ID Cards

"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!

I've been trying to get people to hear this for years now: that the huge advances already made in information and communication technology and in the speed and availability of travel are epoch changing. And there have been a few stories over the past weeks and even just in recent days that have confirmed for me that we are finally in the "last days" of the twentieth century in terms of the way we do so many things we have come to rely on.

Some may call what we are witnessing a Kondratiev Wave of immense proportions, asset bubbles, a global failure of risk management, the convergence of peoples now able to communicate instantly across the globe with half of the rest of the world's population, a concern about civil liberties and, in a much more interconnected world about how others see us and what they want to do to us if they don't like what they see.

And, as I have also said previously, this is an opportunity for far reaching liberalization of the world - remember Cobden's quote at the top of my page: "Peace will come to earth when the people have more to do with each other and governments less." Now we have the ability to have more to do with each other and need our governments less to do so for us we could realize that hope. Or, on the other hand, it could be an excuse for a slide into dark totalitarianism as governments seek desperately to hold onto the power to which they have become accustomed; and perhaps worse, seek to control the new global world in the same way and clash more fiercely with each other when they disagree.

Why do I say this now? What are the signals that we need to change things one way or another? Well, take a look at the Guardian's Corporate Tax Avoidance campaign for starters. This is something I predicted long ago - one of the most liberating things about the new world is that people can move, physically or just their economic interests, around the world almost instantly. This used to be the preserve of the very wealthy and well advised. But there's no reason nowadays why relatively modestly financially endowed people cannot do much the same. In response to the Guardian's campaign people have been screaming about the need to tighten up on this sort of thing - even St Vince has been at it.

This is dangerous, for it requires close co-operation between states into our personal affairs not seen before. Think of it - forty years ago each schedule in your UK tax return would have been dealt with by a different civil servant so no one person would know precisely your whole financial circumstances. Now we are asking whole countries to share data between them. It is economically counterproductive too. Tax competition is an important brake on state profligacy. It is right that one of the means of registering an objection to one country's over-taxing is to move your affairs, if the recipient country is willing, to somewhere that is not so profligate. The evidence of the last decade should be enough to show the multifarious, and nefarious, ways in which a determined state can take more tax whilst simpering that they are not raising headline rates. The common, international, policeman of tax competition seems to be able to do economically what governments are incapable of politically.

Similarly currencies - our 95-odd year flirtation with a monetary system invented effectively especially for the rich and powerful banks like J P Morgan and J D Rockerfeller looks to be collapsing. And rightly so. It cannot be right that banks are able to take on vast international liabilities in far huger volumes of a country's currency than that country can possibly guarantee, and yet we are seeing our politicians effectively writing what are potentially vast, bankrupting, blank cheques because of that system. Not only was this very system of money invested to benefit the rich and those with access to the largesse of governments but it is now being propped up, albeit in our name, essentially to the benefit of the same people and to the disbenefit of the vast majority.

And with "civil liberties" - this, to me is the crucial one, because it is a cause celebre for many, but may of those do not see, or if they do see don't want to embrace, the idea that civil liberties cover both social and economic aspects of our lives. For those who want on the one hand to fight for tougher tax enforcement against one group yet against, say an ID database or the widespread collection and sharing of personal data, they have a problem. That data is made even more necessary by their own wishes to see everyone tracked down so that they "pay their way", or don't get what they're not entitled to. And those pressures are set to become even stronger as the mechanisms that allow us, physically or virtually, to hide our affairs from governments become easier and more widely available.

Libertarians believe there is a solution. Most of us, not just libertarians, recognize there's something wrong with "monopoly". Where we differ is that libertarians tend to see the state as not just a monopoly itself but the mother of all monopolies. A true conglomerate of monopolies with a whole plethora of arbitrary power. Others believe that state monopoly can itself be controlled by the thing we call "democracy". But, as I said previously - show me an example where the problems we are now in are not already supposedly in the hands of a democratically elected body. A democratically elected body that gave in to Rockerfeller and Morgan nearly a century ago and forced us all to accept their monopoly solution say. A democratically elected body that thinks ID cards are necessary the more efficiently to transform the management of government. And so on.

On the other hand, to libertarians (or at least some of them) I would say that you need to realize that some of your often heart-felt policies cause quasi monopolistic structures - such as with the relatively recent, in libertarian history at least, fixation with an allodial system of ownership of the planet's natural resources - especially "land".

For me, there is no doubt in my mind that liberty is indivisible - you cannot have "social liberty" without also having "economic liberty" and those who seem to try to split the two are doomed to failure, or even worse - encouraging states into that dark descent to totalitarianism by continuing to grant them the monopolistic and arbitrary powers to prosecute one type of freedom. Equally, a more securely philosophically rooted understanding of sharing our earth would enable libertarians to promote a system that was both free and fair and equitable, without a monopolistic state. If these positions can be reconciled...I'll feel fine, as REM said!

If there were a few comments after dinner on Saturday night at the NLC with new acquaintances, maybe even friends, about how little of the days' talks actually helped some of them understand Libertarianism as an idea (after all, the links between aging and nano-technology and Libertarianism could have been obscure without a primer in Libertarian philosophy first) Sunday began with something that more people would recognize as a Libertarian issue...

Session 5: Ban the Ban: The Human Cost of Prohibition by Dr John Meadowcroft
Session 6: The Idea of a Private Law Society by Prof Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Session 7: The Modern Panopticon State v Freedom: Why State ID Cards are Bad by Guy Herbert of NO2ID
Session 8: Post-modernity and Liberty by Marc-Henri Glendinning

Session 5: Ban the Ban: The Human Cost of Prohibition by Dr John Meadowcroft

Meadowcroft lectures on Public Policy at King's College London and has recently edited a book called "Prohibitions" for the Institute of Economic Affairs examining the effects of the outlawing in various parts of the world of a variety of what may be regarded as "victimless" or "consensual" goods, services and activities such as recreational drugs, boxing, firearms, pornography, prostitution, alcohol and others.

He showed how in every case the outcome for the users, consumers or participants as well as the wider community is almost always worse than the effects of that which is outlawed. These arguments should be familiar to most of my readers, for I have rehearsed them, at least in respect of recreational drugs, often enough. The handing of lucrative markets to organized crime, the lack of knowledge, information and harm minimization facilities to users, the side effects of this crime on others in the community, the corruption of public officials and so on.

It was interesting in particular to see how murder rates seem, possibly coincidentally of course, to have risen and show consistent continuing rises after the banning of guns in most countries including the UK, since this is an area I know even some Libertarians (including myself until recently) find quite difficult to argue.

Consequently, he argues, prohibition is bad public policy. Rather than assisting in preventing harm it always increases harm from things that are essentially, in the classical Liberal sense, none of the state's business - what you do with your own bodies and lives which by and large do not affect others, except with consent.

I notice that, as they apparently do with all their publications, the IEA has sent a copy of "Prohibitions" to every Member of Parliament. I am sure their mailbags are full of this somewhat higher quality of "junk mail" as no doubt some of them see it and one wonders how many of them have read it, or even passed it onto their staff to read it and brief them on it. I shall be asking Lib Dem MP Tom Brake in particular, currently embroiled in an illiberal attempt to further curtail the availability of cannabis seeds against party policy, what he thought of the book and how it affected his decision to press ahead with his ill-advised private member's bill or whatever device he used.

Over the summer, in the run up to party conference in September, a number of us noted that, for a supposedly liberal party in which one might expect prohibitions to be roundly condemned as a matter of course, that we do not have a party group, association, "ginger group" whatever you want to call it, dedicated to fighting the seeming increasing tendency by our own policy makers to join in with orgies of "bansturbation". One thing I am hoping to do is to start a group "Lib Dems Against Prohibition" and perhaps try and get a motion into Harrogate conference on the issue. Watch this space. Maybe we can get Meadowcroft up to speak at a launch event.

Following Meadoowcroft came an eagerly anticipated session by someone regarded by many, it seemed, as something of a high priest of Libertarianism, and judging by the little informal gatherings in coffee afterwards, he certainly had some new acolytes in the room...

Session 6: The Idea of a Private Law Society by Prof Hans-Hermann Hoppe

I had long understood that there was a school of thought, anarchist to the core, that you don't even need to have "law enforcement" handled by the state - for many, particularly the Classical Liberals, the idea of a "minimal state" includes, more or less, only law and order and perhaps national defence as legitimate functions of that state.

Hoppe disagrees. And disagrees compellingly with answers to what might seem the most convincingly argued objections. I will definitely want to blog further about this, so I'll keep it quite brief here. Basically he argues that this Classical Liberal vision of a minimal state is a logical impossibility. Since by its very definition the state has the "territorial monopoly on arbitration" it has no incentive to minimize itself. Since it is enforcement, judge, jury and executioner all rolled into one, it has every incentive to increase the number of things it criminalizes to justify its own existence.

Instead, he posits the idea of a "Private Law" society in which individuals insure themselves against the aggression of others (in the widest possible sense - from breaches of contract to physical violence) in a free market of insurance providers (remember that we will have, effectively, abolished the state and certainly its ability to grant monopoly and protection to such providers). In the purest free market they will always have the incentive to pursue violators of the core maxim of non-aggression on behalf of their clients. And when disputes arise between insurers, counter-claims and the like, competing providers of arbitration (appeal) services also have an incentive to produce objectively fair outcomes. Their clients also have the greatest incentives to be themselves non-aggressors - to abuse a familiar phrase you would lose your no claims bonus if you biffed someone!

It probably needs more explanation than can be given here and as I say I want to blog about this more, because he certainly convinced me. I do, of course, have a certain disagreement with him about rights in landed property in particular that I need to think on and try and reconcile, but it a compelling vision of how a truly free society unencumbered by a monopolistic state could be considerably fairer and lead to much less rather than more confrontation and aggression simply because of the financial incentives involved.

I think it probably leaves me with one area of policy to explore further and understand better before I can call myself an individualist-anarchist - welfare, but this one is a significant step towards that! If I remember this conference for just one thing, it will have been Hoppe's contribution, I am sure. And inspired choice of speaker whom we were extremely lucky to get hold of who explained what will for many be one of the far outer reaches of Libertarianism that even many "hard core" Libertarians will have been challenged by I suspect.

And so, from the most theoretical talk of the weekend to what must be one of the most pressing issues for anyone concerned about our liberty in a very practical sense here in the UK...

Session 7: The Modern Panopticon State v Freedom: Why State ID Cards are Bad by Guy Herbert of NO2ID

Again, this session deserves a blog post of its own, and so I will keep this brief. Most of us in the room were I am sure already pretty united in our opposition to the National ID card program being prosecuted by the Labour government. But for me, however strong that opposition, it has largely been from the heart - the "I am a Liberal and I am against this sort of thing" of Clarence Henry Wilcock in 1950 quoted by Nick Clegg in his leadership campaign and since.

Guy Herbert provided the intellectual ammunition for me argue from the head and not just the heart, to understand the sinister machinations in government, and especially the bureaucracy that have attempted to foist this controlling policy on us for most of the last century. Indeed, I came away with the distinct impression that the Leviathan has been trying this for decades and all that is new is that they have finally found a government stupid or naive enough to swallow its arguments and agree to it!

At its heart, the National Identity Register (the database) is the most important issue (this much I knew, but perhaps not why). The state seeks to create the "single source of truth about the citizen", to fundamentally revolutionize the very definition of personhood, from independent individual, who is known through the various connections and activities they do to one in which it is only possible legitimately to exist with the permission of the state and the possession of its membership card.

The superficially beneficial arguments for having ID cards; that they will make your dealings with the state from which you benefit - welfare, health and so on, more efficient; that you will be better able to prove who you are in a whole range of circumstances; and, the worst, that it will help in the "War on Terror" - we've all heard them, and they do give the idea of a policy intended to help us - are not only superficial, but that the real agenda is not actually understood by most of the politicians charged with selling the idea to us.

That real agenda is about control and knowledge, the most intricate web of knowledge about every one of us. It seems likely, for example, that we will need to present our ID to rent hotel rooms, to buy mobile phones, to get bank accounts, insurance, perhaps even to rent your home, and that every time your ID is checked in one of these situations that will be logged against your entry in the National Identity Register. It will so fundamentally alter the balance between the state and the individual that it can be properly termed totalitarian. And even if implemented y people with benign motives is hugely open to abuse, both now in the sense of incompetence as the government has shown in data loss scandals over the past year and in the future in the hands of who knows what flavour of government with more sinister agendas.

Forget the politicians' assurances that safeguards will be implemented. Even since it was announced the functions the database will fulfill have ballooned more than most of us appreciate, can be extended without reference to parliament and are almost entirely in the hands of bureaucrats who do want to know every last thing about you in their area of responsibility. It is truly scary, sinister stuff, and as I say I will return to it again no doubt. And the worst part of it of course is that many, even most people accept the platitudes of politicians that this will be good for us.

I believe it is no longer acceptable for those political parties and individuals who say they oppose ID Cards and the ID Register to have little blog buttons or mere "oppositional" press releases, or "stunts" like saying we will go to jail rather than register for one, we have to up our arguments and explain more precisely the menacing revolution that the whole project threatens. If you only watch one video from the conference, I urge you to watch this one and like me, hopefully learn about the real agenda in more depth, and be appalled!

And so to the final session....

Session 8: Post-modernity and Liberty by Marc-Henri Glendinning

No disrespect to Marc-Henri Glendinning but I confess after all the excitement of Hoppe and the surge of anger generated by Herbert, it seemed a little surreal to end the day with post-modernist philosophy and, whilst I certainly wasn't switched off by this stage I will need to watch this session again to understand it and be able to comment on it more fully!

I did pick up on the general idea that (at least the vanguard and leadership of) the statist left have metamorphosized from what was at least an intellectually honest and fundamentally well-meaning promotion of socialist redistribution with an image of a fairer society, to one which is superficially much more "cuddly", that seems to provide succour and answers to everyone in a supposedly more free mixed economy and society but which masks a more insidious creeping totalitarianism that is anything but benign, putting the state at the centre and subjugate the individual. Beyond that, though, I will need to revisit the session to tell you any more.

And so ended one of the most intellectually stimulating and varied weekends I have ever had I think. I will need, as I said, one of David Friedman's nano-bot enhanced brains I think to be able to really thoroughly cogitate on the many ideas, some new to me, some just newly explained, I got out of the whole event. And I have material enough to keep my blogging controversial enough till next year's conference!

Everyone who helped arrange the weekend and all the speakers are to be commended, and the rest of the audience helped make it a convivial weekend in all sorts of ways in the formal sessions and in the more informal breaks and dinner. The "broad church" of Libertarianism was there for all to see, and I only wish that we could have had more Lib Dems there, perhaps ones skeptical about Libertarianism, for I am sure they would have had many of their misconceptions - in particular that Libertarianism is some selfish right wing "beggar thy neighbour" creed dispelled.

Following on the theme from my post this morning about how we could protect data about us held by agencies of the state by using a sort of a personal key and PIN like your bank's call centre has to validate with you before they can access your data, my mind wandered onto other uses for such a key.

It has been a recurring theme in this blog that the internet in particular and modern communications in general represent a great threat to the balance of power between states (and incidentally also global "intermediary" corporations) and their citizens. I say threat, but it's only a threat if you are in a position of power in a state or corporation seeking to continue to exert control over your citizens. Indeed, for the individual, it is the greatest potential opportunity, and the vehicle by which Richard Cobden's quote at the top of this blog's front page may become reality: "Peace will come to earth when the people have more to do with each other and governments less."

Many of our institutions - governments, trans-national corporations, even currency - evolved to deal with issues of trust between people who would likely never have personal contact with each other in ever more remote markets. When trading, you've got to be able to trust that you will be paid for example - one person's "IOU" is not as good a guarantee as piece of paper endorsed collectively by an entire state - a national currency.

But we have an ever increasing range of other innovations to help us trust each other; developments that are increasing quickly with the advance of the internet. We can access our credit files, we can buy digital certificates that help give others confidence to trade with us over the web because they guarantee we are who we say we are and so on. So why not shift these into the "real world".

Why do we actually need, say, a passport to travel across borders, issued by a nation state, when we could have just as secure a guarantee of who we are through some kind of personal digital certificate from an organization bearing the risk, with strong encryption embedded in it? The British government keeps trying to sweeten its totalitarian ID card scheme by telling us, amongst other things, that it will make proving our identity to others in all sorts of transactions much easier. But in fact the history of government involvement in protecting the source data of those identities is appalling, and, as the technology gets more pervasive it seems to be getting worse.

How much confidence can you have in a government issued identity mechanism when so much data has gone missing already? Those identities are, thanks to state incompetence, all but worthless. Of course that's why, partly at least, they want to take biometric data. But in computer security it is generally accepted that being able to produce "something you have" (say a credit card or internet digital certificate) and "something you know" - a password, PIN, or private digital encryption key is far better than ony one or other of these pieces of information on its own. So far as I can see the ID card system, or the passport, with or without a national identity register, does not fulfill both of these - only the former. It is inherently weaker than the commercially available alternatives.

So, why not replace the need for passports issued by a state with identity mechanisms authenticated by trusted corporate or social organizations for whom financial success or failure rests on people being able to trust the people they certify. So you could have a personal account with Thawte as the primary guarantor, for example, and that certificate could be counter-signed by a certificate from other organizations, such as governments, who want to "mark your card" as one of their citizens, granting you the protections normally written on a passport.

It's not easy to get some of these certification authorities to guarantee your bona fides. You need often as much verification as you do to get a passport with other trusted people verifying who you are and so on. But you would not need to give these data to the poroous security mechanisms of the state which has proved beyond any reasonable doubt that they cannot keep the information secure, nor does it offer the other benefit of a private contract - the ability to sue the ass off them if they damage your reputation or security by losing your data - or the corporate incentive of only being able to make a profit if you actually deliver on what people expect of you.

And you also get a choice of how strong you want the certification to be. If it's only guaranteeing small personal trades for example, you may only need to spend a few pounds and fill in a quick web form, validate your address and you're in business. If you want to travel overseas, or deal in bigger sums, or trade with distant counterparties, you may want stronger levels of guarantee and pay accordingly. It's a global standard pretty well too. So you'd have no problems using it to prove your identity in all sorts of applications - travel, trade, opening a bank account, starting a company, getting insurance, benefits, accessing what little data about you the state actually needs and so on - none of which would need to be on any single central database owned by a bunch of data-incontinents like the government is proving to be with the attendant dangers of losing all your data at once.

So, you see, we no longer even need governments to help us prove who we are. And in fact they appear to be singularly bad at doing so. The threat inherent in this is that the currently all powerful state needs to be able to do this, or it loses control of its citizens. And they are shit scared of that. If we are not mindful, in their lust to maintain that power they will get immensely more authoritarian and intrusive. The time is coming when we will no longer need them. We must do all we can to hasten that day before they get their claws in too deep into these emerging trust mechanisms.

Following the revelation of yet more utter incompetence in government data handling the BBC asks...

Well, I posited a suggestion ten years ago now when I was on the Lib Dems' Civil Liberties Policy Working Group. At the time ID cards were but an evil glint in Liar, Liar, Tony Bliar's eyes but there was a clear feeling that they were pushing in that direction. But it was mainly in response to issues such as Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and government wanting more and more surreptitious access to data already held about us and our activities.

My suggestion was that if government felt the need to keep all this data on us, the very least they could do would be to put us in charge of how and when it was accessed. We could all have an encryption key - it need not even be supplied by government - you could purchase one perhaps from Thawte or someone like that if, when, you decided you could not trust the government.

Two encryption keys would be required any time any bureaucrat or official decided they wanted to take a peek at any data the government held identifying you as the subject. A bit like a "nuclear key" where you need two people to turn the key for anything to work, the official would have their own key which would identify them as the person trying to access the data and check they were authorized to do so, and they would have to be in contact with the data subject, you, and, like a bank call centre does when they phone you would have to authenticate they were dealing with the real you by getting you to enter some of your PIN or similar before they'd get access.

Every government database system that held any data on individuals could have to go through an annual independent audit to ensure there was no inbuilt mechanism for bypassing such a security measure or, for example, copying data en masse with personal identifiers in. The system could be extended, voluntarily, to any organization that holds personal data - such as banks - if they felt it was more effective than creating their own, and the whole principle could be embedded in Data Protection legislation (not that the presence of Data Protection legislation stops the government currently breaking their own laws).

Remember, it's not so very long ago that when you submitted your tax return each part of it, or schedule, would be dealt with by a different official so that no one person could actually gain a picture of what you were worth. We need to return to that culture. Modern technology is great stuff, or it can be. But at the moment the culture seems to be to assume that systems ought to be intrusive rather than actively looking for ways as part of systems specifications to maintain the benefits of fast modern communications and data (for there are many) whilst not being intrusive. Witness the debate about road pricing - "eye in the sky spies" or "black box" systems that don't need to transfer data about your movements, only about your overall journey for the purpose of billing.

Would it grind government to a halt? Perhaps, though in saying that the former tax regime was entirely paper based and so much more troublesome and it didn't exactly collapse then and banks and other large data processing organizations use similar technology and still operate reasonably efficiently. Would government grinding to a halt be a terribly bad thing in any case I wonder?

But, whether the data is about criminals, child benefit recipients or recruits to the armed forces, this current government has proven itself utterly incapable of managing data, or perhaps just contemptuous of our rights. Personally, I doubt any other party's government would be doing much better - contempt for the citizen is embedded in Whitehall and Westminster, but Straw and Smith should resign over this latest data loss immediately. Resign and be tried as any data controller be would with such brazen data losses under their watch. Enough is enough. These bastards need to get out of our lives, or perhaps some day we will collectively decide we need to make them butt out, forcibly.

Thales, the successor to Thomson CSF, has won the first contract to start the design process for the National Identity Register which will be the more sinister side of the whole ID card system. For those of us committed to opposing ID cards and the NIR at every opportunity and wanting a way to boycott suppliers this presents a challenge. Many of the possible suppliers of course are not ones with big "brand names" you can easily boycott. Thales itself is mostly a government contractor, making war machines. And they are nearly a quarter owned by the French state. Both of these in my opinion make their appointment even worse (not because it is French, per se, but because it is partly controlled by a foreign state, however currently friendly that state may be).

But they do make, through their Thomson media subsidiary, a few things we can target. They are, for example the largest or perhaps sole supplier of the BT Homehub kit (and its equivalent from Orange). They also do an awful lot of facilities stuff for film, advertising and television (they own the Thorn EMI filming facilities firm), but it will always be quite difficult to find out which programs, films or advertisers are using them.

So the main real consumer product they can be identified with is Homehub. So, if you happen to be a BT subscriber and use one of those sexy boxes, maybe it's time to switch your communications provider?

(They also make set-top digital TV boxes and DVD equipment if you want to do some more digging around).

If, as the media and certain politicians seem to want us to believe, we have a "broken society " (whatever on earth that might actually mean), surely it is just reflecting how "broken" its leadership, government, has become. And I don't mean just the current Labour government. I mean government as an institution, even our democracy itself, if you will.

The state and its agents and those who act with its protection have routinely perpetrated force, violence and coercion, against their own citizens, against other countries, for aeons. The whole model is based on us surrendering some of our personal sovereignty. Some would no doubt rather say "pool" than "surrender" but look around you; "pooling" implies much more of a consensual relationship than reality attests to.

From cradle to grave, as they once promised, the state imposes itself on our lives and choices by more or less coercion. From compulsion in education, via criminalizing consensual or victimless behaviour (even thoughts and opinions) and right through to prosecuting wars "in our name", commanding our young men and women to kill or be killed. And most of all perhaps through taxation - it never hurts as hard as on the pocket!

In turns the state seems to infantilise and nanny us, to absolve us of personal responsibilities, and then, moralizing, blame us for all our own ills. Those who would rule us cynically play on our fears and talk up our aspirations according to their need to gain and retain power. And a tiny minority of us in our broken system can make or break that power for them, so have disproportionate influence over our fellow citizens.

That this has always gone on need hardly be stated. The biggest mystery, as Milton Friedman said, is why human-kind seems collectively to submit to authority - especially remarkable really when you consider that every step of human advance has actually arisen from someone stepping beyond the current conventions, bending the rules, exceeding the norm.

Supposedly benign regimes create instruments to comfort us, to fool us into thinking they are prepared to limit their own authority, whether we call them Geneva Conventions, Human Rights Acts or Data Protection, and then seem to break their own principles when it suits them, call it Guantanamo, pre-charge detention and control orders or ID cards and state databases.

It is often said that ("successful") politicians display many characteristics of psychopathy. How much more "broken" can we get than to submit ourselves to being ruled and represented by smooth talking, self centered, pathological liars? How much more scary than that such people have their hands on both our wallets and on the nuclear triggers? Is it any wonder that life on some of our streets can be vicious?

The Home Affairs Select Committee has apparently published a report suggesting that we may be wandering unaware into a Surveillance State. Just where have these people been for the last decade and more?

When I was on Oxford City Council we used to receive applications for new CCTV cameras and we were often cautious about permitting them. To be fair to the Greens on the council at the time it was usually they who made most noise about the civil liberties connotations (maybe they were on the wrong side of the "If you have nothing to hide" argument!).

I also tried to have put into the council's constitution a condition to make any surveillance under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (the one that the newspapers are now braying that councils are using to snoop on dogs shitting not terrorist catching - for which it was never explicitly intended) subject to scrutiny and approval of elected councillors and not just officers, at whatever level.

Around the time the News of the Screws started campaigning for "Sarah's Law" in 2000 already there were academics implanting their daughters with chips to find out where they were all the time and already there were people, including me, questioning this as an invention that ought to be lost because of the implcations for civil liberties.

It is not just astonishing, but a dereliction of their duties in my opinion, that those who purport to represent and lead us at the highest level of government to have taken till summer of 2008 to come up with a similar suggestion, that we are sleepwalking into an all pervasive surveillance state. Absolutely amazing.

This need not be a case of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted though. Much of the technology is, at least superficially, comforting, with its claims to be able to prevent crime or find our loved ones in trouble, and much of it has benign application as well as potential for abuse. More importantly it's not a good reason to get all neo-Luddite about technology.

Surveillance can and is used to protect public safety for instance that need not be able to identify individuals at all. You can monitor the flow of crowds, such as might have prevented the Hillborough disaster, through thermal imaging (indeed it's easier for a computer to pick up just body temperature hotspots in order to be able to enforce, say, a safe numerical capacity in a building or trace someone missing in an emergency, than it is for them to pick up visible light images with less contrast in the image).

Databases can and are used to enhance our experience of all sorts of services without being linked to any super database providing nefarious users access to all data anyone holds on a person. And modern communications can and are used to ensure timely delivery of information that will help us, even save our lives, without needing to be centralized.

Even tracking systems can and are used to help us find our way around, or even to help others find us if we are in trouble, without actually tracking our every move when we don't need them.

So why is it that when this technology is touched by the heavy hand of government it nearly always seems that it is being used against us?

Well first of course, Lord Acton's dictum applies. And information is power. Those who seek power over us, seek information by which to maintain that power. Because even with the best will in the world, they think they know best, and what's best of all is if they manage to stick around to implement it. There can be no other explanation for o'erleaping political ambition.

Second, they are easily corruptible in this search for power, whether it be over individuals or power over whole markets and systems - which "progressives" at least seem to feel they require in order to enable their interventionist policies of "robbery" and "redistribution". With nearly half of the nation's income to spend, government is a huge target for someone to sell their "stuff". If some of the comments about it are true, the Lib Dems, with their latest road pricing policy, on which more in another post , have fallen victim to this. Companies who invest in technology want to make money out of that technology. If they can use it to land a great big fat government contract they have hit the jackpot.

Third, I always reckon that the people who "integrate" the individual technologies of others, mostly morally neutral and benign, don't much care about the outcomes beyond their own "problem domain". They too are after making a bit of money by finding innovative ways of putting others' work to use. And that means being "first to market" with the ideas. Corners are cut. In the process of producing something useful first to get that sale, they don't have to think too much about consequences outside of their own field. They are only selling a database system. It's the uses it is put to or what it is mixed with, out of their control, that can make it intrusive or benign, and that is for the future to boot.

Now don't get me wrong. I am an optimist about most modern technology. Because of modern communications methods and the sharing of certain data, I do believe we are entering an epoch in which discovery of all sorts will be speeded up. Cures for diseases will be discovered in double time. Technology that will enable the poorest third of the world at last to access some of the benefits of the past couple of hundred years, or education, health care, industry and the growth of material wealth, even to ensure they have enough to eat. That our ability to communicate, and trade with, individuals and enterprises right around the planet has the ability to spread wealth and peace more widely than ever before. That it is about to unleash a truly "giant leap for mankind".

But that threatens government. It threatens those who, having attained power, need to justify their own existence, and expense accounts. But the good news is that the market, the producers and integrators of those technologies still have to make money. So they continue developing, and this is where our influence can come in. Our pressure, our reaction to their previous attempts, can shape the factors that will go into their next research. At some point, perhaps when they understand that the technology has only made a minute difference, opinion will swing against the untrammelled benefits of CCTV and the manufacturers will look for ways of delivering the benefits without the snooping.

And it's up to those of us with half an interest in the technology, amateur or professional, to think for ourselves and propose possible solutions that resolve the problems we ourselves have with the systems currently on offer. Those whose job it is to scrutinise and hold government to account cannot be trusted to do so if it has taken them all this time to state what has been bloody obvious to anyone with all synapses firing.

Most of all, it is government itself that is the problem. To roll back the surveillance state, we need to roll back the state itself. Never before have governments had so much power over us. Yet they continually fail to make the differences they promise at election time. It's time we woke up to this and stopped listening to their spin, excuses and lies and stopped putting our trust in them.

Tristan points us to companies we might like to boycott who are now on he shortlist for contracts related to the ID cards and database:

ID Cards - companies to boycott:

El Reg gives us the list of companies able to bid for the ID cards contracts.
They are:

Accenture - BAE Systems - CSC - EDS - Fujitsu - IBM - Steria - Thales

Other ways to fight the ID card madness

After all, I would have thought that there are sound commercial reasons not to get involved. If a national ID cards scheme goes ahead there will be less scope for competition for creating computerised trust mechanisms in future. Of course the ones that get the contract will be in the money - at least until costs spiral and they get squeezed as with the NHS systems - but the losers will be locked out of ID and trust type systems for as long as the national scheme operates I'd suggest.

PS - I see from my logs that this post has made it onto some Accenture daily list of "negative" comments about them .  Good!  But to set your minds at rest, what I mean by "mass action" is shareholder action, using any influence we have in other organizations to get them not to do business with the companies who hope to be involved with the ID Cards, persuading like minded antiID card employees to not get involved and so on.  NOT Speak style attacks on executives, oh dearie me no!