Bollocks on the News, Part I

So, there I am harmlessly slowly waking up and the unattractive figure of Jacqui Smith appears on the television.  We know that she shines an inefficient and low-wattage light even amongst the dim bulbs that are the current Cabinet but she was appalling this morning.  On ID Cards, of course.

So we are starting with compulsory issue - first to evil furriners (except EU furriners who, according to the Brussels collective, cannot be evil), then to airport workers, students (who, as we all know are smelly wasters, spending all their time drinking at the Union while skipping lectures) in 2010 and finally, once we have been immunised against it, all of us when we go and get our passports from 2011.  She did try to say that the latter two would be voluntary but, as it is the register not the card that is important, I don't believe here.  And nobody, not even airport workers, will need to carry it.

Unless, and I was taking notes by this point, you want to:

• Travel
• Get a bank account
• Get a loan
• Prove who we are to the police (Wat is going to be in real trouble)
• or buy property

And it will protect us against fraud.  Will it?  Only if we have checks against the NIR, using the biometric data on our ID cards, at every opportunity to commit fraud¹. Which is a problem, because every time our identity is checked against the NIR, the circumstances of that check will ne recorded on the NIR. This is going to make the NIR much larger and much, much busier, therefore, almost axiomatically, much more likely to contain incorrect information and much more likely to fall over.

And the vaunted biometrics, in a different database to the NIR² you know, is now just a digitised photograph and your fingerprints.  Ho, hum.   That will prevent terrorism, I know, Jacqui said so.

Not so - let's take an example.  The completely hypothetical Abdul al Innocent comes to the UK to go to University³. After 4 years of exposure to pictures of Jade Goody, walking around piles of chav vomit / vomiting chavs, and encouraged by sermons from the Archbishop of Canterbury, Abdul decides that Britain is doomed unless we are brought under Sharia law. He goes home to get a job (having entered as a student, he has difficulty converting his visa to a work one and he is law-abiding and not going to go on the run.)

Once home, he meets up with some radical Islamists after Friday prayers and he is, over a period of a few months, convinced by them that the best way to convince us of the right(eous)ness of Sharia law is a series of terrorist atrocities⁴. So, he applies for a work visa which is granted⁵. And he comes to the UK. He has, of course, already got an ID card and an entry on the NIR. His controllers provide him with a forged or fraudulent passport, let's make it French, for Jean le Terroriste. All of his dodgy activity; training, meeting with fellow activists, purchasing parts for his explosive waistcoat, are done by Jean - and on Jean's ID Card and recorded on Jean's NIR record. Before the final terrorist activity, Jean's ID card is shredded and the earnestly innocent Abdul goes to meet his raisins.  Game set match - all sorts of things could have caught Abdul but not ID Cards.

1. And as the banks found out with Chip & Pin, all that will do is drive the commission of fraud abroad.

2. Yes, the biometrics shouldn't be on any database, they only need to be on the card. But that would be the sensible way of doing things.

3. Why, I am not entirely sure. Even if Abdul was from a country we or the Yanks had bombed back to the Stone Age, he is likely to get a much better education, even in the English language, anywhere but here.

4. Adbul is not too bright. Let's say he was a "David Beckham Studies" graduate.

5. I did imagine a lot in here about his arrest under Section 132 of SOCPA and subsequent brutalisation at the hands of a militant lesbian Met Police Officer "because he looked at me funny, m'lud." But it was irrelevant so I left it out.