| |  | Anti-ID Card motion passes unanimously | | | Mole Valley Council rejects ID cardsOctober 31, 2008: Conservatives, Lib Dems and Independents last night unanimously passed a motion opposing the Government’s ID Card scheme. Cllr Paul Elderton (Lib Dem, Dorking N), proposing the motion, said ID cards would change the relationship between the individual and the state: “If ID Cards are introduced, it will not be long before bureaucrats are gold-plating the legislation. Citizens will become suspects and we will all have to hope that our data is not lost, stolen, corrupted or misused. If it is, who will we turn to and what redress will we have?”
Cllr Malcolm Johnson (Con, Leith Hill), said the Government seemed to be making things up as they went along: “No one yet knows what responsibilities and cost will be loaded on to Mole Valley District Council, though they will no doubt be considerable” he said. “Big Brother is coming to town and we will find him a very expensive guest”.
NO2ID's Dorking spokesman, Geoff Cox, said, “The Council is to be congratulated in taking this united stand against ID Cards. In Mole Valley, we do not want to live in a 'papers please!' society. Today, we find our rights to privacy, our freedom of movement, our presumption of innocence and many other civil liberties eroded. ID Cards stand at the apex of a faceless, untouchable, valueless, tech-driven apparatus for citizen control. At NO2ID, we do not like it and our Council agrees with us”.
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| | Mole Valley tories and Lib Dems unite to propose anti-ID Card motion for Thursday's Council meeting | | | 'A waste of money,' says Council leader21 October, 2008: Mole Valley Conservatives are working with the Liberal Democrats to oppose government plans to introduce ID cards. In a statement Conservative district council leader Jean Pearson (Capel, Leigh and Newdigate) said local tories had put together a motion opposing the scheme for the next council meeting on October 30. But the motion will be put by a Liberal Democrat councillor, Paul Elderton (Dorking N).
Many UK local authorities are already opposing the ID scheme, says Pearson: "It is going to cost Mole Valley a huge amount of money and it’s impossible to see what the benefits are for our hard-pressed residents."
The says the scheme "will impose wholly disproportionate costs on this Council" and other public bodies. The motion proposes that, unless the Council is forced to by law, it will take no part in a pilot scheme, any other preparatory work for the scheme, or in the national database which is at the core of the ID card project. The motion also seeks to make it Council policy that ID cards will not be required to obtain Council benefits or services.
The Conservative Group statement says: "Mole Valley council is encouraging discussion of the National ID Scheme, so that people in our area are not 'sleepwalking into a surveillance state,' as the Information Commissioner has put it. "
Most people are complacent about the question because they haven’t considered its full implications, the Conservatives say. "They think of 'ID cards' as simple pieces of plastic, rather than the visible face of a vast change to the way we are governed and the way we live our lives."
The full motion, available from Mole Valley's website (click here to download the whole agenda), reads:
Motion 7/2008
The following motion is proposed by Councillor Paul Elderton [Lib Dem, Dorking N]:
This Council notes that:
1) the present parliament has approved the Identity Card Act 2006.
This Council believes that:
2) the use by government of the ID card and database will have a detrimental effect on the relationship between the individual and the state;
3) the scheme will impose wholly disproportionate costs on this Council and other public bodies which will include both implementation and operational costs;
4) and that this will have a damaging effect on all residents of Mole Valley. This Council resolves, unless required to do so by law, to:
1) take no part in any pilot scheme or feasibility work in relation to the National Identity Card Scheme;
2) establish as Council policy that National Identity Cards will not be required in order to obtain Council benefits or services;
3) refuse to participate in the national database.
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| | Mole Valley taxpayers face huge ID Card bill | | |  Conservatives and Lib Dems unite to oppose database state
September 27, 2008: A Mole Valley councillor has expressed 'shock' at the expense to local taxpayers of the government's proposed ID card scheme. Cllr Malcolm Johnson (Con, Leith Hill), who chairs Mole Valley's development control committee, asked the panel of experts at a debate in Dorking last week what the scheme would cost the council.
Guy Herbert, general secretary of the NO2ID campaign, told the meeting that the government's £5bn-plus estimate for the cost of setting up – not running – the scheme did not include the cost to local councils and others who might have to authenticate the cards.
Herbert was sharing a platform with Mole Valley MP Sir Paul Beresford, Dr Edgar Whitley of the London School of Economics, and Mole Valley Liberal Democrat candidate Alice Humphreys, with local No2ID campaign secretary Geoff Cox in the chair. All are vehemently opposed to the ID card scheme, not just on grounds of cost but because it would be less effective than good policing at identifying and catching terrorists, and that it posed serious risks for innocent citizens.
Sir Paul, who told the meeting his passport was recently stolen and that he had also his identity stolen some years ago, was particularly concerned about the centralisation of all personal records. The risk of centralisation was not so much that hackers could break in and steal people's personal information. It was a concern, shared by senior police officers, that so many people would be involved in handling the data that some could be bribed to steal it from the inside. Losing your passport or credit cards is one thing, he said. Losing all your data at once was something altogether worse.
The cards, the first versions of which home secretary Jacqui Smith showed to the Press last week, will contain some encrypted personal data. But their main function is to provide a link between a card reader and a central database holding the national identity register (NIR). (See also how the scheme will run). Without this link, the ID card will have no more value as an identifier than a driving licence or library card.
The NIR will contain personal information: name, address, gender, date and place of birth, immigration status, fingerprints, iris patterns and facial image. The problem for local authorities, says Herbert, is that, to authenticate the cards, they will have to either provide new or upgrade existing computer systems to link to the NIR. Mole Valley and other local authorities will also have to pay fees to access secure telecommunications links to the NIR, and the NIR itself will charge a fee for each authentication.
Herbert pointed out that most of the costs to local authorities will be incurred at the beginning, even though only a few of the population present the cards. Some councils, as well as the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh and London Assemblies, have passed strongly worded motions against ID cards. Some are refusing to cooperate with the ID scheme. But the government has been careful to stifle such initiatives. Its marketing of the card has concentrated on its use as a single form of identification that can be used anywhere, when claiming housing benefit as well as in supermarkets and banks. A council which refuses individuals access to local services unless they present some other form of identification is likely to find itself open to legal challenge as well as to complaints from those individuals.
Johnson's reaction was to says that, "This is all entirely new. Most officers in Mole Valley aren't aware of this issue and we're pretty shocked to hear what you are saying."
The NO2ID campaign is non-political. Opposition to the ID card is one of the few policies Conservatives and Liberal Democrats have in common, said Humphreys.
After the debate Cllr Paul Elderton (Lib Dem, Dorking North) said he is preparing a motion on ID cards for Mole Valley District Council.
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| | If you've nothing to hide, why have curtains? | | |  Ordinary citizens would be picketing Whitehall if they realised how vulnerable they areIt's a sign of the merit of the government's commitment to introduce ID cards that the organisers of the debate to be held in Dorking later this month (details right and below) had great difficulty getting anyone to defend it, never mind speak in its favour. No government minister, not even any Labour party members, could be found to do the government's dirty work.
The usual, seemingly attractive, defence of ID cards is that, if you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear. But the demolition of this argument by software consultant and visiting Oxford professor Martyn Thomas at a recent Surrey University, Guildford, debate was total and deeply felt.
"There are good reasons why ordinary completely upright people have things to hide," he told the packed auditorium. "They may be escaping an abusive relationship. They may be a celebrity getting away from stalkers. They may be children in care needing to be in safe houses, or people who have suffered bouts of mental illness – 20 per cent of the population – and want to conceal that."
Rape victims, he said, want to conceal their identities: "There are people working in abortion clinics, in Huntingdon Life Sciences, and they have to deal with people who are threatening to blow up their family. Prison officers want to conceal their identities. There are hundreds and hundreds of issues like these. Just because privacy doesn't matter to you, it's perilous to assume it doesn't matter to other people."
In a Royal Academy of Engineering project Thomas asked young people, "If you became a celebrity, how much of what you've put on Facebook would you be happy to see in the newspapers?" For most of the youngsters this question was an eye-opener, he says.
Support or opposition to ID cards boils down to two crucial points. One is that the technology, and whether it works or not, is much less important than whether we can put our faith in the competence and honesty of every one of those charged with its use.
David Birch is a privacy sceptic. The founder of Consult Hyperion and the author of a book on digital identity management, Birch lectures on the impact of new information and communications technologies. In his view, the people, not the technology, are at fault.
For him the concern about the masses of information now accumulating in huge, expensive government and private databases is not that hackers can get access to it. Animal rights terrorists were able to locate and fire-bomb the homes of scientists at Huntingdon Life Sciences simply because they had a confederate inside the government's Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) centre at Swansea. Says assistant UK information commissioner Jonathan Bamford: "It's the inside job that causes the greatest risk, not someone hacking in."
Local authority databases, for example, are available alike to medical practitioners and the staff of leisure centres. That's why Bamford and others are particularly worried about the scope for misuse posed by ContactPoint, a database set up under the 2004 Children Act in the wake of the Victoria Climbié case.
ContactPoint allows health, social service and other practitioners coordinate support for particular children. ContactPoint now identifies every child in England up to the age of 18 by name, address, gender, date of birth and a unique identifying number, with the names and contact details of each child's parent or carer.
The argument for ContactPoint, says Bamford, is to share information about vulnerable children. "But ContactPoint isn't just vulnerable children, it's all children. If people want to find a needle in a haystack, why do they insist on building bigger haystacks? We don't need to have information on every child in the UK."
It's the widespread access to ContactPoint that has Martyn Thomas alarmed. Victoria Climbié, "would not have been on that database. You don't help the nation's children by building such systems and making the information available to several million people. Some will be child abusers, and you will cause more to be damaged than you protect."
The second pivotal point in the ID Card debate is much simpler. It is whether this snoopers' charter for officialdom is a standard for the kind of society we want our country to become. The flow of information is all too evidently one way. Officials and politicians are desperately keen to know everything about us. But when local people want, for example, to see Mole Valley's correspondence about local supermarket proposals, the Freedom of Information Act proves useless.
If they want us to accept ID cards, they'll have to do better than that.
Just because they're logging our phone calls doesn't mean they're listening. But it's still important to say what you think. You get your chance at the big debate at the Christian Centre, Dorking on Thursday, September 25, at 8pm.
The lead speaker in the event, organised by the Dorking branch of the national campaign group No2IDis our local MP, Sir Paul Beresford, an outspoken opponent of the government's plans. He is joined by the general secretary of the No2ID campaign, Guy Herbert, Liberal Democrat candidate Alice Humphreys, and Dr Edgar Whitley of the London School of Economics. With luck, sparks will fly!
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