Iain MacKay

London

IT consultant

A good measure of the (lack of) freedom of a society is the extent to which the officers of the state have powers that ordinary citizens do not.
The problem with ID cards is not that we all have our movements recorded. It is that access to the information is privileged; only certain officials (honest or corrupt) may use it. These people then have special powers, and as history teaches us, power corrupts. For example, journalists and private investigators routinely bribe officials with access to DVLA. ID card related information is a bigger prize and will lead to more corruption.
I would support extension of state information gathering only if it is completely transparent; I could access Tony Blair's or the Queens data freely just as they could access mine. This would achieve and indeed greatly enhance the goal of law enforcement that advocates of ID cards are so keen on; but somehow I suspect most people will prefer that their personal information is accessible only to state officers and criminals.
Most of the comments I read here are technically sophistated but incredibly naive politically. Our state is benign purely because it is not very powerful. A state with a monopoly of intimate information about its citizens is far more of a threat to freedom and safety than any group of terrorists.
There are only two safe options:
- collect the information and make it public.
- don't collect it at all.
Sadly, the lesson of history is that no one learns anything from history.