Harry Metcalfe

Do we need identity cards, and soon?

We need to be able to authenticate ourselves online. The Government’s Identity Card scheme is in part an attempt to do this, and it’s really bad, but we do need some sort of system that offers more than traditional proofs of identity.

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Write to your MP about ID cards!

It’s been a while since we’ve been able to do that. I fruitlessly wrote to my MP, David Lepper, while the ID cards bill was being voted on. Unfortunately, he never saw sense.

In any case, No2ID are raising the alert: a batch of regulations are being laid before Parliament next month which provide a lot of details about the scheme’s implementation. These regulations must be approved by MPs before they are passed, which means a vote — and which means that the time has once again come to write to your MP and ask them to vote against the regulations. From No2ID, here they are:

• The Identity Cards Act 2006 (Application and Issue of ID Card and Notification of Changes) Regulations 2009

  The detail that you will have to give to the Home Office about
  yourself, much much more than the “basic identifying information”
  ministers keep referring to.

• The Identity Cards Act 2006 (Prescribed Information) Regulations 2009

  What will be kept on the cards – but not yet anything about the national identity register database and how it might work.

• The Identity Cards Act 2006 (Designation) Order 2009

  The first of potentially many such. Provides for some people to be forced onto the system because joining will be a condition of applying for another official document that they need.

• The Identity Cards Act 2006 (Fees) Regulations 2009
• The Identity Cards Act 2006 (Information and Code of Practice on Penalties) Order 2009

  The unfair rules that will be used to punish non-compliance.

• The Identity Cards Act 2006 (Provision of Information without Consent) Regulations 2009

  Sets out who the information may be passed to once the IPS has it. Audit trail information will go to: police, intelligence services, and SOCA, and to anyone else they authorise – so we are immediately beyond government promise – plus HMRC, who can’t however authorise it to be given to third parties. Further, non-audit trail information – such as document numbers, names and addresses, signatures and fingerprints, quite enough to be keys for other searches or massive identity fraud – may be provided to the Home Office and MoJ, DWP, DoT and FCO. Records of what information has been given to whom and why may be destroyed after 12 months or less.

• The Immigration (Biometric Registration) (Amendment) Regulations 2009

  Expands the ‘ID cards for foreigners’ system vastly by extending it to more categories of people (for example, spouses of British citizens, visiting artists and academics) who are only being treated as a threat in order to justify ID cards for all.

Please: write to your MP now and ask them to vote against these regulations next month — especially if you have a Labour MP.

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