Pointless Identity

The latest New Labour directive from on high is the introduction of identity cards, whether we need them or not. Now, ID cards may not be the privacy disaster that some of their opponents predict, but they most certainly will not deliver the benefits that their supporters claim. The real issue is whether we should be introducing a costly scheme with both privacy and health dangers, when there is no evidence to suggest that there are any benefits to be gained.

The most commonly mentioned danger of the proposed identity cards is that they could be used to invade our privacy. In general, I think this danger has been exaggerated. There will be both too much and not enough information to track us efficiently. I am rarely stopped by the police (once in the last year, as part of a random vehicle check), rarely visit the doctor, and do not claim benefits. Anyone interested in tracking my movements would be far more interested in other information about me. Intercepting my e-mail, for instance. Identity cards will provide so few data points on so many people that discovering anything useful about any individual or group will be highly unlikely. Unless, of course, you are overly sensitive in your search for connections.

The real danger is that identity cards won't tell anyone anything, without huge leaps of intuition. One of the wonders of mass data is that patterns emerge that have no actual basis. Try staring at the faces in the clouds for a while if you doubt that. Patterns that are found in ID card data will, in nearly all cases, be entirely coincidental. If the security services are really stupid enough to try to use this data to catch terrorists, the result will be that most of the people they investigate will be entirely innocent. If the security services decide to use the data to track other groups - and in the past they have seen fit to investigate everyone from Labour Party members to homosexuals - nearly anyone in the country could come under suspicion. The potential for a British equivalent of the McCarthy communist witch-hunt exists, but, to be honest, if the security services are that out of control, they are likely to have access to enough information that ID cards will make little difference.

The more worrying problem, to my mind, is the health risks involved with the proposed ID cards. The government - at the insistence of the Bush administration - will push ahead with plans to link the ID cards to biometric data. At the moment it is unclear whether this means fingerprints or iris scans, but I'm scared it will be the latter. Iris scans involve shining a powerful beam of light into a person's open eye, which obviously carries a small but real risk of damaging the retina. In return for potentially blinding you, they don't work very well. State of the art iris scanners are unable to distinguish every person within groups of just one hundred people. For a country the size of Britain, your iris scan is effectively identical to that of over half a million other people. The government is apparently delaying the final roll out of identity cards for some months to work out technical difficulties. Somehow I suspect that the fact that they just don't work very well will not be solved in that time period.

In return for invading our privacy, potentially persecuting innocent people, and trying to blind us, what do we get? According to the supporters of ID cards, they will fight terrorism, illegal immigration, benefit fraud, and crime. Interestingly, not a single shred of evidence for any of this has been offered. Spain, for instance, has ID cards, but has recently suffered shocking terrorist attacks, quite apart from having its own, home grown terrorists. Presumably they still suffer crime as well.

A moments logical thought will reveal the fallacy of these ideas. The majority of terrorists travel under their own name, using legal identification. If existing identity documents don't catch these people, why will the new ones? Especially given, as we've already seen, any attempt to find a group through such sparse data will throw up far more false positives than genuine leads. Attempting to prevent terror with such a weak weapon can only lead to the persecution of innocent people. Especially under Blunkett's plans to hold without charge people on the suspicion of being the friend of a terrorist suspect.

Illegal immigration is even less likely to be stopped by identity cards. Those immigrants who don't seek work are supported by a network of family and friends, who will simply protect them from this one additional illegality. Those who seek work are already supposed to provide work permits or national insurance details to their employers. Those employers who do not enforce this rule, won't enforce the new one. If we genuinely want to prevent illegal immigration, a crack down on employers who break the current rules would be far more effective. This won't happen, because those employers are typically Mail or Express reading Middle Englanders, and therefore to be courted, not punished.

From there, we get into complete flights of fancy. Benefit claimants are already required to provide their nationally issued evidence of identity, yet (apparently) benefit fraud flourishes. And it is almost impossible to see how this will effect generic crime. I can see it now - "I know it was him that robbed me. He showed me his identity card!"

Identity cards are an expensive project, and if the downside is not as huge as some make out, the upside is non-existent. It seems that we will shortly be carrying a small piece of plastic for no reason other than because Blunkett can make us carry it.

Graham Robinson. 28th April 2004.

archives :: links :: faq :: feedback

Find out how you can support Online Opinion

Online Opinion is a trademark owned by Graham Robinson. All rights reserved. The copyright on all articles, columns, and letters on this site is owned by the original author. The copyright on all other material is owned by Graham Robinson. Permission is granted to download and store these pages for personal or research purposes only, and only as is consistent with normal viewing of web pages. All other rights reserved. Permission is granted to freely link to any page within this site, as long as ownership of the material linked to is clear. No advertisements may be associated with this site, whether explicitly or implicitly, without prior written permission.