Great article on FOIA

Heather Brooke wrote an excellent article on our FOIA, and its imminent gutting, for our friends across the Pond.

A prescient short story

This pretty much accords with my own view – that we are sleep-walking not into some malicious Nazi or Communist hell, but rather an equally oppressive (albeit well-intentioned) faceless bureacratic mass-surveillance nightmare.

Chilling!

Kafkaesque

“an auctorial descriptive which is used to describe concepts, situations, and ideas which are reminiscent of the literary work of Prague writer Franz Kafka, particularly his novel The Trial and his novella The Metamorphosis.” – Wikipedia.

In the Trial a man wakes up one morning to be arrested and subjected to legal proceedings for an unspecified crime.

Christopher Booker wrote a very similar article for the Sunday Telegraph to one in a recent Private Eye, about a farmer who has been all but destroyed by unaccountable bureaucracy, for a ‘crime’ that remains unspecified.

In 2005 Cheshire trading standards officials, acting for Defra (one hopes Cheshire’s taxpayers do not mind officials whose salaries they pay acting for a government department) began a long series of visits, to inspect the documentation required for Mr Dobbin’s cattle under EC rules. The more they attempted to check the animals’ eight-digit ear tags against their EC “cattle passports”, the more they claimed to have found “irregularities”, although they failed to explain how many or what these were.

Last November, on Defra’s instructions, the officials seized all Mr Dobbin’s passports, making it illegal for him to move animals off his farm and all but wiping out his income. Last month, serving him with a “notice to identify”, they removed his herd to another farm, stating that, under EC regulation 494/98, it was their intention to destroy all 567 animals.

Dating back to the BSE panic, this diktat says that “if the keeper of an animal cannot prove its identification in two working days, it shall be destroyed without delay” and “without compensation”. These powers, as I noted when the regulation was issued in 1998, were unprecedented. Nevertheless the regulation permits officials to destroy only animals that cannot be identified. Defra has never claimed that the paperwork for most of Mr Dobbin’s cows was not in order, only that the officials had found “what they believed to be an unacceptable level of non-compliance with the regulations”, and that this “could have serious implications for the protection of the human food chain”.

Less than an hour before slaughter was due to begin, Mr Dobbin’s combative Liverpool lawyer, David Kirwan, got a High Court injunction, giving the cows a stay of execution. He also won leave from Mr Justice Goldring for judicial review, on the grounds that Defra was acting beyond its powers. But this month, as the injunction expired, Defra insisted that, unless Mr Dobbin could prove the identification of every one of his animals, they must still be destroyed. Since all his passports, the most obvious means of identification, had been confiscated, this was impossible.

Defra told the court that Mr Dobbin would instead have to provide DNA identification for each animal, within two days. This would have been technically impossible, even if Defra had not moved the cows elsewhere and refused him access.

The need to proceed with the slaughter, Defra argued, was urgent, because it had no resources to look after the cattle properly, causing severe “animal welfare” problems. The judge felt he had little option but to give the go-ahead, and on March 8 and 9 the cows were destroyed.

All Mr Dobbin can now hope for is that the judicial review may confirm that Defra acted outside the law. The officials agreed in court that they had never used these powers on anything like such a scale before. It has not been claimed that Mr Dobbin’s animals posed any health risk (BSE this year is down to a single case). His only alleged offence was “non-compliance” with complex bureaucratic procedures, to an extent which Defra still cannot specify. For this he has seen his livelihood go up in smoke, without a penny in compensation.

It seems absolutely and fundamentally wrong that someone can be ‘punished’ for a ‘crime’ that the state cannot specify.

ID myths

The Home Office Identity & Passport Service has made a web page that attempts to dispel some myths surrounding the ID card plans.

You’ll have to carry a card

You will not have to carry an ID card, although you may find it simple and convenient to do so. In fact the Act specifically prohibits making the carrying of an ID card compulsory.

I can’t see where it says that. Regardless, a key part of our constitution is that Parliament is not bound by its predecessors.  In other words, Parliament could pass a law making it compulsory to carry an ID card.

The police can demand to see your card

The police have no new powers associated with the scheme and they will not be able to stop you and demand to see your card.

See above.

The money could be better spent on other public services

70% of the costs incurred will be spent in any event on necessary security enhancements to passports. There is no ‘pot of money’ which could be spent on other things like ‘bobbies on the beat’ or prisons. Other than some of the initial setup costs, the scheme will be funded, as with passports, mainly through fees charged to those applying.

Of course if you asked them to prove it they would respond that they cannot answer on the grounds of commercial confidentiality!

I wonder how much the passport system would cost if there was no central database (National Register) storing all the information given by Schedule 1 of the Identity Cards Act. Surely all we need to know is that the passport is not fake, and that the holder is the person to whom the passport is issued.

Regardless, however the government obtains it, it remains taxpayers’ money – whether the money comes from the public purse or the individual pocket at the point of sale, it is money that could otherwise be spent on the police or prisons.

The database will know everything about you

Only basic personal information will be held to prove your identity – such as name, nationality, age, address and gender.

The use of the word ‘basic’ and the examples following ‘such as’ is is disingenuous at best.

The types of information that may be stored are given in Schedule 1 of the Act, and it is a much more extensive list than just your name, nationality, age, address and gender. For example: “(a) particulars of every occasion on which information contained in the individual’s entry has been provided to a person; (b) particulars of every person to whom such information has been provided on such an occasion; (c) other particulars, in relation to each such occasion, of the provision of the information”.

In summary:

• every name you’ve ever been known by;
• every address you’ve ever lived at;
• every immigration status you’ve ever held;
• a photograph of your face; your fingerprints;
• the number of every official identity document issued to you, such as driving licences, passports, visas, etc; and,
• the details of every occasion on which your identity is checked, and who it was checked by, and thus a record of, for example, each time you register with a doctor/clinic, sign up for benefits, enroll your kids in a state school, access any public services to which you have to prove entitlement, open a bank account, apply for a credit card or take out a mortgage.

By the way, when you are interrogated interviewed on applying for your first passport (and presumably the process will be similar for identity cards) you will be expected “to know answers from a pool of around 200 questions about [your] ancestry, financial history and previous addresses.”

This is no different to what is already held by the public sector, e.g. for issuing National Insurance numbers and driving licences.

Well, it is different, the information is currently held in separate databases, and it is (hopefully) limited to the purpose for which each database exists – a very important Data Protection principle, albeit an inconvenient one.

So important, in fact, that it is mentioned in Schedule 1 of the Data Protection Act 1998: “Personal data shall be obtained only for one or more specified and lawful purposes, and shall not be further processed in any manner incompatible with that purpose or those purposes. Personal data shall be adequate, relevant and not excessive in relation to the purpose or purposes for which they are processed”.

Unrelated information such as religious beliefs, tax and medical records cannot be held. In fact there are strict limits in the legislation which expressly prevent this.

Again, Parliament cannot bind its successors. Also note that in the other databases, such as those held by the NHS, DVLA and so on, there will be a record of your National Identity number. Bristol No2ID has posted an excellent explanation of why this is important.

ID cards can stop global terrorism and crime

No-one has ever claimed ID cards are a panacea for global terrorism or crime. But we do know they will make a contribution to tackling crimes such as illegal working, money laundering and benefit fraud, which are enabled by the possession of multiple identities. Terrorists are known to use multiple identities to avoid detection and hide their activities. ID cards will make it much harder for criminals to build up multiple fraudulent identities by securely linking one person’s identity with one set of unique biometrics.

You hope.

An ID card will cost £300

This figure is complete nonsense. The relevant cost of the ID card is the premium over the cost of a standard British biometric passport, currently £66. An ID card will add less than £30 cost on top of that. This is less than £3 per year over a ten-year card life.

You hope. We do not yet know how much the scheme will cost – the estimate is over £5bn over ten years, but we all know what happens to government IT projects – costs tend to spiral. The cost of £300 is an estimate in an independent report produced by the London School of Economics.

If the Government already has a lot of info on me, why do we need an id card?

You are right that whether it is medical records, or information about your driving licence – the Government does hold information about individuals on specific issues. As do many private companies from Sky to Tesco.

Private companies are covered by the Data Protection Act but the IPS (and Government) has been made exempt from the DPA in some ways. Furthermore, it is voluntary to give your information to Sky and Tesco, but it is made quite clear in the Act that the Government can compel you to register, and the Government has made it clear that in the future they plan to compel people to register once enough of the population has already done so.

But what the Government does not have, and nor do you, is a fail proof system

Of course the Identity Card and National Register scheme will not provide a fail proof system either!

that can prove you really are who you say you are. The long established ways of linking us to our identity – a signature or a photograph – are no longer enough. ID cards will link your basic personal information to something uniquely yours – like the pattern of your iris,

Irises have been dropped from the plans at present.

your face shape

Presumably they are talking about the photograph of your face here – facial recognition is not part of the public plans at present.  Indeed facial recognition isn’t very good at present.

or your fingerprint. It will protect your identity from people fraudulently claiming to be you and make it easier for you to prove your identity when you need to – like opening a bank account, moving house, applying for benefits or starting a job.

Most identity fraud is ‘customer-not-present’ fraud. Difficult to see how the identity card will prevent that.

Also, as the intention is that the card be the Gold Standard of identification, it seems conceivable that criminals will invest a lot in attempting to abuse the system. How this abuse will be prevented and dealt with has not been discussed in public.

ID’ll be alright on the night

The Commons, 19 February 2007:

Liam Byrne (Minister of State, Home Office) Link to this | Hansard source

…

We will put in place two systems in order to underpin the national identity register. One is the DWP’s CIS [Customer Information System] index, which is a tried and tested system and operates at very high volumes. The second is the new biometric warehouse. The link between the two will establish one single record in both systems. That is the right approach because it is lower risk and will make it possible to bring the project in in a shorter time. The system will use tried and tested technology. …

The DWP has a ‘known faults‘ with CIS webpage.

Among the various faults are those that tend to occur at ‘peak times’ (between 8am and 10am).

In other words it doesn’t operate without fail at very high volumes.

Also, information is occasionally displayed in the wrong areas.

I wonder how many more faults will be introduced when the CIS ‘underpins’ the National Identity Register, and how frequently they (and old faults) will occur, for instance, when people try to look up their JobSeeker’s Allowance, apply for identity cards or passports, or when the system counts us entering or leaving the country.

I wonder if on attempting to enter or leave the country we will be asked to “try again later”.

As far as I’m aware, none of this has been publicly discussed.