Home Sec : ID cards wouldn't have helped.

[zotz]

Charles Clark has said the one thing nobody expected him to. A lot of people have just lost yesterday's hastily-made bets.

He did also say, though, that he thought they'd still be a good thing in general, so don't abandon the campaign quite yet.

Comments

[thepaintedone.livejournal.com]

Consideration would need to be given to checks on people boarding tube trains

Spot the person who has never ridden a rush hour tube. People don't board the tube, it's more of a pouring action.

Hyperbole asside, I can't see any practical way to vet 3 million people boarding tube trains each day. The best you could manage is some sort of token random search, a bit like ticket inspectors campling out at random stations. Anything like that would be far more for visibillity than actual security.

[fluffymormegil.livejournal.com]

We should point out to him that if we have security checks before boarding the Tube, terrorists will simply blow up ticket halls instead.

Gods but he's a prat

[wechsler.livejournal.com]

"ID cards won't work against this either, but we still want them anyway, because, erm, they might prevent something, but, erm, it's a secret and I'm not going to tell you what".

[thepaintedone.livejournal.com]

Or a shopping street, gig, nightclub, church, exhibition, school, motorway services, ferry, crowd leaving a sporting event or any other congregation of people.

There is nothing we can do to prevent the risk of this on the ground. At best we might get lucky with some sort of search procedure. The only systemic chance we have of preventing these things is to hear about it in advance, or to prevent people and equipment from getting into the country in the first place. Except of course a lot of them appear to be British anyway, and if you know what you are doing buliding your own bomb isn't all that hard.

[zotz]

The only thing I can think of that might help would be a practical explosives sniffer, but even if one was devised which worked properly in the real world it would be a huge job to implement and maybe just push the prblem elsewhere. Cf "technical fix" passim.

[technotom.livejournal.com]

I've always maintained that ID cards would never make a shred of difference to the way terrorist groups operate. I don't pretend to understand even the reasoning behind the scheme or how the cards are expected to work against crime and terrorism. I've always thought the idea was entirely ludicrous.

[zotz]

It seems to rely on the idea that the perps are going under aliases and strong ID will stop this. The trend now, though, is for them to operate under their own names and rely on being able to find people who haven't been in trouble before. The people responsible for the WTC attacks and the Madrid bombings all had perfectly good legal ID because they weren't pretending to be anyone other than they were. I'd be interested in seeing whether the same is also true of the Bali bombing. I suspect it is.

[dj-alexander.livejournal.com]

Nobody has ever said ID Cards would stop terrorist attacks though, just that it would certainly make things more difficult for that sort of thing to happen.

[zotz]

If fewer of them happened, then some would have been prevented.

[dj-alexander.livejournal.com]

So, what you're essentially saying is - that you have absolutely no idea how they work, but that they couldn't possibly help?

Sounds like my mum and mobile phones!

[technotom.livejournal.com]

Maybe they will be flexible enough to place over a chest wound and stop a lung collapsing.

[technotom.livejournal.com]

How many ways can an ID card 'work'?

[dj-alexander.livejournal.com]

Well of course, there was a bit in Metro today about how some potential attacks have already been stopped.

[zotz]

The Grauniad has apparently been told that about eight have. If so, then that's excellent work.

[zotz]

It can tell people who you are, it can prop up that wobbly table, it can prise open your Yale lock when you've forgotten your key . . . loads of ways.

[dj-alexander.livejournal.com]

Well, in the same context as asking "How does a driving license work?". You have to get one to drive a car, yet it doesn't stop people being killed in road accidents. Although nobody's ever cried out against the tyranny of driver's licenses, at least not in the past 50 years ("Why should I have to register myself as a driver like some kind of criminal?!").

It'll simply make things harder for the terrorists, not impossible just harder. Nobody's claiming it's the answer to our problems, but it's certainly part of the solution IMHO.

[damerell.livejournal.com]

I think the onus is to a degree on the people proposing them to explain how they will work. In the analogy below, it was easy to say that driving licenses would impose a minimum standard of competence on drivers.

[damerell.livejournal.com]

They will be extremely large and made from gekiganium alloy. In the event of a disaster, you will simply remove your ID card from your wallet, unfold it, and wrap yourself up in it.

[devilgate.livejournal.com]

That's exactly what the government is claiming. It'll be the answer to all our problems. All of them, I tell you!

[technotom.livejournal.com]

A driving license, like an ID card, doesn't really do anything useful. Usually, the only time you'll have to produce it is after you have an accident, by which time all of its powers of identification become academic. Similarly, I don't see how an ID card would help identify a terrorist before it's too late. Unless, as I mentioned to keirf, it had career details on it, then it would be simple, as you'd only have to look for the ones which said 'Terrorist' ;-)

[technotom.livejournal.com]

Or a 'body debit card', which would instanty deduct your body from where you were standing and put it into credit somewhere else.

Thanks Douglas Adams for that one

[purplerabbits.livejournal.com]

A driving license, like an ID card, doesn't really do anything useful.

Well in order to get one you need to show some ability to drive a car safely, and if you blow this by driving very badly you can lose the license. Then licenses can get checked in a variety of situations to make sure people without them aren't driving. Not foolproof, I grant you, but there is at least a rational there.

[burkesworks.livejournal.com]

In the event of a disaster, you will simply remove your ID card from your wallet, unfold it, and wrap yourself up in it.

You're thinking of a fire blunkett, shurely?

[yehoshua.livejournal.com]

This notion ignores the game-ability of ID schemes, and because the average political hack has no understanding of higher reasoning like game theory, explaining it never seems to work. They can't seem to grok the idea that I could theoretically recruit a few dozen terrorists for a mission, send them through the new ID checks a few times to see who always gets stopped, who never gets stopped, and who gets stopped initially but can then penetrate security when their faces become familiar, and design an operation based on the threat model the defenders just revealed to me. You pick your attacks or you pick your targets, never both.

Honestly, I'd pick a softer target if I was a practical terrorist. McVeigh was successful in part because nobody could imagine a white former soldier blowing up a building with a daycare in it in the middle of freaking Oklahoma. It's not like the world failed to notice that bomb just because it happened in the middle of a shit of a city. Knowing that Tim McVeigh was Tim McVeigh, absent knowledge of what was going on inside his head, was a useless datum.

God, I hate security amateurs.

God, I hate having these conversations after an "incident." Everyone things I'm much farther gone than I actually am when I talk like this. :\

[dj-alexander.livejournal.com]

Rather than rehash what's said elsewhere, I shall simply post a like to what's said elsewhere:

http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/docs4/Id_Cards_Briefing.pdf

[emarkienna.livejournal.com]

It's one thing to have to register for certain things (eg, a driving licence to drive a vehicle on public roads at high speeds with the potential of causing accidents, or a passport for the right to enter foreign countries) - it's quite another to be forced to register for the right to live; if the ID card is a "licence", it's effectively a licence to live.

As to why driving licences work: although it may be hard to catch people driving without licences, most people are not going to take the risk simply to drive a car. On top of that, if they are good enough drivers, there is no reason for them not to take the test and get a licence; but if they're a bad driver, there's more chance that they'll get noticed and stopped by the police.

But if you're a terrorist wanting to cause a lot of death and destruction, and willing to die for your cause, you're not going to be put off by the small risk of being checked for your ID.

[emarkienna.livejournal.com]

And similarly, if we're debating by posting links, please see http://no2id.net/ .

[dj-alexander.livejournal.com]

Sounds a little melodramatic. It's not a license to "live". You can still drive a car without a license, you can still watch a TV without a TV license, having a license just indicates that you're responsible and abiding by the law.

[dj-alexander.livejournal.com]

Yes, but I already know both sides of the case, and I've previously read 1984 as well as having seen the film.

The problem with campaigns like that is that they're using hysterical unreasoning and fear of the unknown to a far greater degree than the govenment is to get ID cards in in the first place.

Oh yes, let's call him Bliar and draw cartoons of him - the stuff of grown ups.

[zotz]

hysterical unreasoning and fear of the unknown

Well, many things that are being said are accurate - having a large central databse of information on people is unprecedented as far as the UK is concerned, and would make a lot more information available to a wider range for governmental (and possibly to some extent non-governmental) organisations than is currently the case. It doesn't seem likely that there'll be reasonable safeguards against excessive or inappropriate use, because it hasn't been stated that there will be anything convincing and, to be honest, British government has never subscribed to a US-style checks-and-balances approach. Also, it'll probably be cripplingly expensive and (if we can rely on the precedent from other large-scale public-sector IT projects) probably won't work to anything like the extent originally envisaged.

This is all based on government statements or the history of government in the UK.

[dj-alexander.livejournal.com]

I like to view it like Concorde and Mobile Phones.

Passenger planes travelling at supersonic speeds were unprecendented and everyone was against them- there were massive portests in New York as the residents said they would be too loud and damage the environment too much. Yet, once they came into use, this was not the case. However ~20 years later there was a big accident with one of them.

Same things happened with mobile phones. There were protests against them, stories of people microwaving their heads and melting their brains. Yet we still have them today, but unlike Concorde they haven't been proved dangerous yet.

The idea that ID cards will completely stop terrorists is just as absurd as the idea that they won't stop terrorists. Fact is neither is likely to be the case and we won't know how effective they are until they come into use, whether the pros outweight the cons and vice versa. They're only going to be part of the solution, not the complete solution, but certainly not a complete waste of time either.

Personally I can't stand people that take the hardline on either side of the debate, those that refuse to accept there's any good in them, or those that think they're the answer to all our problems - they just appear to be equally ignorant and unreasonable as far as I'm concerened. At least what the government is saying, that they will help to some extent, seems more reasonable then any of the arguments against ID cards.

[zotz]

Concorde and mobile phones were unprecedented. There's a perfectly straightforward (and utterly shameful) record on British security legslation (see the sorry and protracted tale of the Prevention of Terrorism Acts, for instance), but if you want to ignore it then that's your privilege.

[dj-alexander.livejournal.com]

Not ignoring it, it's just a natural step forward. Better phones... better planes... better security? We always have to take steps forward, it's just sometimes the steps forward we take turn out to be the wrong ones - but standing still is just pointless.

Besides which didn't you just say:

having a large central databse of information on people is unprecedented

[zotz]

It's unprecedented in Britain. AFAICT from other examples, that sort of data-collection is either basically intended to be oppressive, or is abused in bad ways. I'd be happier with the proposals if there was meaningful discussion of safeguards, but I'm not aware of any.

Large SSTs were unprecedented globally, and anyway the basic objections were more economic. Cellphones . . . well, I haven't noticed it impeding their uptake at all.

[emarkienna.livejournal.com]

Well yes, I can choose to be a criminal instead, but that's not really giving me much of a choice... My viewpoint is that having to register to drive potentially dangerous vehicles around at high speeds isn't quite on the same level as having to register to live in the country I was born in.

You still haven't answered how ID cards might help. (I read the link you gave - mostly it just makes assertions without saying how the ID card would help, the only significant reason it gives is regarding checking fingerprints. Whilst this might help solve some cases after a crime, the idea of a national fingerprint database still has some worries I feel, and it would obviously not help in suicide attacks. Plus, if what the Government wants is a national fingerprint database, I wish they would come out and say that rather than hiding it with more friendlier and misleading terms like "ID card").

Driving licences are giving to people who can drive - they're not perfect, but it filters out people who are hopeless at driving. There are two significant differences to ID cards here:
- We have no way at all to give out ID cards according to who is and isn't a terrorist (and indeed, if we knew who the terrorists were, we wouldn't need ID cards anyway!)
- Someone without a driving licence will in most cases be deterred from driving without one. Why risk getting caught just to drive in a car. But if you're a terrorist, willing to commit huge crimes, the additional crime of "not having an ID card" is hardly going to deter you. How do you propose we keep track of who does and doesn't have an ID card?