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petitionResponseRebuttal.php
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petitionResponseRebuttal.php
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<?php
// Change this for the title - all titles start with "No2ID -"
$page_title = 'audio & video resources';
// add ../ before inc if page is within a directory - only need to do this on top include
require_once('inc/pageHead.php');?>
<!-- Put your page in here -->
<h1>10 Downing Street's delayed response to e-petition</h1>
<p>On 13 January 2005, just over 7 weeks after it was submitted, <a href="http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page6909.asp">10
Downing Street responded to our e-petition</a>. It appears that in attempting
to justify its plans, the Government is now even willing to try to redefine
the very concept of civil liberties.</p>
<p>Riddled with revisionism, outrageous assertion and pure misinformation, the
response insults the intelligence of those who signed and reveals the low regard
in which this Government holds its citizens. The following is our paragraph-by-paragraph
rebuttal:</p>
<blockquote cite="http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page6909.asp">
<p>Proposals for a national compulsory identity cards scheme, to strengthen
national security and protect people's identity, were set out on 29 November
2004 when the Government published the Identity Cards Bill. Our decision to
introduce identity cards has been taken following a wide ranging debate, starting
with the announcement in February 2002 of the original consultation and continuing
with the consultation on the draft legislation.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The Government fails to mention the National Identity Register, the 30-odd
new powers awarded to the Home Secretary and the punitive fines that form the
bulk of the Bill. If these things were genuinely going to protect our identities,
then surely the "80%" (ha ha) of us that want them would be queuing
up to have them without the 'encouragement' of £1000 and £2500 pound
fines?</p>
<p>The debate has been almost non-existent with, for example, no Government or
Home Office representative at Mistaken Identity, nor even at some less threatening
invitation-only affairs. For people who are so utterly convinced that what they
are doing is right, they seem remarkably reluctant to defend, or even make,
their case in public.</p>
<blockquote cite="http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page6909.asp">
<p>The decision to proceed is based in part on the fact that we will have to
introduce more secure personal identifiers (biometrics) into our passports
and other existing documents in line with international requirements. If our
citizens are to continue to enjoy the benefits of international travel, as
increasing numbers of them are doing, we cannot be left behind.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is completely disingenuous. Adding biometric identifiers to passports
need involve nothing more expensive or intrusive than putting a digital photo
onto a chip - the UK are the only country taking this as an excuse to compulsorily
register all its citizens and put them on a massively intrusive privacy-busting
database. Are they saying that without ID cards, UK citizens will no longer
be able to travel abroad?</p>
<p>If so, they are lying.</p>
<p>The international standards for machine-readable travel documents may require
fingerprints in addition to a digitised facial image, but it is our Government
and our Government alone who have decided to scan everyone's eyes as well and
put all this - and lots more - information into a central database. The reason
why the Home Office seperated the ID card from the passport is that they had
overloaded the specification so heavily that our passports may no longer have
been compliant with international standards.</p>
<blockquote cite="http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page6909.asp">
<p>Identity cards will provide every person in this country with an easy and
secure way of proving their identity, of demonstrating their right to be here
and of asserting their place in the community. Our liberties will be strengthened
if our identity is protected from theft; if we are guaranteed access to the
services to which we are entitled; and if our community is better protected
from terrorists and organised criminals, and from those who seek to abuse
the immigration rules and public services.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I do not need a card to 'assert my place in the community' - and I definitely
do not need a license to exist from the Government. It presents ID cards in
such a way as to appeal to xenophobia and play to people's fears, yet has consistently
failed to show exactly how they will significantly address any of the problems
mentioned. This is about being seen to be doing something, not about actually
tackling a number of complex and largely unrelated problems.</p>
<p>We are already entitled to the public services for which we pay and adding
in a massively complex and unproven technocratic barrier to access is no way
to guarantee anything. What we really have to fear in a world of State-issued
'entitlement' cards is denial of service through administrative error, network
failure, computer crashes - problems that occur with every large Government
IT project, or wherever technology is blindly used to replace trust.</p>
<p>A short civics lesson for Mssrs Blair, Clarke et al. - civil liberties are
what protect us from the arbitrary exercise of power <strong>by the state</strong>.</p>
<p> They cannot be sacrificed for the convenience of bureaucrats or politicians
seeking re-election. It is fraudulent to assert that our liberties are being
curtailed by fraudsters, criminals, illegal immigrants or terrorists when it
is, in fact, the Government doing this itself.</p>
<blockquote cite="http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page6909.asp">
<p>ID fraud is a growing crime, costing the country more than £1.3 billion
per year. Multiple or false identities are used in more than a third of terrorist
related activity and in organised crime and money laundering.</p>
<p> It is crucial that we are able to confirm and verify our own and others'
identities quickly and easily. Consequently, we believe that there are clear
benefits to be gained from biometric identity cards.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Centralising all our information and issuing everyone with identity numbers
is likely to lead to an <strong>increase</strong> in identity fraud - i.e. the
Government's proposed solution would make the problem worse. This has been the
experience in the US and Australia, where one State-assigned number could be
used to connect all sorts of information about a person.</p>
<p>The vast majority of what the Government calls ID fraud is 'card not present'
credit card and internet-related (e.g. phishing) fraud that ID cards can do
nothing to stop. The figure quoted is a two year old guesstimate - for more
detail see <a href="http://www.spy.org.uk/spyblog/archives/2005/01/pathetic_govern.html">Spy
Blog's commentary on this.</a></p>
<p>If the Government is going to spend billions on a measure that it portrays
as tackling serious crime and terrorism it should explain precisely what ID
cards are going to do to stop or deter the two thirds of terrorists who, by
its own figures, use their own identities and legal identity documents. ID cards
have been sold as the answer to a whole host of problems - but, in reality,
it appears that they will be AT BEST nothing more than a partial solution for
the most serious of them, and offer no deterrent at all.</p>
<p>The Government imply that biometrics will make ID cards more secure and convenient.
Home Office representatives have used words like 'unforgeable' and 'infallible'
but biometric technologies are all fallible and, as applied in the proposed
ID scheme, will potentially discriminate against hundreds of thousands of British
citizens. Biometric enrollment alone will be deeply inconvenient for the fifth
of the population who live in rural locations.</p>
<blockquote cite="http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page6909.asp">
<p>The Government's proposals are designed to safeguard, not erode, civil liberties
by protecting people's true identity against fraud and by enabling them to
prove their identity more easily when accessing public or private services.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>If the proposals are designed to safeguard civil liberties, then why is every
single civil liberties group up in arms about them? No Government will <strong>ever</strong>
have our 'true' identities, though it may assign registered ones. The Home Office
can protect nothing if, for example, they are not held fully accountable for
the correctness and use of the data in the Register and on the cards. The Bill
has been criticised on this basis time and again - including by the Home Affairs
Select Committee.</p>
<p>Linking ID cards to a national database and tracking every use of the card
constructs the architecture of a surveillance state, something that the Government's
own Information Commissioner warns us of - and it can give no guarantees about
how this might be used in 10 years time, in 20, in 50...</p>
<p>If the Government's proposals were truly beneficial or convenient, it would
not be resorting to criminalising people's identity in order to force them onto
the system.</p>
<p>The Government cannot simply redefine civil liberties to suit its own agenda.
Despite changing tack so many times, it has failed to prove the case for ID
cards for any given purpose - and refuses to talk openly about the massive database
and surveillance infrastructure required to administer its proposed scheme.</p>
<p>We note that 10 Downing Street chose to avoid any mention of costs, these having
risen from the original £1.3 - 3.1 billion to £5.5 billion on the
publication of the Regulatory Impact Assessment with the Bill. They may have
decided to ignore principled objections to their plans but are going to find
it a great deal harder to get away with what is, in reality, <strong>nothing
less than an Identity Tax</strong>.</p>
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