in the new forms than people currently are [3], such as their previous addresses, and official references used for other government
services. New powers, in regulations under the Identity Cards Act 2006[4], will be used to make other public authorities provide private information they hold on the person corresponding to those details, which will be compiled into a single file.

IPS plans published last year [5] show that this procedure is intended to be extended gradually to the entire population, as a step towards creating the ID cards database. While it applies to passports (or other official documents such as residence visas) it is being officially regarded as “voluntary”. Many more interrogation centres will eventually be required.[6]

Phil Booth, NO2ID’s National Coordinator said:

Claims that this is an essential independent passport programme are tripe. The IPS’s own publications, even it’s own name, make it completely clear
that it is a pretext to build the ID scheme. The only reason your private life is to be raked over by officials in this way is to collect and connect all official information about you for National Identity Register. The spin is intended to be reassuring, but the real message is clear: If you want to travel, you are a suspect.

Guy Herbert, NO2ID’s General Secretary said:

As for ’security’, it is at best ridiculous gold-plating. Passport applications are already checked with credit reference agencies to see that the person concerned has a ‘footprint’ in society. That’ cheap and straightforward: a problem for privacy, but not a big one.

But at worst it this a major new threat to the security of the individual. Leave aside that it is thoroughly unpleasant to have a bored clerk poke into your private life. The Government is deliberately collecting in one place all the information, and more, you’d need to take someone’s identity for fraud, or for an enemy to track and to persecute them. State security and personal security are different things.

-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
Scroll down NO2ID’s front page http://www.no2id.net for a list of database state initiatives that the campaign is working to actively oppose.

2) No longer “the Passport Office”. The clue is in the name. The new agency was created on 1st April 2006, two days after the Identity Cards Bill 2006
became law.

3) The IPS announcements have minimised these changes, but they are very significant. Currently passport applications seek to verify only that you
are the person applying. Where you live only matters to return the passport to you. Passports themselves do not include address details, and there is
very limited information supplied on the form that could be useful to a third party. See a form at any Post Office.

4) s38(1) 38. Verifying information provided with passport applications etc.
(1) Where it appears to the Secretary of State that a person on whom a requirement may be imposed under this section may have information in
his possession which could be used -
(a) for verifying information provided to the Secretary of State for the purposes of, or in connection with, an application for the issue of a passport, or
(b) for determining whether to withdraw an individual’s passport, the Secretary of State may require that person to provide him with the information.

5) See IPS, Corporate and Business plans 2006-16, published 21st April 2006.
http://www.passport.gov.uk/downloads/IPS_Corporate_Plans06.pdf [pdf]

6) The British Computer Society in evidence to the Home Affairs Committee in 2004 estimated that 2000 centres would be required to issue ID cards. That was before the details of the elaborate interrogation process had been announced.