Quote:
Originally Posted by mthead
Yeah ID cards are good idea and should be free,and only somebody with something to hide would be against them.IF YOU HAVE DONE NOWT YOUVE NOWT TO FEAR  |
The problem is mthead is that these things ARE planned to hold so much data about you that it would be very useful to anyone who intended to defraud you financially. It is a single point of failure(which is a VERY bad idea in anything IT) to almost all information about you from medical records to benefit claims, any police record/past convictions to credit worthyness.
As said, to actually collate all this information into a single place will cost a fortune, forget £30 on top of a Bio passport, general consensus is that these things will be costing each person ~£200 and thats before the project goes over budget(which has happened in over 95% of goverment IT projects over the last 5 years). Then there is the technical aspects. In trying to put together the new NHS ITsystem ( a small subset of what the ID cards will cover) different areas are being developed by different companies, data exchange between them has proven to be nigh on impossible due to different interpretations of the rules. There has already been incidents of Xrays and records being unavailable that have put lives at risk. I see fairly big( multi million pound) IT projects on a daily basis and none of these are anything close to what is being suggested and my view is that there isn't any company that would be capable of implementing the ID cards systems successfully. As soon as you get into colaboration you hit even bigger problems due to the politics involved.
The other point is about what use they will be in practice, all this talk of anti terrorism/scrotes/etc is just propaganda. In Spain they have ID cards yet ETA have been blowing things up for years, Then there was teh madrid train bombings. Back to our own country, all of teh London Bombers were 'ordinary UK citizens' and would have been carrying ID cards had we had them, would it have stopped the awful events that unfolded? Nope. If you are set upon blowing yourself and numerous innocents into the next life, would you really care about carrying an ID card?
Onto immigration, again, there are lots of countries who have ID cards yet suffer just as we do from illegal immigrants. All it would do is force them further underground creating an almost sub human class who have no rights, no way of protest and no protection from teh likes of organised crime.
I have nowt to hide as you say but I do not see how any of the above can offer me any protection from what they claim.