Safe Speed Forums

Identity Cards - Do you know the full extent?



Got this from someone who works on technical stuff for the council, she

REALLY thinks it's important that as many people as possible are aware of

what may lie ahead...



You may have heard that legislation creating compulsory ID Cards passed a

crucial stage in the House of Commons. You may feel that ID cards are not

something to worry about, since we already have Photo ID for our Passport

and Driving License and an ID Card will be no different to that. What you

have not been told is the full scope of this proposed ID Card, and what it

will mean to you personally.



The proposed ID Card will be different from any card you now hold. It will

be connected to a database called the NIR, (National Identity Register).,

where all of your personal details will be stored. This will include the

unique number that will be issued to you, your fingerprints, a scan of the

back of your eye, and your photograph. Your name, address and date of birth

will also obviously be stored there. There will be spaces on this database

for your religion, residence status, and many other private and personal

facts about you. There is unlimited space for every other details of your

life on the NIR database, which can be expanded by the Government with or

without further Acts of Parliament.



By itself, you might think that this register is harmless, but you would be

wrong to come to this conclusion. This new card will be used to check your

identity against your entry in the register in real time,whenever you

present it to 'prove who you are'.



Every place that sells alcohol or cigarettes, every post office, every

pharmacy, and every Bank will have an NIR Card Terminal, (very much like the

Chip and Pin Readers that are everywhere now) into which your card can be

'swiped' to check your identity. Each time this happens, a record is made at

the NIR of the time and place that the Card was presented. This means for

example, that there will be a government record of every time you withdraw

more than £99 at your branch of Nat West, who now demand ID for these

transactions. Every time you have to prove that you are over 18, your card

will be swiped, and a record made at the NIR. Restaurants and off

licenseswill demand that your card is swiped so that each receipt shows that

they sold alcohol to someone over 18, and that this was proved by the access

to the NIR, indemnifying them from prosecution.



Private businesses are going to be given access to the NIR Database. If you

want to apply for a job, you will have to present your card for a swipe. If

you want to apply for a London Underground Oyster Card, or a supermarket

loyalty card, or a driving license you will have to present your ID Card for

a swipe. The same goes for getting a telephone line or a mobile phone or an

internet account.



Oyster, DVLA, BT and Nectar (for example) all run very detailed databases of

their own. They will be allowed access to the NIR, just as every other

business will be. This means that each of these entities will be able to

store your unique number in their database, and place all your travel, phone

records, driving activities and detailed shopping habits under your unique

NIR number.



These databases, which can easily fit on a storage device the size of your

hand, will be sold to third parties either legally or illegally. It will

then be possible for a non governmental entity to create a detailed dossier

of all your activities. Certainly, the government will have clandestine

access to all of them, meaning that they will have a complete record of all

your movements, from how much and when you withdraw from your bank account

to what medications you are taking, down to the level of what sort of bread

you eat - all accessible via a single unique number in a central database.



This is quite a significant leap from a simple ID Card that shows your name

and face. Most people do not know that this is the true character and scope

of the proposed ID Card. Whenever the details of how it will work are

explained to them, they quickly change from being ambivalent towards it.



The Government is going to compel you to enter your details into the NIR and

to carry this card. If you and your children want to obtain or renew your

passports, you will be forced to have your fingerprints taken and your eyes

scanned for the NIR, and an ID Card will be issued to you whether you want

one or not. If you refuse to be fingerprinted and eye scanned, you will not

be able to get a passport. Your ID Card, just like your passport, will not

be your property. The Home Secretary will have the right to revoke or

suspend your ID at any time, meaning that you will not be able to withdraw

money from your Bank Account, for example, or do anything that requires you

to present your government issued ID Card.



The arguments that have been put forwarded in favour of ID Cards can be

easily disproved. ID Cards will not stop terrorists; every Spaniard has a

compulsory ID Card as did the Madrid Bombers. ID Cards will not 'eliminate

benefit fraud', which in any case, is small compared to the astronomical

cost of this proposal, which will be measured in billions according to the

LSE. This scheme exists solely to exert total surveillance and control over

the ordinary free British Citizen, and it will line the pockets of the

companies that will create the computer systems at the expense of your

freedom, privacy and money.



If you did not know the full scope of the proposed ID Card Scheme before and

you are as unsettled as I am at what it really means to you, to this country

and its way of life, I urge you to email or photocopy this and give it to

your friends and colleagues. The Bill has proceeded to this stage due to the

lack of accurate and complete information on this proposal being made

public.



Hand to hand, we can inform the entire nation if everyone who receives this

passes it on.



Please make sure you do this.





Ray Bouch

Senior Trading Standards Officer

Lambeth Trading Standards

0207 926 6114
what next this govenment are control freaks. don't vote the bast**ds ps please spread it around inc other webby's cheers

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born with nothing and still have most of it left

Rearrange this into a well known word:

obllocks

Unlimited space? (rolls around floor laughing)

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COAST Not just somewhere to keep a beach.

A young loner on a crusade to champion the cause of the innocent, the helpless, the powerless, in a world of criminals who operate above the law.

How much space is necessary to write a very detailed file on someone? 50kb? Maybe 100kb? Even x60 million that's within the storage capacity of a couple of large home computers.

How much space is necessary to write a very detailed file on someone? 50kb? Maybe 100kb? Even x60 million that's within the storage capacity of a couple of large home computers.

that all depends on what's being tracked.
If you're going to insist on the card being swiped in order to scratch yourself and you want to track and store each swipe then you're going to need a whole lot more than 100kb/person.

1. database overheads. Unless they intend to make near line storage part of the database (which means it's not instantly available) then this will require a VLDB.

2. Time variant data. You can bet your life that the design will call for time variance, depending on how it's implemented, time variance can eat any storage up.

3. this is a Government IT project. It'll never work correctly. It'll probably do something really stupid like store duplicate records of exactly the same thing.

4. The important word I picked up on was "unlimited". Yeah, right, I'd like one of those as the pesky limits of disk space, licensing, partitions and usable table spaces keep on being a problem for me.

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COAST Not just somewhere to keep a beach.

A young loner on a crusade to champion the cause of the innocent, the helpless, the powerless, in a world of criminals who operate above the law.

I did read some stats on the PNC a while back, it was quite interesting.

As mentioned, indexes (pre-ordering data by multiple fields)), and logging (ie. recording all access and modifications, and keeping copies of older versions) and all sorts of other crap can make a DB pretty large.

For example on the PNC the administrators can both view a list of every record that a specific user has accessed, and also view a list of every user that has accessed a certain record. I'm not sure if they keep live copies of changes made though, but you can be sure that there is a way to get a complete historical list of all changes, who made them and when.

edit: The other issue is of course performance! The physical space might be small but if you have tens of thousands of clients working continously then the amount of network traffic and server load is likely to be significant.

Your assertion appears to based upon the limitations of current technology and disregards the continuing evolution of IT systems. 10 years ago the concept of ANPR was just a twinkle in the evil eye of some forward-thinking control freak, but now look how things have changed.

If the variables selected for tracking remain more or less constant, then the technology will eventually evolve to absorb the demands places upon it and ultimately provide a reliable service.

Do not seek comfort in the belief that this will be just another failed Government IT project that will fall by the wayside. If they really want to force this one through, then they will.

But there's still not a cat in hell's chance that it will work though...

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"Politicians are the same the world over... We build bridges where there aren't any rivers." - Nikita Kruschev

I think that the OP is referring to the fact that they can alter information storage criteria at will without acts of parliament.

No worries anyway, they could just run on a fibre channel SAN, and stick extra shelves in as needed. Enterprise level RDBMS can cope with the level of storage required, its just as was said, being a goverment IT project, they will fail to define the requirements and scope, then bleat when it all goes tits up whilst carefully sweeping it under the carpet

(edit as I spotted a typo)

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"Are you sh**ing me?"
"John Spartan, you are fined one credit for a violation of the verbal morality statute."

I think that refusing to pay for the card is an interesting personal strategy if it ever looks as if it might get going.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

The ID card doesn't worry me in the slightest, it's the database that gives me sleepless nights (actually, it's the kids that give me the sleepless nights, but as they have given them I use the extra time to fret on some things, and the government database is one of the things I have found time to fret on).

The government history on large IT projects is not very good; and if I were embarking on a Db of this nature and importance I would want to have a very good team of people on it with me.

The government will award the contract to one of the big few consultancies, who will dazzle with b#llshit in the tender but then swamp the project with borderline 2:2 graduates who can spell database 7 times out of 10 (as long as they can have their dictionary to hand) yet have no skills in database management, or the more involved skills such as referential integrity, time variance, application and database security, de-duplication, indexing, partitioning etc.

This very large database is also expected to support real time access (for the instant checking requirements when someone is stopped?).

The fact that the OP reckons the Govt will be able to add data without legislation is a very big concern, but it's my belief that the physical limitations of major DBMS's will stop that happening pretty quickly (if the police, for example, are using this database, can you imagine the uproar if it was taken down for a week to add a new data item and reindex?)

All of these technical problems are surmountable, but the combination of large size, historical records, instant access, changing requirements and Government management will make it
A) cost a fortune of our money
B) quickly become unstable
C) be shored up with more money as it starts to fail
D) be canned.
Whether that happens in 2 years or 10 years is only a matter of cost, but in the meantime people will lose out of money spent on important things (like, say, lets be controversial here, a police presence on the roads, because even terrorists need to get around, speeders aren't the only lawbreakers on the road) and people will lose out when their records are incorrect or lost - credit history, disenfrachisement, even false criminal charges are very real risks.

Quite frankly, I would be more comforted if the goverment awarded the contract to Tesco to expand their clubcard as an ID card than tried to do it themselves!

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COAST Not just somewhere to keep a beach.

A young loner on a crusade to champion the cause of the innocent, the helpless, the powerless, in a world of criminals who operate above the law.

Personally as you say "The government history on large IT projects is not very good;"-- and given the efficiency of the nectar scheme from Sainsburies homing in on my spending preferences ,i'd be a bit more worried if the clubcard people at any supermarket were put in charge

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lets bring sanity back to speed limits.
Drivers are like donkeys -they respond best to a carrot, not a stick .Road safety experts are like Asses - best kept covered up ,or sat on

Just thought I'd chuck this little coal in the fire!



(You need sound)

http://www.madville.com/link.php?id=127244&t=24

The problem is that unless it is *activly* prevented stuff like this WILL happen simply because it CAN!

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"The road to a police state is paved with public safety legislation"

while we are doing links ... from March 1980 national database

When I mentioned Tesco, it was more about capability to do something like this without making a total pils of it, not a suggestion that they would be more appropriate than the government.

That said ... it's a sad indictment when I (for one) would trust a moneygrabbing grocer more than a government as at least the grocer tries to appear to act ethically?

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COAST Not just somewhere to keep a beach.

A young loner on a crusade to champion the cause of the innocent, the helpless, the powerless, in a world of criminals who operate above the law.

That was my point ,too handy - at least tesco would make it work ,and reliably, without hiving off bits to another supermart, just to make a few bob.

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lets bring sanity back to speed limits.
Drivers are like donkeys -they respond best to a carrot, not a stick .Road safety experts are like Asses - best kept covered up ,or sat on

I look at it all this way............................................................

you happen to be a bit anti government, they take some of your DNA place it at a crime scene, middle of night bang bang, arrested without trial and never heard of again!

get it yet?

Alexander Solzenitsin.................

Police state?

Gulags?

think about it