These snippets culled from the latest bulletin of the No2ID Campaign ...
While the Minister for Identity tries conjuring up possible uses for the ID card - more fantasy than reality - the Home Office continues to use every trick in the book to manufacture 'demand'.
Its latest manoeuvre, buried in yet another obscure regulation - The Licensing Act 2003 (Mandatory Licensing Conditions) Order 2010 - is due to come into force this October. This measure, undebated by MPs and passed on the nod, is one of the first cases where showing ID for an ordinary everyday function is being written into statute.
Less formal age checks creep ever wider, but from this autumn a pub or club MUST have an age verification policy, and MUST ask anyone who looks as if they might be under the age specified in that policy (which could be 18 but could equally be any arbitrarily chosen age which makes the premises "safe") to show "identification bearing their photograph, date of birth and a holographic mark".
Note - 'identification' not 'proof of age', and the conveniently limited definition of what constitutes valid ID. Mandating forms of ID is a step closer to compulsion - they can't entice enough young people to apply for an ID card, so they'll coerce them instead.
Moves like this, trivial as they may seem, are designed to entrench state identity control - serving Whitehall agendas that will not die easily no matter which party is in power. Even more sinister is the proposal to embed chips in the next generation of ID cards so they can be used to authorise chip-and-pin transactions in shops and to identify yourself on the internet - see here.
Meanwhile the British Medical Journal Blogs website carries an article expressing concern about the NHS Summary Care Record. Stephen Ginn, a psychiatrist in training, says: "As with other large database projects - of which this country now has legion - the advantages of sharing information must be balanced with the possible pitfalls. The SCR's benefits are most obvious for forgetful people who have a serious medical condition or allergy and are visiting friends out of town. This is a relatively small number of people and for the rest of us the benefits appear to be marginal. The rollout of the SCR raises serious questions around the issues of privacy, legality, effectiveness, and cost".
If you live in London or one of the four other strategic health authorities currently receiving information in the post about the rollout of the SCR system then here are links to the opt-out forms that you can use to preserve your medical confidentiality ...
http://www.no2id.net/downloads/SCR_optout_sheet.pdf
http://www.nhscarerecords.nhs.uk/options/optoutform.pdf
Following on from the Vetting and Barring Scheme (VBS) débacle the government has been piloting more ways to run criminal database checks on individuals who have "unsupervised access to children". Ten days ago, the Home Secretary announced that members of the public can make applications for disclosure from police records about anybody who is in contact with children. The new system being trialled would allow members of the public to make applications for disclosure from police records about anybody who meets the "unsupervised" criteria. The Home Office has now published a research report into the 'Public Disclosure Pilots'.
On the Amberhawk Training blog, Data Protection expert Chris Pounder has written an article that looks at the research. He reveals that: "Table 7 of the research report indicates that 'over half (i.e. 54% of applications) did not have unsupervised contact with children'. In other words, it appears that most applications for disclosure did not meet the stated criteria for an application."
Pounder points out the problem with this: "There are likely to be audit trails in criminal intelligence that the subject was checked in connection with an inquiry under the 'risk to children' disclosure procedure." So effectively the mere act of being checked could show up in subsequent checks and a sprinkling of "there's no smoke without fire" could barr innocent people from working with children.
See the full article here.
In her desperation to tease out new uses for the ID card Meg Hillier, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Identity, has come up with a brainwave. Why not get rid of the free pensioner bus pass, and instead supply every pensioner with an ID card, possibly offering them for free?
That would mean many more millions of people carrying ID cards, and with free bus travel as the tempting bribe it would be a sure-fire winner (nice one, Meg. Not just a pretty face, then - GOS).
But wait, haven't we been down this bus lane before? We surely have, and it started in Scotland just four years ago. Old-style simple cardboard bus passes were abolished everywhere, to be replaced by shiny new plastic ones. But while these cards were widely advertised merely as 'new bus passes', in the smallprint it was clear that they were cleverer than the old ones, because in time they were to have other uses, such as local library access.
Oh, and the posh name for these cards? - "National Entitlement Cards". And school students were to be treated to them too, in the form of the "Young Scot Card". The reality behind this story is, of course, that these NEC cards are in fact RFID-chipped, ITSO-standard ID cards, which can indeed be used to log every pensioner's bus journeys and library borrowings. Moreover, in the card registration process each pensioner has been issued with a Unique Citizen Reference Number (UCRN) and placed on a national database. So, in short, these so-called 'bus passes' are actually Trojan Horse ID cards, and indeed they are so intrusive that they would not be permitted as ID cards in Germany for example.
More info here.
Germany's Federal Constitutional Court has ruled that blanket retention of telecommunications data is a breach of privacy. Dated 2nd March, the verdict confirms that parts of the current German data retention law are unconstitutional.
That could spell more trouble for the EU directive underlying the legislation. The main anti-surveillance campaign in Germany says the country's government must now work to scrap the European requirements. "If it makes such a move, the federal government can count on the support of many states such as Austria, Sweden and Romania, which are still refusing to implement data retention."
The campaigners also want the European Court to rule against blanket data retention, as one member state cannot effectively protect privacy "while other countries carry on storing communications data without good reason".
Around 70% of Germans are currently against data retention, opinion polls show. One in two said it would dissuade them from contacting marriage guidance counsellors, psychotherapists or drugs advice centres by phone or e-mail. German campaigners plan to use the new legal precedent to challenge other surveillance measures.
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