In this bleak winter, on the darkest day of the year, when even the Moon was eclipsed, there was a small glimmer of hope for the future:
The Identity Cards Act 2006 has now been repealed, with the Royal Assent of the Identity Documents Act 2010
House resumed.
Royal Assent
9.49 pm
The following Acts were given Royal Assent:
Consolidated Fund Act,
Identity Documents Act,
Loans to Ireland Act.
House adjourned at 9.49 pm.
However, as Phil Booth of the cross party NO2ID Campaign rightly says:
Statement on the Royal Assent to the Identity Documents Act 2010
"NO2ID [1] is, of course, glad to see with the passing of the Identity Documents Bill the death of the ID Cards scheme and the monstrous National Identity Register that it created.
However, while NO2ID welcomes evidence that all copies of the Register are being destroyed [2], powers retained from the original Identity Cards Act still allow the Home Secretary to potentially enact the same enforced data-sharing across government that NO2ID has campaigned against from the beginning [3]. To dismantle the ID Cards scheme but leave powers it rested upon in place leaves the people of Britain vulnerable to a resurrection of the scheme.
Also, with biometric identity cards for the UK now a thing of the past, it is a shame that residents and workers from outside the EEA must undergo the same experience and are being used to justify the continued existence of much of the technical infrastructure of ID cards: the Biometric Residence Permit [4] remains in place, unchanged. Do the principles that led to the scrapping of ID cards for EU citizens not apply to those other legal residents?
This partial abolition is an excellent first step, but the Government should now take the courage to override the deep laid bureaucratic plans, and finish the job. NO2ID will not stop until the database state powers that would allow mass surveillance and official trafficking in personal information are erased for good."
[...]
1. NO2ID is the UK-wide non-partisan campaign against ID cards and the database state. See http://www.no2id.net/dbstate for a list of database state initiatives that NO2ID is actively opposing.
2. To include physical destruction of any device that had stored the register or its contents: http://www.no2id.net/newsblog/2010-11/how-id-card-database-will-be-destroyed3. To wit, the enforced sharing of your full name and any other names by which you are or have been known; your gender; your date and place of birth; your biometrics (which could still include your fingerprints); the address of your principal place of residence in the United Kingdom; the address of every other place in the UK or elsewhere where you have a place of residence; the times at which you were resident at different places in the UK or elsewhere; your current residential status and all previous residential statuses; information about numbers allocated to you for identification purposes and about the documents to which they relate - which could mean your driving licence, National Insurance or even your NHS number. We note the latter was specifically *excluded* from the 2006 Act.
4. Variously billed by the Home Office as "ID cards for foreigners" as if it were part of the National Identity Scheme, but in fact introduced under the UK Borders Act 2007.
Spy Blog has been involved in the technical and political and moral opposition to the apallingly authoritarian and bureeaucratic compulsory, centralised biometric database, the National Identity Register from the beginning back in 2002 when the ide first oozed out of the Home Office under the multiply disgraced Labour Home Secretary David Blunkett.
Hopefully any attempt to re-introduce such an evil scheme will will be seen as electtoral poison by politicians of all parties, but only if readers of Spy Blog and supporters of NO2ID remain constantly vigilant and vocal in their opposition to any attempts to further destroy our fundamental freedoms and liberties,
No politician or bureaucrat should be allowed to pretend that there are easy technological magic fixes to difficult social and political problems. They must not be allowed to waste our taxes on centralised national databases, which simply cannot be made both secure and actually usable.
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