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MyLifeMyID - The UK governments database state footbullet.
Lave II
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Why are young people treated like idiots?
So the UK ID card scheme is a backdoor scheme to create one of the world most complete databases that spies on every aspect of your nature.
So way back when a leaked report detailed that the Government had plans to "coerce" the public into excepting the scheme. And that the first step was to persuade the young.
And that plan has started today with Home Secretary Jacqui Smith launching MyLifeMyID.org a horrible handsfisted attempt to link the ID card with "being able to prove your age."
It's awesome because they've assumed that "Teh kidz" are stupid, and being bombarded by rational, thoughtout opposition. The basic level of propaganda and persuading makes alliwantforxmasisapsp look like Shakespeare.
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith biggin it up
We are on the cusp of an important time, today is the vote for David Davis, who resigned over the threats to our liberty by the Database state and 42 detention without trial.
Hell even Geldoff thinks it's going to far.
So yeah, we should care D&D, because I put it to you we are walking into an orwellian society, to such an extent that overblown language like this sentence, no longer seem that ridiculous.
TL; DR - So yeah, a thread for discussing the issue of Liberty (or the lack of it) in the UK
So the UK ID card scheme is a backdoor scheme to create one of the world most complete databases that spies on every aspect of your nature.
So way back when a leaked report detailed that the Government had plans to "coerce" the public into excepting the scheme. And that the first step was to persuade the young.
And that plan has started today with Home Secretary Jacqui Smith launching MyLifeMyID.org a horrible handsfisted attempt to link the ID card with "being able to prove your age."
It's awesome because they've assumed that "Teh kidz" are stupid, and being bombarded by rational, thoughtout opposition. The basic level of propaganda and persuading makes alliwantforxmasisapsp look like Shakespeare.
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith biggin it up
We are on the cusp of an important time, today is the vote for David Davis, who resigned over the threats to our liberty by the Database state and 42 detention without trial.
Hell even Geldoff thinks it's going to far.
So yeah, we should care D&D, because I put it to you we are walking into an orwellian society, to such an extent that overblown language like this sentence, no longer seem that ridiculous.
TL; DR - So yeah, a thread for discussing the issue of Liberty (or the lack of it) in the UK
Lave II on
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I get enough spam as it is.
A farce of 1984 proportions.
My inbox has been constantly filled with illegal, unsolicited emails from the Governement.
The Government are also using my tax money to fund free marketing for the following brands:
Super Mario
Finding Nemo
Dilbert
Powerpuff Girls
Sonic the Hedgehog
and Batman
The forum code is terrible, up until a few minutes ago they were ordering posts with the oldest at the top. It frequently shows signatures twice, and the post ordering is in no way conducive to debate. The whole operation is geared towards being as spinable as possible, and aparently lots of threads (coincidentally the most controversial ones) have been 'disappearing'.
This government can't even put together a stable forum but they want us to trust them with a centralised database of our sensitive personal information?
A great example of sliding purposes is the Swedish PKU register. PKU or phenylketonuria is a genetic disorder, and since 1975 all new-borns in Sweden have had blood samples taken and stored in the PKU register for medical research, with stringent laws saying that this gigantic DNA database can only be used for medical research.
Now the current administration wants to hand that DNA database over to the police. And this is a sliding purpose.
Adding more insult to injury: currently you can simply send a letter with your name, SSN and some info about your mother and request to have your data removed from the PKU database and any tissue samples destroyed. A few weeks after that became public, the politicians now want to remove the option of removing yourself from the database.
Now, personally I don't consider ID cards to be bad, but then again I live in hippie commie pinko socialist Sweden. The only times I have to wave my ID card is when I want to buy alcohol, or to prove my identity at the post office to pick up deliveries for me.
How do you pronounce that?
Most people don't have a problem with the ID card per se, but with the idea of a huge government-maintained database storing all of your personal info.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
The by-election isn't a meaningful way of over-turning 42 day detention. Firstly, it can't stop the Counter-Terrorism Bill, which probably wouldn't make it through the House of Lords anyway. Secondly, the Conservatives have a massive advantage in the polls nationally, it's a traditionally safe Conservative seat and Davis faces no credible opposition, so the by-election is a meaningless waste. Besides, didn't David Davis vote to extend detention to 28 days in the first place?
A better way of getting your message across would have been to write to your local MP, rather than going to a website designed to promote ID cards.
The website isn't run by the government, but by Virtual Surveys, an online market research company.
Could either of you explain how Britain is anything like an Orwellian society before you get hauled off to Room 101?
I don't I said anything about Britain being like an Orwellian, but their is a grey area between Joyville, Happyland and 1984, and this kind of thing is a shift towards a totalitarian government.
Glad to hear it.
What exactly is totalitarian about an optional ID card that uses information that is already standard in passports? I'll admit that I have misgivings about the Government being able to deal with this data securely in a cost-effective manner, but I have no problems with the principle.
See you are falling for it, it's techincally optional. But it isn't really. Thats the hook to get it passed. as echo say's it's sliding purposes.
Read this leaked document Summary and link to pdf here.
They need it to be optional to pass but then the government want to "coerce" people into joining, by making them "need it every day." Seriously read the pdf, it's fucking horrendous. A governemnent shouldn't try to coerce people. And it shouldn't use the word coerce.
And it's not info standard in passports. Because an optional form of ID with the infomation of a passport is a passport. This will have over 50 pieces of information on you.
There is complete missunderstanding about what it will actually have because, it's in constant flux to get it passed. Then they can extend it.
Do you know for instance that Gordon Brown wanted it your database entery to keep a record of everything you buy? That will come back. Once it's present, it will grow and grow.
Seriously, read the pdf.
2009 is a year of Updates - one every Monday. Hopefully. xx
On a side-note, a show on the TV the other night showed an awesome device: a portable fingerprint scanner. The police at the scene press a person's hand to it and the machine communicates with HQ to display that person's criminal record and any outstanding warrants or details.
And the great thing about a DNA database is that with a really, really, really good DNA sample, you are going to get an accuracy of about 99.8% which means that when you run it against your national database of 60 million you only get 120,000 exact matches. Of course if we pretend it's 99.99% accurate you've still got 6,000 perfect matches.
Brilliant.
Oh that and it destroys the magna carta's innocent till proven guilty schtick - but you know, no biggie..
2009 is a year of Updates - one every Monday. Hopefully. xx
2009 is a year of Updates - one every Monday. Hopefully. xx
Insidious
Hypothetically, anyway.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Can you link me some stories? I'm pretty sure you're right, but can't remember the details of any at the moment. Like any new technology, the police and the CPS get a bit overexcited at first, thinking they've got something that will make them not have to do any detectoring any more. Adding everyone / more non-convicted people to the database would cut down on conviction relying too heavily on DNA evidence, of course.
Yeah. Properly used, DNA checks can be really useful. If the check narrows it down to one of 6000 people, that means that either you or a relative have their genetic blueprints all over the evidence, or else they're really freaking unlucky. If everything else points to you having done it, plus the DNA is a match, that's a whole lot of "really unlucky" to account for.
But people are dumb, and think that DNA match = he definitely did it, no questions asked, even when it's explained to them. And since juries are, last I checked, composed of people, the use of DNA evidence becomes a risky proposition.
Exactly but, finding a suspect, then checking their DNA against the sample, and finding a match means your candidate has a high likelyhood of being guilty.
But running your sample against a database, and then searching those hits for the one most likely to be guilty (nearest etc) means your candidate has a very low likelyhood of being guilty.
A DNA database paradoxely makes DNA evidence worth less because the Police lose the abilty to show they didn't just single him out, and then find evidence to back them up.
It's very worrying.
2009 is a year of Updates - one every Monday. Hopefully. xx
I don't have any stories. Right now, DNA evidence is more likely to exonerate somebody than lead to a false conviction, because in order to compare DNA evidence to a suspect you have to have already brought the suspect in on other evidence.
However, if there were a centralized DNA database, then one possible abuse might be law enforcement data-mining the database for DNA that matches evidence found at the scene of a crime. Then they start brining people in, based on that DNA evidence.
The latter process opens up the possibility of a false positive where the former (and current) process does not. It's not a foregone conclusion that such false positives would occur, or that they would lead to convictions, but it is something to be very very careful of IMO.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Davis may have a lot of views I don't like but he has redeemed himself with this one. That is why I donated to his campaign. Besides, when was the last time you saw a politician make a stand in this country about something like this? And fuck off with the whole "waste of money by-election angle" - a couple of million quid is a small price to pay to make us actually sit down and debate this issue properly before it gets passed. Nothing else was working, Brown bribed it through the Commons, so if not on this, then when exactly should a politician ever do anything about anything?
2009 is a year of Updates - one every Monday. Hopefully. xx
Huh, I never even knew of this. *reads more*
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This is what goes on in the FRA debate in Sweden. We opponents don't care what you say you will use the law for. We care about what the law can be used for. Who is to say that an administration ten years from now won't use the surveillance framework already set in place for crushing political dissent?
Agreed.
Further, why give the Government powers that 1) they have no need for and 2)when they don't already use the stupidly wide powers they already have
Exactly, one of the problems was that Labour was hiding the issues with ID cards and 42 days. For instance, when they had to announce that the ID card plan had gone a 400million quid over budget they withheld it for three weeks later than they were supposed to.
Why? So they could bury the news by releasing it on the day that Blair resigined, knowing it wouldn't be covered. (source: here)
Nick Clegg and the Lib dems, went nuts over this, but did you hear about it? Probably not.I only remember because I blogged about it at the time. By resigning Davis is making us talk about it now. So he succeeded.
2009 is a year of Updates - one every Monday. Hopefully. xx
This is an incredibly concise position statement.
Is all political discourse in Sweden so concise?
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Exactly this is the real, real issue here. And depressingly saying this makes people (in the UK at least) call you a crack pot. Laws need to be designed so they can't be misused, and they are no longer being.
I mean most people in the UK who agree with 42 days detention are doing so because they believe it will be used against guilty people who aren't like them, and most likely a different skin color.
They can't seem to understand that it means that anyone can be held for 42 days without any evidence. And that includes them. But no you'll just get the editor of the Sun going - "I don't care if you lock them up for 420 days!" whilst failing to understanding that "them" means every-fucking-one and not just scary muslims.
2009 is a year of Updates - one every Monday. Hopefully. xx
If it is, I want to live there.
Additionaly this applies to databases too. This is why places that had people like the Stasi, no longer keep any data they don't have too, because they know how it can be used. Whilst idiot brits keep it all because we think 'that could never happen here'
2009 is a year of Updates - one every Monday. Hopefully. xx
It's a very common and a very inane statement. If any of our countries has a totalitarian government in the future, guess what the problem is? The totalitarian government. They'd just do whatever they want anyway.
It's having effective safeguards built into the system that prevents a totalitarian government from forming. We don't give any one person or one small group of persons unnecessary access to power. That's the whole point of checks and balances. I would argue that the same principle applies here.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Oh do come on. Look at how every totalitarian government has come to be. Hitler* slowly distorted his country into one that he was in total control of. The more your countries laws safe guard against that, the longer it takes the despot to take control.
*Anyone who mentions Godwins law during a discussion about totalitarian states and orwellian surviellance can fuck the right off.
2009 is a year of Updates - one every Monday. Hopefully. xx
National IDs are coming with or without the government. Businesses want them, and more importantly, consumers want them. Do you know why our SSNs here in the U.S. became so valuable? They were originally just designed so that we could track one's contributions to SS throughout their life to ensure they got their retirement when they got old enough. But holy jeepers, how valuable was it for business and consumers to know that there was a unique ID assigned to every citizen that could be verified by a business? How many things are SSNs now used for that have absolutely nothing to do with SS? Society took that number and grew it into an immensely valuable tool. The government provided the infrastructure to make it possible.
But the SSN isn't enough anymore. Businesses and consumers want more. Government agencies want more, too. Pictures, biometrics, age verification, purchasing power, travel, security, and so on. Cry all you want, it's coming.
The question is whether or not the government ought to play some role in standardizing and regulating society's desire to identify one another, and again, whether or not it is our government who is in the best position to provide a successful infrastructure to support it. I say hell yes. There are about 10,000 functions government has taken on that I wish they'd leave alone, but this particular collective need is something perfectly suited for public governance. Better them than a corporation. Better them than 40 different corporations, or 51 different states and districts, each with different rules and standards.
Let's worry about totalitarianism and rights abuses when we actually get any inkling that we are headed towards them, not just when a tool that society desperately wants for valid reasons might also be viewed as a potential tool for totalitarians and abusers. The military would be darn useful to a dictator, too. So would be financial institution systems. And jails. And a federal police force. And so on. That doesn't make them evil.
Except of course it being a extreme clever way to run a country. I'm not quite sure how to argue something that I personally see as being self evident.
In a democracy people of varying quality get elected. Often compelete dick heads get elected. Unlike a dictatorship, democracies enforce periodic elections to reset the system if a dick is in power.
The power for the elected head to be able to call martial law and halt elections would be a useful power in times of chaos, but the ability to misuse that power by a corrupt governement means that the law shouldn't exist.
Structures that are open to exploitation by totalitarian governments need to be very, very carefully considered, at avoided at all costs.
2009 is a year of Updates - one every Monday. Hopefully. xx