By way of Carl Minns up in Hull and Dick Puddlecote, comes revived comment that the police during the Olympics will have powers to enter homes and business premises near the venues to remove displays and posters they don't like - mostly advertising for products not belonging to the various official sponsors of the games.  This did surface last year some time when some Olympics enabling legislation was being introduced from memory.

Aside from the obvious civil liberties connotations - and, for example, will it be restricted to non-sponsor advertising or would, say, protest posters be the subject of these "raids" - there is the simple question of who are our police supposed to serve?  Are they there to protect the commercial interests of MacDonalds, Coca-Cola, Cadbury (Kraft of course now) Samsung and so on or the security of the venues, participants, spectators and local residents?

On whose planet is it a valid part of a commercial sponsorship agreement that people in their own private property who are not parties to the contract outside the park itself not be permitted to do what the hell they like in their property?  

Presumably no competitors will be allowed to participate or spectators visit the games either who have not arrived by British Airways planes (and then only ones powered by General Electric engines), paid by Visa cards from Lloyds Bank accounts (which can hardly now be counted as part of the private sector sponsorship anyway) and arranged by Thomas Cook, or been driven in BMWs fuelled by BP petrol?  Woe betide if you are spotted with a mobile phone other than a Samsung, a laptop other than an Acer or a watch by anyone other than Omega and no doubt those police who like stopping people taking photographs will now have an added excuse if you are not using a Panasonic camera.  And don't even try getting into a venue if you are not wearing Adidas clothing and have receipts for all of this from John Lewis.  

Given that MacDonalds are providing the food, Cadbury the snacks and Coca-Cola the drinks, perhaps we shouldn't even expect that much of the athletes anyway - and that's assuming that there's nothing in these two companies' products that would cause a doping test to fail - certainly I've heard that horses can fail a doping test after a Mars bar so presumably feeding them Whispa bars is out.  Those bicycles don't look capable of carrying someone who has pigged out on a Macky D and Coke, and I wouldn't go near the diving pool without full waterproof coverings (by Adidas again of course).

Oh, they say, but these companies are "paying" for the Games with their sponsorship and should expect exclusivity.  Bollocks are they.  The private sector contribution to the now £9,000,000,000 plus budget is only just over 20% of that.  Most of the rest is coming from taxpayers directly, with some coming from the people of London in added council tax and a large chunk from Lottery players everywhere.  Add to that the fact that almost any business in the country that has tried to get construction work done over the past few years has had to pay over the odds because the Olympic developments have been sucking up as much construction activity and materials as it could get (at one point the construction inflation caused by the Olympics was running at 30% over "normal" costs) and the contribution of the people of Britain dwarves that of the "official sponsors".

No, this is all an appalling invasion of peoples' privacy and property that can only be applied arbitrarily at best in favour of a group of companies that are barely covering a fifth of the costs of the Games.  I wonder what the charge sheets will say if people refuse to comply - "aggravated poster displaying", or "grievously flaunting an iPhone" perhaps?  Utter hogwash.

Thankfully, with or without state attempts to prevent it, horrors such as the Soham murders and mercifully very few and far between. Strangers remain a much smaller source of abuse than people who are known to their victims - usually within families or extended family groups. The more recent case of "Baby P" in Haringey just goes to show how, even with the intense scrutiny of the state child protection apparatus, the worst cannot always be prevented.

But the idea of bureaucratically vetting virtually everyone, even in informal arrangements, who will assist in keeping kids activities going through volunteering to drive their own and their friends' kids to clubs and events and so on seems to me to threaten what must, or at least ought, to be the first line of child protection - friends and local communities.

A quick check on a database is not going to get to the source of abuse, it's just going to make people more suspicious of others. It is the mother who, taking their own child to school or the football match calls in to pick up one of their friends who will notice first a child that is showing signs of stress at home - upset when they leave the house, or upset when it's time to go home. Small character changes over time - maybe more sullen or moody or nervous or tired. All that sort of thing. They may pick up on a bit of yelling. Their own child may be more reluctant to travel with someone else's parent because they're always shouting at the kids and so on.

So, if you are at all nervous about something in your past (whether child related or not - a quarter of the adult population are not going to understand the nuances of what appears on a CRB check and may not want to take the risk), perhaps you decide that if you cannot be part of the match-day lift rota the best thing would be to withdraw your kid from that activity. So fewer and fewer people are in your informal support network, your child gets even more under your feet stuck at home all the time or making particular calls on your time because you're not sharing the burden with anyone else. Well, that's when a short temper might tip over into abuse where it would not have done previously.

You see the problem for me is that we have, over time, put far too much trust in the state to carry the responsibilities that we all, as families and communities, should really bear, and, in fact only can bear - for 200 staff at some government agency (even when augmented by stretched and harassed police or social services departments) cannot possibly build that sort of incidental and pervasive knowledge of all the families in informal community networks.

The fact is, that harassed by the state for the best part of half our labour, harassed by the state's protection of landed interests and the banking cartel making the big ticket items in life so much more expensive than they would be otherwise, we are more and more forced to work so long and so hard that we do not have as much time as we once did for these sort of community networking activities. Yet another example of the state taking away with one hand and then having to go to extraordinary, disproportionate, and I predict ineffectual lengths to try to make up for the consequences of their predation on ordinary people.

This pandering to the "something must be done" culture, is not necessarily about child protection as much as about getting more and more information about people and their networks into central databases. That is how the state, especially the "transformational state" works. And it must be resisted. What "must be done" instead then...

How about instead of all this futile bureaucracy, a "Good Samaritan" law that places a duty on people to act when they see or hear indications that a problem may be developing. Not as snitches necessarily, nor accusatory, but as someone who asks questions when they see a child in distress or behaving unusually, who can offer some support and, if problems don't resolve themselves, then an early intervention from more experienced assistance.

Put a bit of responsibility back onto friends, connections and communities, instead of trying to absolve them of all responsibility - and taking more of their money to do so. They are the only ones who really can logistically do the job.

"You know my name. You people gave me the fucking number."

Whether it's John McVicar's prison number, an army number, a tattoo on your forearm or a piece of plastic, there is a tendency of authority to assign some "unique ID" to their "subjects". Sometimes "unique IDs" can be useful - they make database management more efficient - all our students have unique IDs, so do all our staff. Often times people will not know they even have a unique ID on any particular database as it may only be used internally. For example, I have several different account with my bank, each with their own identification features such as sort code, account number or VISA number, but I'll bet the database helps keep them all together under my name by assigning me as an individual an ID that I will never see - probably even the bank staff will not see.

But none of these attempt to define who you are. Except one. The National Identity Register. Most other forms of unique ID are either entirely voluntary - you don't need to use a firm that keeps a database, but your customer experience may be the worse for not doing so; you can choose the convenience or the privacy, say - or operate in only one aspect of your life; you may be in the army, voluntarily of course, and accept that they give you a number, but that only applies to your interactions within the military network.

While we may exist on lots of different databases dealing with many different interactions with others and have many different "unique IDs" from each of them, they are subservient to the individual. But the state proposes to create for us an entry on a database that will expand to cover so many aspects of our lives that it becomes effectively the ID database that will eventually verify our very existence.

We do not exist because the government says so but because we were born, and our continuing existence at any point in time is a function of the networks we operate in - those who can identify us best may be our family, friends, employers work-colleagues, neighbours and so on. We may even call ourselves one thing in one context, amongst our friends for example, and a different thing in a different context, our family or workplace say - and everyone within those networks will recognize us. We may even wish to do this precisely in order to keep those two "identities" apart - especially say if our work is sensitive and so on.

Or we may wish to vary our identity over time - in order perhaps to give us a "new start" after some calamitous event in our lives or just because we don't really like the person we were before any longer. But having one database that brings all our interactions with government, and presumably in time others such as banks or landlords or travel or whatever, together throughout our lives we lose that basic right and ability - your records will be there forever.

Revealing the design of the ID Card the other day, Home Secretary and former postie (who presumably had little difficulty getting letters, and postal Giros, to people without a centralised ID) Alan Johnson, trotted out the old cliche that it will help prevent us having to carry around lots of different pieces of ID when we want to engage in a contract. But there are other ways of achieving that without the government getting involved and storing everything on a single point of failure (and multiple points of corruption) database; without transforming the relationship between state and citizen from occasional protector and safety net to the body that defines your very existence.

A nice idea I quite like is what I call "networked identity". The network is the group of people and organizations you deal with on a day to day or even just an occasional basis. You could have a card, provided by an independent data holder - you could do it mutually as a community or commercially by a firm like Experian or Verisign - and every time someone confirms your identity you get points - it could start with single points for friends verifying who you are, through to hundreds of points perhaps when a bank confirms your identity to their satisfaction in order to open an account; you could get points for making sure you are on the electoral roll, or for voting, or each time you pass through customs and immigration.

The higher the points you have on the card, verified by digital signatures of the verifying contacts, the lower the threshold for proving your identity in future, perhaps even to the point where you could bypass airport security checks and so on. Nobody need know precisely who else has verified you, just that their credentials for verifying anyone can be recognized. Perhaps your bank's fraud insurance might insist on biometrics, but they would not be mandatory and held by the state, just on your card maybe. Over time we would be freer because of our network of verification rather than potentially the more restricted by a state with hundreds of thousands of people able to access aspects of your data. If for some reason we wanted to make a "fresh start" just as with bankrupts now you would start again with your verification network and build up points as the new identity.

When you think about it, the state ID system is also a form of protectionism for private interests. Those companies, like banks, who deal in complex risk based transactions with you have an incentive to minimize those risks - of misidentification and so on. The ID card system saves those companies who can afford to gear up with the technology and set in place procedures to comply with access requirements set by the state and so on get what they will no doubt believe (at first at least) is more definitive identification of potential customers.

So apart from usurping the position of the state vis-a-vis the individual if that wasn't bad enough, it's also a great big piece of corporate welfare, and an unnecessary monopoly, paid for by us!

Well, what an unpleasant surprise I had last night. I was bloody stopped and me and my car searched by the police about midnight as I was returning from my friend's house in a nearby village. They said they were randomly targeting vehicles on these country lanes late at night, asked where I had been and where I was going and whether I had had a drink - I hadn't.

So he started on about whether I used drugs: I don't really know where that one came from, though he had seen my roll up fag and asked how long I had been smoking rollies. He asked me to get out of the car and to go and show my ID to his colleague and he had a quick nose around in the car. Now, I have got to be one of the untidiest person you could ever meet, but one think I do hate is people dropping litter and especially fag butts. So what I do when I am smoking behind the wheel, since my car came with no ashtray and lighter, is to twist the fag out out the window and then put the butts into my driver's side door pocket.

I don't know if I've done a proper clean out of the car since I bought it four years ago or so! I do usually empty out the big stuff in the car and do a general binning of the rubbish every so often but haven't done for a while. As a guide - he was asking about a spade in the back seat - which I put in there during the snow in December or whenever it was as I was driving up to my mothers and wanted to have one with me in case I broke down. Anyway - all this, notwithstanding my explanation that the fag butts were about my civic responsibility not to drop litter, made him decide to conduct a proper search of me and the car.

What a faff - on a pitch black country road in the middle of the night he went rifling through all the junk in my car, rummaged through my pockets and wallet and so on. Then came back and asked me, off the record so to speak, to be honest about whether I ever used cannabis. Well of course I do, but it's such a rare occurrence - basically maybe every couple of months when I go for dinner at a particular group of friends' houses, so I never have any of my own. He said "you have a habit, I notice, from the car, that suggests to me that you are a user". He wouldn't tell me what this habit was; he did say it wasn't the butts in the door pocket or the general mess, and that I'd have to work it out for myself.

Well, I haven't got the faintest idea. Unless perhaps he was referring to the fact that there was a Tesco back in the bag with half a dozen empty energy drink cans in - again the relics of several longer distance journeys over the past six months when I have stopped in service stations and I usually buy that sort of thing. So, is that it? I'd never really think of that as a trait of drug using, and I dare say that Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber wouldn't think so either!

I did notice that he didn't give me his name or number and whilst the female colleague did fill in a search form I was not given a copy - they said it was primarily for the supervisor at the station to record what they had been up to but that I could get a copy from their station (miles away in Bicester) if I wanted.

So much of a reward for going to do a friend a good turn. Do these people get off on stopping and harassing drivers for no observable reason? Jeez!