Horses and Stable Doors.
Sir Brian Barder’s blog Ephems latest posting “Jottings” refers to a letter written by Richard Newsom and published in the Guardian on 19th May. Mr Newsom on the proposed National Identity Card:
“The name itself is misleading. ID cards are merely the acceptable face of the government's real goal: a national identity database designed to allow the state to observe and log almost everything we do.”
What seems to be ignored is that most, if not all, the information that will be stored, and which so concerns Mr Newsom, is already available to the government, or will be available in the near future, on various departmental or other databases to which the goverment has access . And it’s a small technological challenge to enable all this information to be gathered together. That challenge, for all we know, may have been overcome. The Inland Revenue and H.M. Customs computers are already being linked. The police now have a computer system to identify a face in a crowd, and details stored on a biometric passport, could be used to compare those digitised faces. Vehicle number plates can be recognised by the same system.
Medical information is now routinely stored in digital form.
CCTV systems now routinely store large amounts of film in digitised form. The cost, which prevented routine storage, has plummeted over the past few years. More and more will be stored as the cost declines further.
posted by Tony @ Saturday, May 21, 2005
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