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Privacy

The most serious threat to our liberty in the future is also one of the softest on its feet – the unstoppable spread of surveillance, the plan for a national identity card scheme backed up by a giant computerised register, and with it the gathering by the state of an extraordinary amount of information about our lives.

In the 19th century criminal law reformer Jeremy Bentham designed the Panopticon, which he believed would be the perfect prison. He took the idea of surveillance as a means of control to its logical conclusion. The concept of the design is to allow an observer sit on the inside ring to watch the prisoners, without the prisoners knowing if they are being observed or not. This would convey a "sentiment of an invisible omniscience" onto the people inside. In his own words, Bentham described the Panopticon as "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example".

If the prison population believe they are being watched all of the time, then they will behave and conform. The design never took off and no perfect Panopticons were ever built. But if Bentham was alive today and could see the mass of surveillance available, he would no doubt congratulate us for testing his dream across an entire country.

We’re used to the reality of CCTV cameras capturing our image many times a day, wherever we go, and it doesn’t especially bother us. It’s estimated there are around 4.2 million of them in Britain, one for every 14 people. We figure that a lot of the time CCTV helps to catch criminals, and the rest of the time the operators kick back and use the cameras to check out the pert bits of girls. We aren’t usually aware of being watched, which is mostly why we don’t see it as a problem. But if you think that surveillance has reached saturation, a multi billion pound industry will tell you otherwise.

Over the past 15 years databases have gone from being something that IT men bore you about at parties to a controlling factor in every single area of your life. There are now databases to store information about everything, and there are quite a lot of databases that just store information about other databases. We have databases for the nation’s health records, DNA, children’s school reports, and criminal records.

The latest supercomputer that has been wheeled out by New Labour and the IT industry to transform our lives is, of course, the National Identity Register (NIR) – the database that sits behind ID cards. In 2005 the Identity Bill became law, and ID cards and the NIR are now becoming a reality. The sheer size of the operation is such that it will be a few years before the cards are in our wallets and purses; like an unstoppable steamroller, it is only a matter of time.

The card is only a small part of the whole; all the information on there will be kept on the National Identity Register (NIR). The information will sit on three existing Government databases. The Department for Work and Pensions database will hold biographical information; biometric data, such as fingerprints or eye scans, will be held on the Home Office system; and the Identity and Passport Service system will hold the remaining information. In all, the Identity Cards Act 2006 provides for 49 items of data pertaining only to you to be stored on the register, and all of this will have to be handed over when you go for your compulsory ID session.

A few of the items are as follows:
full name
other names by which person is or has been known
date of birth
place of birth
gender
address of principal place of residence in the United Kingdom
the address of every other place in the United Kingdom or elsewhere where person has a place of residence
identifying information
a photograph of head and shoulders
signature
fingerprints
other biometric information – this included iris scans and DNA
personal reference numbers
National Identity Registration Number
the number of any ID card issued
allocated national insurance number
the number of their United Kingdom passport
any driver number given to him/her by a driving licence

You’ll use the card every time you interact with the state, in the form of your GP, your kids’ school or the local library. What you do on each occasion will be added to the register. It’s an all-inclusive record of the things about you that change, and the things about you that always stay the same. It retains everything about your past and your present, and will suggest a lot about your future.

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