Comment by SilverBirch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SilverBirch | Hacker News Reader

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I'm extremely relaxed about this sort of legislation in the UK at the moment. The reason is that you need to view our government on 2 axes. The first is authoritarianism, and the second is competence. Whilst the government has been drifting more authoritarian for the last 13 years, it has also collapsed in competence. We've seen bill after bill dragged out for years and never acheived. The last lot wanted to completely re-write our human rights legislation. Needless to say that didn't go well. At this point in the political cycle there is no way serious legislation is going to get through parliament.

What I really worry about is that it looks highly likely post election that the government will be replaced by a much more competent, but still highly authoritarian government. It's easy to forget that last labour party tried to introduce ID cards, and tried to introduce rules to let them lock people up for 90 days without charge. The Labour party has none of the libertarian instincts that part of the tory party has.

So, you are saying that the country is accelerating towards making Brazil a reality. Not a good prospect.

Also, I don't get the obsession against ID cards.

As someone in the last "no2id" campaign: we were against the outcome of introducing ID checks everywhere. It's not good to impose state ID checks on people in their daily life.

What we ended up with is the ID checks were introduced anyway, without the card itself. So you need ID to have a job or a bank account or rent a house, but there's no formal ID system, and deeply ridiculous things like "utility bills" are used instead.

A good example of how stupid the system is: because the British public is anti-immigration, immigrants (and only immigrants) are required to have ID cards. The "biometric residence permit". When you naturalize, one part of the process is .. destroy your ID card.

That's the reason I don't understand the opposition: the government is perfectly able to identify a individual person from its interconnected databases, the lack of an ID card just means you have a hard time identifying yourself.

What you actually want is better control over how government agencies handle your personal information, but I guess people are less spooked by ambiguous worded legislation and databases than by physical pieces of plastic.

> the government is perfectly able to identify a individual person from its interconnected databases

Being somewhat familiar with how this plays out in the NHS, all I can say to this is: that would be very nice. And that's with a system that has an ID number which is legislated to be the primary personal identifier.

Substantially all touch points with the NHS that don't flow through NHS Login require the NHS Number plus two other bits of demographic information, specifically because the interconnected databases can't be relied on to have either one number per person (for which there are valid reasons, but never more than one active), or one person per number (for which some DBA somewhere needs to answer for their crimes against relational consistency).

There is a non-trivial number of medical procedures (some remarkably serious) which are performed on the wrong person every year because they were mis-identified at check-in, or later. Solving this is not as easy as you would think.

Yeah, it's very hard to explain to "normal people" who can see the card but not the database.

It’s a very Anglo-Saxon objection, they are not mandatory in any of the Five Eyes countries unlike the majority of Western countries. Something to do with preventing government overreach.

> Something to do with preventing government overreach

Which doesn't make any sort of sense, really, if you think about it for more than a few seconds. Any of the governments in question already has at least one, usually multiple databases of their citizens (drivers licenses, births, passports, health systems, social security, taxes etc.) which are easy to correlate for probably 99.99% of people. They wouldn't gain anything from an overreach/surveillance perspective for everyone to have an uniform ID with number and a photo, because they already have all that information anyways. But regular people would gain a ton because they would be easily able to identify themselves uniquely to whoever needs it, without useless intermediaries (like utility bills), and without any risk of identity fraud or errors.

I think it's really unfortunate that the ID card legislation didn't go through. Standardising this would have made so many things much easier, especially interacting with government services. Instead we have this convoluted ad-hoc system of proving identity that just frustrates everyone while making fraud more likely. I hope Labour, in the next Parliament, builds upon the voter ID scheme and makes a national ID card for everyone.

As long as you don’t need a residence to have one.

Careful with those axes, Eugene.

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