
              IDENTITY CARDS:  SOME BRIEF OBJECTIONS
                          by Sean Gabb


INTRODUCTION

Aside from Eire, ours is the only country in the European
Union not to have some kind of identity card scheme. 
Elsewhere, it has long been common for people to carry, and be
required to produce, identification.  Here, by law and custom,
there is no need for people to identify themselves, unless
they are seeking some positive benefit or have been arrested.

This difference is under attack.  The Prime Minister, the Home
Secretary, a former Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, and the
Editor of The Sunday Express - to name just a few - have
called for the introduction of identity cards.1  With the
present balance of votes in the House of Commons, it seems
likely that these particular calls will come to nothing.  Even
so, the issue is not one that will go away.  With this in
mind, I offer the following objections.  They are condensed
from an earlier piece written for the Libertarian Alliance,
which, whatever its merits, has the defect of being too long
for general circulation.  Readers are advised to buy a copy if
they want more information than I have room to give here.2


ONE:  THE FIGHT AGAINST CRIME

The commonest argument in favour of identity cards is that
they will help in the fight against crime.  After all, it
sounds reasonable to claim that if we all have to identify
ourselves on demand, the opportunities for breaking the law
will be diminished.

Reasonable as this sounds, however, it is not wholly supported
by the evidence.  Let us consider some of the leading claims:


Claim One

According to Fred Broughton, Chairman of the Police
Federation:

      In relation to crime, terrorism and any
      investigation, [an identity card scheme] would be a
      great advantage.  It would make the police more
      efficient because sometimes people lie about their
      identification, which can be very time consuming.3

Reply - According to Dr Michael Levi, Reader in Criminology at
the University of Wales:

      In ordinary policing terms, the value of ID cards is
      hard to discern.

      Many police officers to whom I speak tell me that
      they know, or believe they know, who the offenders
      are in their neighbourhood.  The problem is proving
      it, given that they don't have the resources to
      conduct surveillance. In this situation, identity
      cards are an irrelevance, a tough soundbite that has
      no practical effect.

      I cannot imagine how the chances of detection or
      conviction will be improved significantly by this
      measure in any form....4


Claim Two

According to Roy Hattersley:

      [Identity cards would make it] more difficult for
      conmen to talk their way into pensioners'
      bungalows....5

Reply - This is a bizarre claim.  Telephone engineers, police
officers, and all the other people whom conmen impersonate
already have identification documents.  Their victims suffer
by not asking to see these documents.  I fail to see how
providing everyone with an identity card will change matters.


Claim Three

Mr Hattersley again:

      [They would] also prevent teenagers renting
      pornographic videos....6

Reply - Another bizarre claim.  There are no pornographic
videos legally available in this country.  And here, as with
drugs and prostitution, illegal suppliers are more interested
in how rich their clients are than how old.


Claim Three

According to the Editor of The Sunday Express:

      Illegal immigrants and dole scroungers would find it
      impossible to dip their sticky fingers into the
      welfare pot.7

Reply - Not so.  According to Peter Lilley, the Secretary of
State for Social Security, identity cards would do little to
curb benefit fraud, which at the moment is far more a matter
of hidden earnings from the black economy than of
impersonation.8

As for illegal immigrants - according to a Peter Lloyd, a
former Minister at the Home Office, "the main problem faced by
the immigration officers at Dover is fake French ID cards".9


Other Claims

There are similar claims about bank fraud, impersonation at
elections and in driving tests, about people who lie in job
applications about their age and qualifications, and so forth. 
But I will not continue making specific reply to specific
claims.  I will instead observe that they all rest eventually
on three assumptions that are, and will for the foreseeable
future remain, unlikely:  that everyone will carry the right
identification; that the information to which identity cards
give access will be entirely correct; that the costs of an
identity card scheme can be precisely known.  Consider again:

First, all experience suggests that any document the
authorities can produce can be reproduced by criminals.  This
has long been the case with coins, banknotes, passports,
ration coupons, postage stamps, and any other thing of nominal
value.  In the United States, where official identification
has become far more important than it is yet here, one can buy
a green card, a social security card and a driving licence for
as little as $120.  All passable forgeries, they can be ready
within the hour.10  These are for illegal immigrants needing to
work and get their children educated, or for teenagers wanting
to drink without official harassment.  Doubtless, for
criminals or terrorists, much better is available.

To suppose that digital technology can change things is to
know nothing of computers, and nothing of criminal ability. 
We can have identity cards with a photograph, a thumbprint,
and a full retina pattern - and forgeries would be on the
streets within a month.  In Singapore, a country not famous
for high levels of crime, perfect copies of the most
elaborately bank cards presently issued are available as
blanks for a few pounds.11


Second, the official information held on us is riddled with
errors more or less serious.  According to a National Audit
Office report, 35 per cent of the 12.2 million driver records,
and 25 per cent of the nine million vehicle records, held by
the Drivers and Vehicles Licensing Authority contain at least
one error.12  Such levels of inaccuracy would soon wreck an
identity card scheme.  There would be wrong names on the
cards, and wrong photographs.  People would suffer perpetual
inconvenience from the use of incorrect data.

There is also the certainty of malicious hacking.  There is
nothing mysterious about hacking.  Nor is it difficult.  The
newspapers are full of stories about information altered,
destroyed, or illegally retrieved.  Recently in south London,
for example, someone broke into the local Health Authority
computer, and altered a standard letter that was sent out to
5,000 women before anyone noticed that a request to attend for
a cervical smear had been altered to an invitation to drop in
and "have your fanny examined".13


Third, The Home Office has estimated that a compulsory scheme
using a plastic card, with photograph, fingerprints, date of
birth and signature, would cost GBP500 million to establish,
plus GBP100 million per year to maintain thereafter.14  These
costings we can dismiss unconsidered.  Bearing in mind that
the civil servants can be expected to buy the wrong computers,
and that about five per cent of people each year will lose or
damage their cards, the final cost - as with Concorde, and the
Humber Bridge, and many other public works - is anyone's
guess.15


So far as law-enforcement is concerned, the immediate effects
of identity cards would be a slight increase in the
preparation costs of committing certain kinds of crime, and an
expansion of forgery.  For the rest of us, they would mean a
multiplication of bureaucracy and yet another waste of public
money.


TWO:  THE DESTRUCTION OF LIBERTY

The objections raised above are important.  They are the sort
of thing that can worry "right wing" Ministers and the more
respectable think tanks.  As such, it is useful to raise them
as often as possible.  But they are not the most important
objections, and they may not always be valid.  Experience and
better software will eventually reduce forgery and
inaccuracies; and the accessibility of more information will
diminish the opportunities for fraud.  The primary objection
is the very existence of most accessible information.  And so
far as the secondary objections can be overcome, so this one
is magnified.

Until recently, the amount of information that identity cards
could make available was limited.  There could be a
photograph, name, address, and a few other details.  For
anything else, it was necessary to look through various paper
archives - a process so slow and expensive, it was not worth
even considering for everyone all the time.  Electronic
databases remove this limitation.  They ensure that
information, once gathered, can be stored at almost zero cost,
and retrieved at once in any permutation.  They are also
ensuring that the range and depth of information gathered and
stored can be greatly expanded.

Already, MI5 is connecting all the government databases, to
give access, "for reasons other than national security" to
"personal information held on tens of millions of people, from
tax files to criminal convictions".16  To this single database
the Home Secretary wants to add the DNA records of all
suspected criminals - that is, of anyone arrested for any
offence.17

Then there is the information gathered and held by private
organisations.  Since 1979, financial confidentiality has been
abolished in this country.  A series of laws, culminating in
the incorporation of the Money Laundering Directive, gives the
authorities open access to our banking and other financial
records.  For the moment, these records are stored in
databases outside the public network; and the authorities must
still ask for them to be produced.  But this is too great an
inconvenience to be allowed in the long term.

The same will soon be true for our shopping records.  My
weekly receipt from Asda gives an itemised breakdown of all
that I buy there.  It also carries my credit card account
number.  I have receipts from other shops that do the same.  A
few years more of falling hardware prices, and someone need
only think it useful, and there will be no more shopping
secrecy.  Some of us, no doubt, will start paying in cash -
especially for more personal items. But this will not long
remain an alternative.  The panic about money laundering is
too strong:  and there is too much talk about the smart card
"e-purses" now being tested in America.

Looking ahead, there are developments that can only now be
imagined.  At the moment, many of us must wear identity cards
in our places of work.  This helps the security staff.  I have
no doubt that someone will think it equally helpful for us to
do the same in public.  It will then be possible for digital
video cameras to monitor and record identities from the
wearers of interactive identity cards.  Moving somewhat
further ahead, it will be possible to match the faces of
people caught on video to digital images stored centrally -
thereby dispensing with much of the need for identity cards. 
This again is a matter of no more than storage space and
processing speed.

I see the progressive integration of every record ever opened
on us - from our first weighing in the maternity ward to our
assessed susceptibility to dying of heart disease.  In this
new order of things, an identity card must be seen not as a
thing in itself, but as the key that each of us must carry to
a vast electronic filing cabinet of information.


Nothing to Hide, Nothing to Fear

Now, I hear the mantra endlessly chanted against this sort of
argument:  "Those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear". 
We do not live in a police state, but in a democracy.  We have
independent courts and a free media.  And I must admit that
the present and likely extensions of surveillance are not the
result of some evil conspiracy.  Each extension can be
justified by reference to some benefit.  Once again, consider:

*     If I fall under a bus and am rushed to hospital, to
      imagine the value of a card that will give instant access
      to my blood group, my allergies, any other medical
      conditions that I may have, and my next of kin;

*     If some non-invasive way is discovered of verifying DNA
      against details centrally recorded, how it will save
      billions in credit card and social security fraud;

*     If a terrorist bomb explodes, to think how the police
      computers might scan the street videos for the past six
      months, identify everyone there and check for previous
      convictions, or anything suspicious in any other
      records - the purchase, perhaps, of garden fertiliser;

*     If a woman is raped and left for dead in a park, how it
      will be possible, even if the rapist wore a condom and
      left no other body fluids, to profile the population - to
      see who has a taste for violent images, as recorded by
      the book and video shops, who is shown by evidence from
      other sources to have a tendency to violence, and who
      lives within easy distance of the park, or whose
      movements took him close to there; and who, therefore, is
      likely to have committed the crime, and should be pulled
      in for questioning.

Agreed, these are benefits.  But everything has a cost.  And I
can think of two very plain costs involved in this scheme of
total surveillance.

First - Any government that is able to know so much about its
subjects is able to single them out for persecution.  Even
paper identity cards have been repeatedly used for purposes
that range between the vexatious and the murderous.  Without
details of religion stamped on their papers, the Jews of
Central Europe would not have been so easily herded into the
concentration camps.  The same is true of the massacres in
Rwanda:  it was the word Tutu or Hutsi on identity cards that
let the murderers find their victims.  I am not suggesting
that the British Government will turn this nasty.  But there
are other, gentler forms of persecution.  At the moment, for
example, smokers are sometimes being denied medical treatment
on the NHS.18  There are suggestions for the licensing of
childbirth, to bring an end to "irresponsible" procreation.19 
For the moment, we can lie when the doctors ask if we smoke. 
We can put on suits and smile at the social workers, and hope
they will not guess what substances we once consumed, or what
we still do in bed.  But identity cards will make that harder
where not impossible.

Anyone who is happy to have every last detail of his life
known to the Government is gambling on the future.  We are all
members of some minority:  and there is nothing that we are
and nothing that we do that is not unpopular with someone who
is, or may one day be, in authority.

"Those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear"?  Well, this
is fine enough for those who can believe that something about
them presently innocuous will not one day be used against
them, or their children or grandchildren.  But who can
infallibly believe this?

Second - even if governments refrain from these mild
persecutions, identity cards will tend to establish a
despotism.  This will not be openly horrible.  It will in its
outward appearance be gentle and reasonable.  It will remain
democratic, in the sense of allowing elections to office and
the discussion of authorised topics.  Its uses of power will
be more or less in accord with public opinion.  But it will
allow no individuality.

Even without other punishment, to be watched is often to be
deterred.  Most of us, after all, are quite timid.  We do not
pick our noses in public, or scratch our bottoms, or cast
openly lustful glances, for fear of how we shall be regarded
by the world.  Shame is a natural, indeed a necessary feeling. 
But to let shame act as a restraint in all our doings means a
return to the minute surveillance of village life from which
our ancestors so gladly escaped.  We are looking at a future
world in which there will be no privacy, no anonymity, no
harmless deception, in which we shall all live as if on a
stage under the watchful eye of authority.

This homogenising pressure will be reinforced by economic
policy.  The state I am imagining will not be socialist in the
old sense, of central planning.  There will be enough of a
market to ensure minimal coordination.   But this will not be
enough to lift the economy from permanent recession, with high
unemployment and periodic bursts of inflation - and, most
importantly, few prospects of personal independence.

Until quite recently, it was possible for many people to say
and do almost as they pleased, free from any need to court or
keep the good opinion of others.  I think of Edward Gibbon.  I
think of Charles Darwin.  I think even of Friedrich Engles. 
These were men who outraged the dominant opinion of their age,
but whose independent means placed them beyond the effects of
this outrage.  Today, most incomes are earned, and all are
heavily taxed.  Few of us have time for dissenting
speculation; and then we must take care not to upset our
employers or customers beyond an often narrow limit.

The combined effect of surveillance and economic dependence
will be an invisible but effective control.  There will be no
definite formulation of what we must not do, no Act or article
in a code against which protest might be made.  Instead,
people will come to realise that safety lies in trying to
behave and to think exactly alike.  The exposure consequent on
doing otherwise will be too awful if vague to contemplate. 
There will, of course, be some exhibitionists, willing - and
perhaps happy - to expose their lives to the interested
scrutiny of others.  But I will not think much of a world in
which such people have become the only individuals.

And the death of individuality will mean the end of progress. 
The causes of the mass-enrichments of the past three centuries
are difficult to separate and weigh.  But it is obvious that
much is owed to individual genius.  Think of the steam engine,
the telephone, the aeroplane - even the computer:  these have
been much improved and cheapened by common ingenuity; but they
all came in the first instance from the mind of some inspired
individual or sequence of individuals who were often denounced
in their own time as cranks or monsters, where not physically
attacked.  Cut down that tree of individuality - or, as I am
now discussing, merely starve its roots - and it will blossom
no more.  The lack of overt regulation in this future state
may delight the standard Thatcherites.  But with an economy
less formally hampered than the one in which the Internet has
emerged, our descendants may sit as stagnant and self-
satisfied as the Chinese were when the Jesuit missionaries
first arrived.


THREE:  POSSIBLE RESTRAINTS

For many, this will seem wildly pessimistic.  I have entirely
neglected the possibility of a legal and institutional
framework in which the dangers of identity cards will be
restrained.  Roy Hattersley, for example, believes that the
corrupt or domineering use of

      information - who was where, when - [c]ould be made
      a criminal offence.20

Otherwise, we can have a privacy law, to let us say "no" to
many demands for information, and give us legal redress
against damaging uses of what information we must make
available.

It is, however, wishful thinking to suppose that the sinister
potential of identity cards can be abolished by a few changes
in the law.  It is possible to establish a scheme in which
information collected for one purpose cannot be used for
another - so that a doctor could have access to medical but
not shopping or tax records, and a Policeman access to details
of criminal convictions but not of a sex-change operation.  It
is possible to make laws against the passing of information,
or the means of obtaining information, to unauthorised
persons.

But the value of a unified database is that the information on
it can be shared very widely.  We can start with all manner of
good intentions about limiting access.  In practice, these
will soon become a dead letter - at the insistence of those
now calling for identity cards, and perhaps of those who now
talk about restraints.  Why should a hospital not have access
to a patient's immigration status?  Why not to his sexual
inclinations?  Why should the Police not be able to check what
books a suspect has borrowed from the library, or what bus
journeys he makes?  Why should a Social Security official not
have access to a claimant's tax and banking records, and
details of spouse and children?  Why should an insurance
company not have access to a customer's medical records, to
see what predisposition he may have to an expensive illness or
early death?  Why not to his shopping records, to see if he
has filled out his lifestyle questionnaire truthfully?  Why
should a senior manager, in a "national champion" company not
have access to the full range of a subordinate's private
life - to see if he is drinking too much, or smoking, or
taking bribes from a foreign rival, or putting on a wig to
pick up sailors on a Friday night?

I do not need to ask what pretence will be made for each
specific knocking down of the original barriers.  But, once
the principle of identity cards has been conceded, it is a
matter of time alone before everyone with a right to inspect
part of the information to which they give access will have
claimed and obtained a right to inspect the rest.  And all
else will follow from that.


CONCLUSION

As said, the present calls for an identity card scheme are
unlikely to succeed.  Too many Conservative MPs have promised
to oppose them on principle - and have promised too vehemently
for even politicians to back smoothly away.  To others who
have no principled objection, but who still cannot think of
the poll tax without shuddering, cost may be a safe excuse for
opposition.

But only for the moment - not in the long term.  On present
trends, identity cards must come.  That we do not yet have
them is an aberration.  It is like an area of the beach still
dry long after the incoming tide has soaked all around it. 
The central database exists, and it is rapidly filling with
new information.  The full evil of surveillance will require
identity cards, so that we and the information held on us can
be conveniently matched.  But there is evil enough now without
them; and more will inevitably follow.

The only real salvation lies in recognising this fact.  The
great majority of those who are currently against identity
cards take it for granted that a government large enough to
impose and use them is a good thing.  They like the welfare
state, and have nothing against a large bureaucracy.  But this
consensus must change.  The one sure means of emptying the
database is to bring about a permanent reduction in the size
and power of the State.  The welfare state must go.  The war
against drugs must be conceded.  The snoops and regulators
must be sent looking elsewhere for jobs.

Of course, what I am asking is that everyone who dislikes
identity cards should endorse and start calling for the full
Libertarian Alliance agenda.  I cannot imagine that this will
ever happen.  But I can still hope.


NOTES

1.    George Jones, "Major backs ID cards to fight crime", The
Daily Telegraph, London, 8th June 1994; The Right Honourable
Michael Howard QC MP, Home Secretary, "Speech to the 111th
Conservative Party Conference, Thursday 13th October 1994",
Conservative Party News Release 759/94, p.15; Roy Hattersley,
"How Britain can solve its identity crisis", The Daily Mail,
London, 10th August 1994; Brian Hitchen, "ID cards for all",
The Sunday Express, London, 16th October 1994.

2.    Sean Gabb, A Libertarian Conservative Case Against
Identity Cards, Political Notes No. 98, the Libertarian
Alliance, London, 1994, GBP2.40.

3.    Source:  "National identity card high on Tories' agenda",
The Independent, London, 10th September 1994.

4.    Speech in Birmingham to the Council of Mortgage Lenders;
Source:  Christopher Elliott, "ID cards 'will not reduce
crime", The Guardian, London and Manchester, 15th October
1994.

5.    Hattersley, op. cit..

6.    Ibid..

7.    Hitchen, op. cit..

8.    Charles Reiss, "Cabinet clash over ID cards hits Howard",
The Evening Standard, London, 11th October 1994.

9.    Source:  Alan Travis, "Conservatives at Bournemouth:
'Rubbish' cries greet Howard's ID card plan", The Guardian,
London and Manchester, 14th October 1994.

10.   Sean Mac Carthaigh, "Californians ponder cost of a
proposition they didn't refuse", The Times, London, 2nd
December 1994.

11.   Simon Davies, "Please may I see your identity card,
Sir?", The Daily Telegraph, London, 13th October 1994.

12.   See Dr Edgar Whitley, "Too many errors on the cards",
Letters to the Editor, The Daily Telegraph, London, 12th
August 1994.  The National Audit Office report mentioned was
reported in ibid., 22nd December 1993.

13.   Source:  "Hacker hunt after smear campaign", Computer
Weekly, London, 20th October 1994.

According to the Audit Commission, hacking and other computer
fraud are endemic.  There are almost no controls on access to
sensitive data, and few intrusions are noticed until after
harm has been suffered:  see the Audit Commision, Opportunity
Makes a Thief - An Analysis of Computer Abuse, Her Majesty's
Stationery Office, London, 1994.

14.   Source:  Richard Ford, "Ministers facing a minefield",
The Times, London, 14th October 1994.

15.   The figure of five per cent was estimated by the
Australian Government in 1988, when it was considering an
identity card scheme.  See Simon Davies, "Please may I see
your identity card, Sir", The Daily Telegraph, London, 13th
October 1994.

16.   David Hencke and Richard Norton Taylor, "MI5 hacks its
way into privacy row", The Guardian, London and Manchester,
19th October 1994.

17.   Howard, op. cit., p.13.

18.   For details, see Petr Skrabanek, The Death of Humane
Medicine and the Rise of Coercive Healthism, The Social
Affairs Unit, London, 1994, p.123 et passim.

19.   See Judy Jones, "Top doctor urges legal controls on
parenthood", The Observer, London, 7th August 1994.  See also
Skrabanek, op. cit., pp. 158-59.

20.   Hattersley, op. cit..


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