Really Needed?
Imagine, your home is burgled, your prized possessions stolen, with no evidence left behind but a few fingerprints. Under the current system, those prints will be taken away for analysis to find a match on the Police National Computer (PNC), or if unsuccessful, kept on record for future cross-referencing. That’s the way things have been for many years under the idea of a system where someone is ‘innocent until proven guilty’.
However the Government wants to introduce National Identity cards, linked to a National Identity Register (NIR), with the power to hold up to fifty categories of information on each citizen ranging from the basic name and date of birth to biometric data such as fingerprints and iris scans. Whilst some may argue that this is a good idea, helping to reduce the problem of identity theft and terrorism, this brings Britain one step closer to a Police State where every citizen can be tracked and traced with nowhere to hide, so the average burglar (if not already on the PNC) could be caught and arrested much quicker than may happen under the current system.
Whilst you may think this is brilliant - offences can be solved faster, terrorism can be reduced easier, and identity theft could become a thing of the past, this will mean that personal, intimate, unalterable details of all 60+ million UK citizens as well as those of visitors’ to the UK, will be stored on a national database, the target of terrorists and hackers intent on causing national disruption, and this is only the start of it.
The database may sound promising, but with the Government’s track record of IT projects would you trust them with your personal information? How would you feel if your DNA record was mixed up with someone else’s so you were placed at the scene of a crime? Would you like the police knocking at your door, arresting you for a crime you didn’t commit and had no connection with? I know I wouldn’t.
Thankfully, the Government has now seen sense that rolling out a nationwide compulsory ID card system is impractical. However instead of completely dropping the idea, they are simply introducing it in phases. So instead of everything being over with and ID cards part of every day life by 2012/13, it will now be nearer 2017 when they become compulsory.
I, like many people, still can’t see the need for them. Will the benefits (if there really are any) outweigh the enormous drawbacks? I hope time doesn’t tell.