Private Details

Well, here's a thing: the Minister of Unfitness for Purpose has decided that the Surveillance Makes You Free project, as currently conceived, is unfit for purpose. The original plan was to have an entirely new record system, "in order to avoid contamination from errors in existing database files on individuals"; but since, according to the Minister, "doing something sensible is not necessarily a U-turn", the information on the database will now be split between computers at the Department for Work and Pensions, the department of immigration, passports and virtually voluntary ID-cards, and the Department of Unfitness for Purpose itself. This is "lower risk, more efficient and faster", and in any case the scheme "will evolve over time" as the three separate departments each "adjust the details of this action plan as required by experience". Why bother trying to avoid errors when one can simply wait for them to happen and adjust matters accordingly?

The Minister said, again, that the scheme would help secure Britain's borders against people without ID cards; tackle illegal immigration by people who do not apply for ID cards; reduce fraud until someone learns how to forge ID cards; fight crime and terrorism by those terrorists and criminals who carry the correct ID cards; and improve protection for children at risk of being stopped in the street by police and ordered to produce their ID cards. As so often , the rightness of the scheme is placed beyond doubt by the wrongness of those who have misgivings about it: "No one who opposes introduction of identity management," proclaimed the Minister of Unfitness for Purpose, "can truly claim to treat these subjects as seriously as they claim to do."

A consultation paper will be published in the new year; and once any frivolous objections by those consulted have been appropriately ignored, sixty-nine regional identity management centres will be established across the country so that human resources can offer their "biometric and iris details" for low-risk, fast and efficient processing by one or other, or all three, of the computers involved, perhaps with some help from the private sector. In order to prevent hacking, none of the three parts of the database will not be connected to the internet; so, a few inevitable adjustment experiences aside, the details will be available only to those involved in securing Britain's borders, tackling illegal immigration, reducing fraud, fighting crime, protecting children or claiming to prevent terrorism. And to the private sector, of course.