In the United Kingdom we have a system of government quite unlike anything else. The system has an unelected head of state (The Queen) an unelected upper house (The House of Lords) and unelected judiciary (Judges) and unelected local, regional and country wide civil service (Indeed Minister).
The only two parts of the running of the country that are elected are local councillors and peers of the lower house (House of Commons) also known as Members of Parliament (MP). The leading party in the lower house goes on to form the Government and the leader of that party goes on to become Prime Minister. And even that is highly stacked in favour of the existing parties, with it’s first past the post voting system. Proportional Representation and Instant Runoff feel like they are hundreds of years away.
Currently the once Labour government lead by Gordon Brown is trying to sneak in ID Cards and the National ID system through as many back door methods as possible. Merging them with passports, forcing immigrants to carry them, forcing airport staff to carry them. ID cards in general are not so bad, especially when they aren’t governmental controlled. The national ID database on the other hand, is a heinous crime against civil rights. not because this Government is THE most incompetent bunch of technophobic fools who should never be allowed near a computer, not even because the Government has a hideous track record of keeping information about it’s people safe; but also because that information they want to store is not the governments to own and control.
Ownership of Personal InformationA person of a country has the right, in my view, to own and control the information about themselves. To call upon any secure and trusted third party to manage and hold their information. For that information to conform to a strict set of standards and for access, viewing and searching of that information to be controlled by either the owner or a court order.
The owner of the information may be a legal guardian of a child for instance, but mostly it will be the person themselves. I see this kind of system working in conjunction with existing GPG cryptographic signing and trust signing profiles. I want this data to have viewing access controls and for EVERY access of any part or search of the data (where the person was found in a search) to be logged and signed in such a way as to make it difficult to forge.
There are some very good discussions that could flesh the system into an evidence based and logical system that prevented the vast majority of fraud and theft of identity. But these kinds of forward thinking systems are no good unless the people of England and the UK by extension take loss of liberty seriously.
We as the people of UK must make a priority of learning about the importance of civil rights, free speech and liberty in general. Teaching others if required about the dangers of being complacent and the bloody mess a it would leave if we had to dig our way out of a real fascist state.
See No2ID for further information on resisting this liberty land grab.