When the devil calls your cards

Hello there. I've been sorry that I haven't been updating this website as much as i'd like to recently. This is because I was in France for a friend's wedding (congratulations). It was a good weekend. And i've been super-busy at work and the sun has beating down on this non-airconditioned, glass-roofed office for too long now. By the end of the day (when I usually write this drivel) I'm so brain dead I can't write.

You may have noticed that i've added a banner to the right of my blog. This takes you through to the campaign site of a group against the introduction of ID cards in Britain. I'm not paranoid, not a freak, not some weirdo, I'm just afraid of what this will mean. As a French citizen I have to carry an ID card, but it is so far removed from the proposed UK scheme.

The UK scheme means that the government will be able to know 49 key personal characteristics about me (including biometric data such as my fingerprints). There will be a database which will cross reference existing databases so a complete picture of my life can (and will) be formed. I will be forced to use my card when I go to the doctor, take out a credit card, borrow from the library, go on holiday. All of this will allow the government to know more and more about me and you. I will have to have an interview with a government representative when I eventually am forced into obtaining a card which to be frank disgusts me. And what happens when the government makes a mistake (which they will) and i'm stopped by the police because the database says that i'm evil yet i've done nothing wrong. No, no, no, with the government's record in computer projects (see NHS, DCA computer projects running years behind or when they put thousands of innocent people on the criminal register by mistake) it has the potential to be horrible.

Plus there is the fact that this is going to cost billions and billions of pounds which would be better spent on providing air conditioning on the tube, better health care, better schools, more social housing, more international aid - basically anything but this. Even the home office thinks that the scheme will cost £200 per tax-payer (and they are likely to be conservative in their estimates).

This scares me because I thought everyone had read George Orwell, yet I hear few dissenting voices. I'm scared that we're sleepwalking into a police state, it seems that there are few people discussing this out in the open...we need a national debate surrounding this issue. Let's not let the government tell us about the terrorist threat, id fraud and all that bollocks. It is just propaganda so that we can accept the most intrusive personal relationship that any state has ever had with its people. Even Kim Jong-Ill doesn't know as much about his people, and he's a lunatic.

Don't believe me, think i'm crazier than a loon? Please read the facts then get back to me. This is more than left/right politics. It is about my freedom as a human being and a fundamental shift in the relationship between the government and myself.

Watcha Gonna Do?