Phil Booth (London, NO2ID) "I'd be happy to have an ID card, so long as it’s got a Bill of Rights printed on the back". This is what Bill Bragg is saying, according to the report in OurKingdom. What Billy seems to be missing is the fact that the Identity Cards Act 2006 sets out powers to routinely surveille every citizen’s public and private transactions. It also gives the Home Secretary direct control over a person’s civil life and therefore - through the removal of the card - a kind of civil death. And this is already on the statute books.
Is any Bill of Rights going to rectify the consequences of ‘Identity management’? For this is a core policy objective of this government. It is aggressively pursuing a legislative programme that facilitates the non-consensual dissemination of personal information, profiling and data-mining - dismantling the cornerstones of privacy and even medical confidentiality. Identity control fundamentally redefines the relationship between citizen and state. In bald terms, you are who it says you are. While ‘fishing expeditions’ into population databases turn us into a nation of suspects and undermine long-held principles such as the presumption of innocence.
Given the facility, what authority will never be tempted to use the information its holds on you (and may pass on to others) in ways it would not dare to ask you for openly? In our media - and data - driven society, the effects may be just as devastating as a physical assault. History shows how mistaken it is to trust constitutional rules to prevent this. An ID system that enables surveillance and control will be used for surveillance and control, whatever the rules say. No Bill of Rights will prevent civil liberties abuses when opportunities for abuse and arbitrariness are built into the system. Rules, operated by those in power, can and will be exploited. There will always be an opportunist excuse or exception: national security, serious crime, immigration.
By all means let's have a debate and move forward constructively on constitutional protections that might prevent future assaults on our basic rights. But let’s be clear that the current ID cards legislation takes away hard won freedoms and must be reversed. This genie, once out of the bottle, will be almost impossible to get back in.
