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UK Government May Ignore ID Card Opposition 52

Posted by michael from the by-whatever-means-necessary dept.
DangerousBeauty writes "Yahoo has an interesting article up about the introduction of id cards in the United Kingdom. The main concern of people is that the UK Government has decided to ignore thousands of people who have said they opposed the cards because they commented via the internet."
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UK Government May Ignore ID Card Opposition More

UK Government May Ignore ID Card Opposition

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  • of the Prime Minister of Canada:" Am I the only one here with half a brain?"

    Nice, ignore the comments you asked for! Ssssssmart!

  • Who cares what "thousands of people" think. I can show you "thousands of people" who oppose just about any government plan.
    • True. The UK Govt ignored millions of people who were against he colonisation of Iraq and went to the trouble of a public demonstration about it. Why the fuck should they care about a few thousand tossers who feel so strongly about something that the best they can do is whine about it on the Internet?

    • Re:Thousands of people? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Captain Large Face ( 559804 ) on Saturday May 31, 2003 @01:12AM (#6083092) Homepage
      We've already seen that the UK government has forgotten those people that voted for it. Before the war started in Iraq, there were estimates of up to 2,000,000 people opposing sending British forces to the Middle East. If the Government can so easily ignore 2,000,000, then I'm hardly surprised to see it ignore mere thousands. Unfortunately, I doubt the British public will remember this behaviour when it comes to the next general election. :(

  • They only want comments... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Col. Klink (retired) ( 11632 ) on Friday May 30, 2003 @07:34PM (#6081864)
    ...from people they can track down and eliminate.
  • Why should a government care what people on the internet complain about? Why because people had to write in to complain or support the messure? Or bewcause of the large out pouring?

    I will use the postings on Slashdot as an example of why it doesn't matter. First that's remember how many times people will be psamming from diffrent accounts over and over just to bitch and moun. Second the qualilty of the complaints might have been good from some people but what about the countrless other people who basiclly

    • Re:why should goverments care about internet posts (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      > Why should a government care what people on the
      > internet complain about?

      Because this was a Government consultation exercise that asked for commments to be submitted by email as one of the response mechanisms.

      It wasn't a 'this suxxors dudes' post on Slashdot. We sent in reasoned comments based on the cost, civil liberties and feasability of the proposed plan and expect to have them taken seriously.

      Also because copies of some of the responses were sent to MPs and responsible ministers by fax and e

  • The question is: (Score:3, Informative)

    by WolfWithoutAClause ( 162946 ) on Friday May 30, 2003 @08:26PM (#6082118) Homepage
    This could lose a lot of votes though, particularly if they ignore the comments they had via the web. Is this the poll tax [everything2.com] of the Labour Party? Could they lose an election because of it? Probably not on it's own- but it could trigger an ireversible slide- Tony Blair already rammed through the Gulf War II, and that wasn't particularly popular either; if he does this as well he is creating a pattern, and one that can lose him the election.

    • Re:The question is: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ApharmdB ( 572578 )
      Let's hope that it is. If you are British and have any sense, you should vote anything but Labour in the next election.

      How funny is that? The British need to vote out the "liberal" party to prevent 1984 and those of us in the US need to vote out the "conservatives."
      It just goes to show that people in power don't have any goals other than increasing their power. Their political positions are just the means by which they think they can get the most votes.
      • Well, if they ignore these comments I will be; I was one of the ones that sent in a comment via this particular website.

      • It seems to me that the British voting public voted [New] Labour in as an alternative to the almost-two-decade rule of the Conservatives, rather than for any ideological political reason, such as a leaning towards policies with a higher degree of socialism.

        British voters need to sit up and pay attention, and vote to reflect their personal ideologies, not just voting for an alternative. I'd love to have a more liberal ruling party (I generally vote Liberal Democrat), but do the people in my constituency fe

        • My intention was not to suggest literally "anything but." I agree that people need to be informed and vote for who they want in the government, not the lesser of the evils.

          However, my pessimism tells me that, people being people, all political groups will fall prey to corruption given time.

    • Do you really think this will lose New Labour the next election? I have my doubts. For them to lose, the British public need to stop being so fucking apathetic to issues that affect them (how much did the anti-War movement fade when war was declared?) and check the box of another party. This in itself is another problem -- who are people going to vote for? The Conservative party is even more right-wing than New Labour, and wouldn't've hesitated to send British forces to Iraq, nor I doubt hesitate to imp

      • Do you really think this will lose New Labour the next election?

        It's hard to say, probably not. But even a reduced majority can have a chilling effect on the more way-out tendencies of governments.

  • See the big picture (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ralphclark ( 11346 ) on Friday May 30, 2003 @08:46PM (#6082190) Journal
    Apologies for more or less duplicating this post from another I posted under the traffic camera story.

    Consider this move together with existing laws to deny people the right to protect their data with encryption, and the increasing number of urban and traffic surveillance cameras, an increasing number of which are to be upgraded to use AI able to recognize vehicle registration number plates (i.e. "license plates" in the US) so any vehicle's location can be pinpointed and tracked in real time. They have also revealed that they are developing technologies to track your location in real time via your mobile phone more easily.

    I even saw a piece in one of the more respectable UK papers that described another technology currently in development that allows them to use shortwave EM from mobile phone masts to "X-Ray" buildings - allowing them to monitor your activities inside your own home or office, with the resulting computer generated images being automatically transmitted to a remote receiving station at some arbitrary location. These can be forwarded over the internet or whatever in real time to whoever has authority to see them.

    So very soon it will be entirely possible for the authorities to know cheaply and routinely exactly where you are all the time and precisely what you are doing. Without even getting out of their seats, for God's sake!

    Judging by the number of urban surveillance and traffic cameras about, we're not really all that far away from that situation right now, as it happens.

    Just think for a moment, people: this may all seem reasonable to you now, but are any of you old enough to remember reading George Orwell's "1984" and shuddering with horror at the very idea of living in such a world? I can tell you that the police state we are now heading for would have been completely unthinkable as recently as 1975. After all, wasn't that precisely why the people of Britain fought the second world war and endured the tension of the cold war - to prevent enslavement by a totalitarian regime? Wasn't it? Well it seems to have all been a waste of time because that is exactly what we are headed for now.

    The public are being very naive if they think that these surveillance capabilities will only ever be used principally to catch those we people we currently think of as criminals. History has shown time and time again how governments don't often relinquish powers which suppress dissent and maintain their own hegemony, instead they use them to squash opposition while they continue to increase those powers. And "criminals" includes whatever people the law says. In such totalitarian regimes, "criminals" can mean protesters and dissidents of all kinds - like authors, journalists, even people who just said the wrong thing in public - ordinary people like you and me, law-abiding as we understand the term now.

    Once ubiquitious surveillance has been a commonplace for a few years and we are all used to it being used to track lawbreakers, it won't seem such a shock when the odd government department is occasionally caught using it for their own nefarious purposes. Just as governments at both ends of the political spectrum have already been caught time and time again using any and all available surveillance technologies to defeat their political opponents.

    If current public apathy is any guide, a few years down the road after that such incidents will be off the front page (if they make the news at all) and won't even cause raised eyebrows.

    By that point, if not well before, organized public opposition to any government policy will have become practically impossible as the authorities will always know in advance exactly what you are planning and will put a stop to it before it happens. In fact that's already similar to what happened at this year's (and last year's) UK May Day celebrations.

    As for the justification that it will make it easier to catch criminals - let me remind you of the incisive words of Benjamin Franklin (often quoted

    • ...but are any of you old enough to remember reading George Orwell's "1984" and shuddering with horror at the very idea of living in such a world?

      You're new here, aren't you?
      • Hey, check out my user id serial no: 11346 ... only 5 digits, and a low one, at that ;o)

        I don't why but I tend to imagine that the mean and the modal) age of the slashdot crowd would be around the mid-to-late-twenties. Perhaps because that's what it's like where I work, and I'm 40 so I'm used to experiencing a bit of a generation gap. I don't know where all the other old tech guys went.

  • EU (Score:1)

    by Britz ( 170620 )
    AFAIK they are one of the few countries in Europe that don't have IDs. But one of the EU treaties provides that people only need IDs to travel many counties of the EU (the ones that signed that treaty). UK signed and still their people need passports to go around Europe because they don't have IDs.

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