I’ve been struggling for months - well, vaguely wondering in my off-moments for months - to work why I find ID cards just plain wrong. I think - and I’m still not totally sure about this - that it’s about ownership. So, dear reader, let me take you on a journey through the brambles of my confused thinking and you can tell me if we end up in a sunlit glade or a dingy dell of despair. (You don’t have to stick with this, verbal garbage, by the way. Let’s be honest - it’s more for my benefit than yours. Still here? Okay, we’ll go on…)

The problem

The problem is this: My heart says the introduction of compulsory ID cards is fundamentally wrong. My head can’t capture this in a clear and convincing way. And when my head and heart disagree then it means I’ve not searched by heart deep enough. I’m never happy til they agree.

Also, I know a lot of people who say that ID cards, but can’t express why. Matthew Parris, long-unconstrained by parliamentary membership to have a free opinion on this matter, echoed my feelings on a recent airing of Any Questions. “I can find absolutely no logical reason why ID cards should not be introduced,” he said [from memory], “and I find the very idea of them absolutely abhorent to everything I stand for.” And got a huge round of applause from the audience.

I’m going to cut through the brambles first - all the spurious arguments - before I get to the “ownership” argument. That should help put it in context.

Wrong arguments against

So here are some anti-cards arguments that I just don’t buy:

• It’s a breach of privacy. My fingerprints, iris patterns and face just aren’t private. Everywhere I go I leave fingerprints; my face is visible to anyone I meet; and I don’t have the faintest idea about my iris patterns, so I don’t feel particularly precious about them. I wouldn’t feel bad about presenting a police office with a photo of me. If I wanted to hide that I’d go around with bag on my head (which, admittedly, some might say wouldn’t be a bad thing). I’m most annoyed by this argument, as it’s exactly what Liberty have said again and again, without ever justifying it. It’s not about privacy.
• It won’t cut benefit or tax fraud. Disagree - and another spurious argument put forward by Liberty. If all government departments actually used the same data, and referenced the same people in the same way using a single, central database then the chances of the same person claiming multiple and contradictory benefits (including tax claims) are massively reduced. As someone who’s job involves managing data and maintaining data integrity in the face of an world that works like a supermarket trolley, a single, central data source is just sensible - not using one is just inviting trouble.

Weak arguments against

Here are some anti-cards arguments that I do buy, but which I don’t think are sufficiently compelling to justify stopping them:

• They’ll foster discrimination. The reasoning here is that if the police (say) are empowered with stop-and-produce powers, compelling people to produce their ID card on demand, then they will inevitably be stopping obviously-minority people disproportionately more. You can be certain blacks will be stopped vastly more than whites. You can bet they’ll be way more card demands in Soho than Surrey. Can’t disagree with that, and it’s a bad thing. But this is more a compelling argument to manage the scheme properly and to eradicate institutional racism.
• The benefits are exaggerated, part I. A piece of plastic won’t stop a terrorist. True - you don’t need to be someone else to plant a bomb. If you’re a suicide bomber it doesn’t matter if you get on-board the train/plane as yourself. By the time they discover who did it, it’s too late. If you’re planning to buy bomb-making equipment and detonate it at a distance then it’s unlikely the criminal selling you the goods is going to worry about a full ID check first. But the cards will still help crime detection - just as any data will be an aid to the police.
• The benefits are exaggerated, part II. It won’t cut down illegal immigration as much as is claimed. If a nefarious employer is willing to treat you as a slave then they’re not going to worry about the niceties of identity checks and honest statements to the Home Office. But still, the cards will make it more difficult for those tempted towards this mode of employment.
• It’s impossible to make the data safe. We can assume that whatever system is used to run this, it will be compromised before it goes live. It will be complicated, it will need lots of people to commission it, and lots more to keep working on it. And every twist and turn is an opportunity for organised crime to exploit. But I’m not sure that’s a principled argument against ID cards. That’s an argument against it being so complicated - it’s not an argument against ID cards per se.
• Function creep. The danger here is that it’s all very well saying it’ll “just” hold minimal biometric data today, but once you’ve got the technology it’s use will grow like topsy. (Note to you: did you ever wonder where that phrase came from? It’s here. Note to self: never use that again.) Again, as someone who deals with the development of software systems, I’ve seen too many nifty little innovations get used well beyond their capacity for reliability. But again, this argument isn’t sufficient for me, because I’m against ID cards as they’re proposed, not as they might be.

It’s an ownership thing

After much soul-searching, I think the problem is this: the data is in exactly the wrong place, managed and owned by the wrong people.

This biometric data is essentially you, or me. And who does this data - your fingerprints, your iris patterns, your DNA structure - belong to? It’s you. And who holds this data? The government.

Now let’s be clear. I don’t want us to confuse the tips of your fingers with the information about them. But that data in the Big Government Database is going to be so core, so central to everything you are entitled to. Everything that concerns you is going to be linked back to it, so it is going to become definitive. It’s going to be the definitive reference to you, the working copy of you. It will be the practical substitute for the other you, because the other you happens to be out wandering round the shops at the moment, and isn’t available to help process your tax claim. It’s going to shuffle from screen to screen inside the Home Office, linked into documents from the Department for Work and Pensions, and it will include your fingerprints, and your iris scan, and will become a replacement you. And it’s managed by the government.

This isn’t like your money inside a bank. You can’t take your fingerprints back from the British government and give them to, say, the Swedish government because they’ve got a better interest rate or they’re offering a free pen for every citizen.

Who owns your fingerprints and your iris scan? The government. What if suddenly there’s an error in your fingerprint data? What if suddenly you discover a mismatch between what’s on the end of your fingers and what’s in the Big Government Database? What do you do? Walk into your high street branch of Home Office R Us? Okay, you can phone them up. (No, you can’t go to your local police station - they’re not going to take on extra staff for ID card management.) And why should the nice Home Office call centre operator believe you? After all their records show that you’re not the person on their records. All that data is built up against your history, your tax payments, your entitlements - and when it comes down to the wire, you can’t take it back. You don’t own it.

Really, I think centralisation of data is a very good thing. And if it was just your national insurance number and date of birth that would be fine. Because your national insurance number is just a reference number made up by the government, and they can keep their own number. And your date of birth is something you’d give out anyway, and you should have a copy of your birth certificate. But your fingerprint data has no purpose other than to make up a substitute-you. And you can’t access your fingerprint data without a scanner from… the government. Similarly for other biometric data. Their only purpose is to be a substitute-you, and once that data has been taken from you it’s out of your reach.

This - I think - I hope - will marry up my head and my heart.

Tags: data, idcards, ownership