Tuesday 24 February 2009

I knew it was too good to be true.

David Blunkett's repositioning continues apace in the Grauniad's liberty central. Of course as soon as you read it, it falls apart and you can see the spin and bullshit shining through.

We will ignore simple jurisdictional naiveté such as suggestions the information commissioner's position should be strengthened to deal with issues such as the Facebook T&Cs or utter laugh out loud lines like 'We are not a "surveillance state"' given the ridiculous number of cameras in use in this country and move strait onto the meat.

There is a misconception that the database for biometric passports and ID cards might be misused. That's why I'm coming to the conclusion that we may have to consider simply making passports universal.

Well I suppose to be generous, if you suggest that having a huge great database of everyone to be data-mined by government and lost in the post by contractors is the intended purpose of the database then is won't me misused. If by making passports universal, you mean we all have to have one, then that really isn't any different from an ID card now is it? I have written about the cards and the database so often that it even bores me, but the utter rubbish that they troop out in their defence makes me want tap-dance with anger.

I am coming to the conclusion that the national identity database is the single, solitary, biggest threat to national security we face. We are giving terrorists a central one-stop-shop location to have to break into to find out where all our constables and members of Her Majesty’s forces and the intelligence services live. Perhaps the first time this system gets broken or breeched the Chief Executive of the Identity and Passport Service will get charged with "Eliciting, publishing or communicating information about members of armed forces etc".

The other thing I want to take issue with in the article is the suggestion that we as a nation are "crying wolf" I would disagree, the boy in that story caused himself the issues by raising the alarm incorrectly and having the village react each time. I don't think that the current groundswell of protest at the moment is based on any false premises and Parliament (our village) isn't reacting. To back his Aesopian premise he also suggests that Stella Rimington was merely rambling on and apparently she doesn't understand the 'the genuine threat that new forms of terrorism pose' which kind of left me wondering whether the chutzpah of this man has an end.

Of all of it I think that commitment to freeing people from the fear and instability is the bit that is the worst attempt to misrepresent the 'Blunkett Position' he, along with Jaquie Smith and pretty much every other minister or prominent politician to speak on the subject in recent times, have cause far, far more widespread and persistent terror that anyone trying to blow things up in this country has.

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