The trouble with setting up an Aunt Sally is that something is liable to get damaged.
In a letter to the Financial Times on Friday, Home Office Minister Meg Hillier expressed her view that anyone who thought the National ID card scheme was intended to stop card-less students from getting student loans should think again, and re-read David Blunkett's 2003 foreword to the paper setting out the scheme.
Of course, no-one has seriously suggested that the most significant risks inherent in the ID Card scheme have anything whatsoever to do with student loans - and arguably, the publication of his massive memoirs more than satisifed the desire of most people to read anything written by David Blunkett.
Ms Hillier goes on to say "Young people need to prove their identity more than most"... an assertion which is bizarre enough to deserve more detailed examination. What is it that young people do more than older people which requires them to prove their identity? If the answer is "air travel" or "applying for a passport" (at £72 a go), then no wonder they're worried at the prospect of not getting a student loan. Perhaps what Ms Hillier means is that young people are more likely than others to need to prove their age... which hints at a more serious problem.
As long as we are unable to separate the idea of 'proof of identity' from 'assertion of a specific attribute', we're doomed to a digital age in which identity-related assertions are indiscriminate, and result in the excessive disclosure of personal information. Ms Hillier may have been a bit rash to raise that notion while the HMRC breach is still so fresh in the public memory.
I have to be honest and admit that I haven't gone back to Mr Blunkett's foreword - but Ms Hillier's suggestion did have a happy side-effect. I found this
BBC News story from November 2006, in which "Mr Blunkett said the idea [of extensive audio surveillance of London's 2012 Olympic venues] echoed the fictional authoritarian Brave New World of Aldous Huxley's novel.
"As you walk down the street you expect to be able to have a private conversation," he said.
"If you can't guarantee that - and here is someone
speaking who has been pretty tough in terms of what should be available
to protect society - I believe we have slipped over the edge."
He said he hoped the government would not authorise it.
"There is an enormous difference between surveilling
people in terms of CCTV - where what you see is what anyone can see
walking down the road - and actually recording someone's private
conversations," he said."
I think it's great that a former Home Secretary thinks that our conversations in the street should be private. I haven't been able to find out what he thinks about bugging MPs when they talk to their constituents. The closing irony is that Babar Ahmed is only in prison right now because Mr Blunkett signed the UK up to the unilateral 'peremptory extradition' arrangement with the States.
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My dear Robin, your point is much too subtle for the Home Office.
Modern political theory doesn't understand the distinction between 'proof of identity' and 'assertion of a specific attribute'. To a politician, anyone under the age of 25 has an identity called "Young-Person", from which their expected behaviour and attitudes can be accurately predicted. All instances of Young-Person are interchangeable - that's why they all wear hoodies, drink asbopops, and hang around street corners making a nuisance of themselves.
In other words, the problem is not that these politicians (am I generalizing here - surely not!?) don't have a sufficiently subtle notion of identification, it's that they don't have a sufficiently robust notion of identity in the first place.
Posted by Richard Veryard on February 26, 2008 at 09:31 PM GMT+00:00 #