ID Card Bill - Round 2
The Bill gets voted on, if not debated, today, and the climate has become intensely hostile towards the Bill.
The Information Commissioner has spoken out against the plans, saying they are too costly and intrusive.
The LSE report has been published, and despite not looking at full implementation costs or the effects of civil disobedience, is still way over the Home Office figures. The Home Office has suddenly turned round and reverted to their thirty pound figure, claiming that the rest of the cost will be met by the "needed" upgrade to the passport. Leaving aside the fact that passports are voluntary (so who meets the cost of cards for those without?), the biometrics planned for the passports are far beyond what is required.
The "mark up" on passports to make them biometric in line with international guidelines is far in excess of that being made by other Governments, largely because other countries aren't going completely overboard by bringing in National Identity Registers. We are required to have passports that contain a digital image of the user and nothing more. Personally I wouldn't have much of a problem (alright, a small one) if my passport had a thumb print or iris scan embedded in the card, as long as it wasn't recorded anywhere else. To me it's just a spit and a throw from a photo anyway. What Labour have in mind is something else; a vast and intrusive database recording our entire lives and a card all set to become an internal passport. Blair is blatantly attempting to massage the figures a la "It's a free car with a pint of petrol. The pint of petrol costs £20,000."
What makes the above even more disgusting is that it is a blatant lie. When the passport costs are removed from the LSE figures, (I have no HO figures, naturally), the costs lie between £6.6 and £15.209 billion. So either the LSE's figures are catastrophically awry or, as many critics are suggesting, the massive price increase on passports is to pay for the register, not the biometric passport.
The Information Commissioner has spoken out against the plans, saying they are too costly and intrusive.
The LSE report has been published, and despite not looking at full implementation costs or the effects of civil disobedience, is still way over the Home Office figures. The Home Office has suddenly turned round and reverted to their thirty pound figure, claiming that the rest of the cost will be met by the "needed" upgrade to the passport. Leaving aside the fact that passports are voluntary (so who meets the cost of cards for those without?), the biometrics planned for the passports are far beyond what is required.
The "mark up" on passports to make them biometric in line with international guidelines is far in excess of that being made by other Governments, largely because other countries aren't going completely overboard by bringing in National Identity Registers. We are required to have passports that contain a digital image of the user and nothing more. Personally I wouldn't have much of a problem (alright, a small one) if my passport had a thumb print or iris scan embedded in the card, as long as it wasn't recorded anywhere else. To me it's just a spit and a throw from a photo anyway. What Labour have in mind is something else; a vast and intrusive database recording our entire lives and a card all set to become an internal passport. Blair is blatantly attempting to massage the figures a la "It's a free car with a pint of petrol. The pint of petrol costs £20,000."
What makes the above even more disgusting is that it is a blatant lie. When the passport costs are removed from the LSE figures, (I have no HO figures, naturally), the costs lie between £6.6 and £15.209 billion. So either the LSE's figures are catastrophically awry or, as many critics are suggesting, the massive price increase on passports is to pay for the register, not the biometric passport.
posted by Hamilton's Brain | 9:48 am
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