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exactly, i said i'd happily allow a change that makes things more practical ie no need for a specific drivers license etc
this is jsut an excuse to get everyone's information - i thought i'd never have to have the equivilent of 'papers please' in this supposed 'free' country
But not everyone can get one.
You keep mentioning all these OBVIOUS benefits, but besides saying it'll help track terrorists, rapists and child abusers (and I'm still lost as to actually how this would be accomplished) you seem content to give the Government another way of keep us 'on file' when there are loads of ways to do it.
So why bother then?
those benefits can be achieved by many other things, want to track terroists better, provide more funding for SIS to recruit more people; want to stop illegal immigration, get the people who employ them and make it too risky so they'd just hire legit workers instead, or get the traffikers who force people into prostitution or get people who buy the illegal DVD from street sellers who almost are always illegal chinese workers; it'd make ID theft more of an issue as they will be stolen, like the DWP people who got caught 3 years ago selling hundreds of thousands of NI numbers
and they won't be cheap, and well it doesn't matter hwo 'cheap' they are because the government will jsut use tax mony to fund them instead
then look for sucessful government IT ventures that haven't been done just to suit the technology sector's lobby group
almost every country who haave introuduced ID cards, done so under facist rule, spain did for sure
Unless you want to tag these cards with GPS, they won't help in tracking anyone.
ID cards don't give us anything extra than what we've already got. I can't believe people condone the obligatory and forced nature of this plan. My private life is my private life, why should I be forced to give up that right "just in case".
ID cards wouldn't have stopped 7/7 here
ID cards wouldn't have stopped 9/11 Here
ID cards DO NOT prevent/hinder/stop/ terrorism Here
ID cards won't stop theft, burglary, rape, abuse, bullying, corporate crime, money laundering, drug related crime etc etc etc Here
People who are arrested are identified fairly quickly in any event, so why do we need ID cards?
I'll bet you're one of the people who condones increasing the 'time jailed without charge' for 'suspected' terrorists. Watch 'The Road to Guantanamo' and then get back to me.
ETA: The fact that the Government just lost a quarter of a million individual's sensitive details a few weeks ago also makes me question their competence in keeping my details safe and secure.
Why should I disclose what I earn, where I live, where I go on holiday, when I left, when I got back, which places I ate, which courses I'm enrolled in at uni, which books I got out the library, where I bank etc etc to some snotty nosed public servant who's earning 7 quid an hour without *any* say in it?
The Government already has all that information about me in some way or another. Why should I fork out money for them to have even more information about me? I have a passport, I have a driver's license, I have a national insurance number, right now my retina and fingerprint scans are on a US database, I have a J1-visa for which I had to fill out 8 forms and attend an interview in London, I have a student ID, my details of where I've lived all my life are in a database somewhere, my banking details can be easily accessed. I could go an get an ID card tomorrow, and decide to become some fundamentalist crusader. I could then go and attack some government building (hypothetically) and I'd be able to get away with it. I could go out and rob a bank. Right now, even with an ID. There's a good chance I'd get away with it. Me having the ID card won't stop me doing any of these things. And it certainly won't make me any easier to identify. C'mon, they managed to identify who bombed the Trade Towers about 2 hours after the crash. This was in a wreck that brought down 4 planes and 4 buildings, in all that wreck and devastation they were still able to find out who dunnit. All without ID cards.
If you really want to stop terrorism, you'd need to GPS tag everyone and have a mind-machine to discover intention. ID cards don't show intention. They show identity, and that alone will do jack shit.
yes people want us dead, people around the world have always wanted us dead - but the threat they pose, does it truly threaten this country as a sovreign state, will they actualyl put us under their rule? the only people removing the rights of the general population are the government
like we said, when?
silly
you catch them before they do it, you spy on them properly and see if they actually are planning something, get evidence and nab them before they can......
yes you'd make miniscule gains i admit, but they nowhere near justify the cost in liberty and financial cost of implentation, and in the risks in setting up a centralised database containing everyone's basic information ie hacking (OF WHICH, IN THE FUTURE A GOVERNMENT CAN ADD MORE INFO TO WITHOUT A PARLIAMENTRY VOTE)
as well as the fact there's better ways of achieving all these aims, without intruding on peoples private lives, and at a far cheaper cost too - yes as is always said, i have nothing to hide apart from my privacy - yeh i'll be snooped on secretly if i bought 20 kilos of NH4NO3 which is enoguh to bring down a building or to fertlise LOADS of fields, but i'm not and there's no reason for them to colelct data on me personally unless they can trace something dodgy back to me
are you tony blair
I can already prove my ID. We've been over this. I have a passport.
No they didn't. They were driven out by the Spanish.
Incidentally, have you ever been here?
You mention all the woes that civil servants go through (and to be fair, I didn't know that you were a civil servant....), yet you fail to realise exactly who it is who is ordering the cuts, who sets your wages, and who gives you your work to do. The Government.
You moan about your working conditions, your strike, your pay increases. Who does that? The Government.
Yet, you stand by your conviction that the Government, in doing this ID card scheme, is doing its best by you. I'm arguing that this is not the case. It's a sleight of hand. It's appeasement of the masses. It's one of the reasons the States attacked Iraq. Not that it would do anything, but that the Government had to be seen to do something. This is what ID cards are. It won't help anything, it will cost a fortune, and at the end of the day terror attacks will still happen. Crime will still happen. You might have a negligible affect on incidence rates, but at the end of the day far more could be done with the proper allocation of resources.
The idea that as a modern society we *need* ID cards is a moot point. Modernity, civilisation, advancement are all relative terms, and there is no real correlation between modernity and ID. The Aztecs died out because the Spanish invaded. If they had ID cards, that wouldn't have stopped it... I'm arguing that we DON'T need ID cards, since they won't stop anything. I'm arguing that they won't STOP the attacks, you're arguing that they will help us IDENTIFY the attackers. I don't think that's what we need. We need ways to actually combat the problem at a more grass-roots level, and that's why I agree with all of WMP suggestions.
You reckon I'm foolish (or over-reacting) in saying that in order to stop terrorism you need to put a mic and camera in each house. But I'm right and you know it. In order to be able to stop terrorism, you have to find out what people are thinking/talking/arguing about. And the fact is that once people realise that ID cards aren't working, the Government will trot out measures exactly like that, in the name of national security, and people will be happy to give them over. That's what the Patriot Act is all about.
"People with extremist views want to kill us" highlights the very limited nature of ID cards. They can't help us know who has extremist views and who doesn't, how could they? Sure, maybe we'll be able to find out quicker who did it (but in 9/11 the terrorists were able to be identified in a couple of hours in a 4 plane, 4 building inferno....), but after the damage has been done.
I know I'm not going to be able to convince you, since you've fallen hook, line and sinker for the Government's propaganda that this is to 'protect' us, and to 'stop terrorism', so it'll be kind of pointless that you respond to this cause essentially it's becoming cyclical. Don't get wrong, I totally get where you're coming from, and I wish that ID cards would stop terrorism, but I don't believe it's the correct allocation of resources and energy. I guess that time will tell.
Yep, real tough to identify terrorists who make a video beforehand telling everyone that they're going to commit an attack. Give me one example of the police having difficulty identifying Islamic terrorists after attacks in this country. They're proposing an expensive solution to a problem that doesn't exist. And equally, knowing who a suicide bomber was after an attack occurs is of no use to anyone. What are you gonna do? Hold a trial?
I *can* prove my identity. In many different ways. Passport. Driver's license. Student ID. American Visa. We've been over this already. Why should I have to pay more to prove my identity *again*? Especially when it won't help.
Why should I have to speak up about this? I signed the petition, I've written to my MP. I have my own career and aspirations, why should I go around trying to fix the fuck ups of the government? I could go into Government, but that wouldn't make me happy. The Government should be listening to the people, and they're not.
If you are truly scared of a 'V for Vendetta' scenario then you should be protesting this scheme, cause this is only one factor in the development of such a nightmare future.
P.S. And if you're going to be as petty to suggest that I don't call civil servants 'snotty nosed', at least have the common courtesy to write in proper sentences with punctuation and correct spelling. If we're debating, I don't want to have to try and decipher it.
Don't you have to find out who they actua;lly are before an ID card would be asked for. Therefore wouldn't you have their ID before asking them to produce it themselves?
Please point me to a single incident, anywhere in the world, where the use of ID cards has lead to an terrorism arrest before an attack.
NB The attackers of the World Trade Centre also had ID cards. Ooops, too late again.
The reason that you don't know of any examples is because there aren't any - otherwise our lovley Govt would be shouting about it everytime the issue came on the press.
Charles Clarke is talking shite. The bombs killed people. ID cards didn't stop it from happening. The 7/7 perps over here were traced without them...
Seriously, anytime you Govt wants to take more power then you should be asking why.
Your problem is that you think the more times you write the SAME EXACT THING it somehow makes you more right. It doesn't, and don't think it does.
And yeah, you'll probably be all like 'god, you're so immature that you have to resort to mud-slinging', but when it comes down to it when you're dealing with entrenched beliefs that won't accept rational thought, rational debate becomes a useless endeavour.
To close:
1) You haven't provided any proof that ID cards will help.
2) You support a wasteful deployment of our hard-earned cash.
3) You're just one of many sheeple who can't do any critical thinking for themselves, and think that the Government is looking out for us, and are willing to prostitute themselves out for a little bit of short-term fulfilment.
4) I don't have to accept anything the Government peddles out for us, yet you seem to think we should just because it's the Government. The Government's a fucking idiot as well, and it's no surprise you side with them.
You know what, I really hope you don't waste any brain energy replying to this, cause you'll come out with the same trite, tired and pathetic excuses and arguments you've came out with already.
P.S. I still stand by my comment that civil servants are snotty-nosed. And if you are one, then I'm even more determined to oppose ID cards. I can't imagine someone like you having access to all my personal data.
I give up.
is charles clark in a job?
This idea that we're 'at war' and ID cards will protect us is a smokescreen, nothing else.
I don't have the time (nor the energy) to debate with you anymore. You have a lot of 'hope' and 'belief' in this scheme, and as anyone who has tried to debate with a religious fundamentalist will testify, it's hopeless to try.
You think lots of other plans have been discussed. I think they have as well tbf, but in typical Government fashion they've gone with the most wasteful, expensive, inefficient system possible in a completely misguided attempt to 'do the right thing'.
If there were a system where ID cards had been shown to combat crime then I might be more open to it, but there hasn't been.
But I'll give you one thing, time will tell, and I'll bet my house the ones who oppose ID cards will be vindicated.
Matt, you were telling me earlier how ID cards could've helped identify those responsible for 7/7 and 9/11 - but as you've admitted, there's no way they could've been identified before they committed their acts of terrorism.
I don't quite see how you can honestly believe that things are 'worth a try'. This isn't running a supermarket. This is running a country. You can't just give everyone an ID card, and then say 'well it didn't stop terrorism - but we've all got them now...'. You're in favour of the government wasting our money on schemes that aren't fit for the purpose that they are intended, when the money could be better spent on more funding for REAL needs?
Oh yes they can. That is exactly what will happen. And since we'll all have ID cards anyway, well it's not such a big step to having those RFIDs implanted directly into our muscle tissue, is it? I mean, we'll already HAVE them, it's just a matter of WHERE. And hey, that'll do away with the hassle that will ensue if you lose the damn thing....
It is my contention that they are perfectly fit for the purpose for which they are intended. It's just not the purpose you've been led to believe.