@fencoul I voted "no" because I remember the ghastly mess that was the National Identity Register proposed by the Home Office under Tony Blair (about the ONLY good thing David Cameron did on gaining office was to kill it with fire). And I also remember my father (born in 1924) telling stories of how the wartime mandatory ID card was misused by the police/authorities to harass people, leading to an earlier civil rights campaign (in the 1950s).
@fencoul My opposition is not about whether it can be done securely; it's because you didn't ask whether it can be done *fairly*.
(That is: without it being turned into a tool of oppression. Which is pretty much guaranteed to happen within milliseconds under every Home Secretary we've had since Roy Jenkins …)
👆 It'll happen. Whether we like it or not. Imagine if the private sector got hold of de-facto #Digital_IDs!
"Scan your #AaronBanksCard or #ElonMuskCard now, whichever one you have."
@fencoul @cstross NI numbers have very limited data attached to them, can't be used as ID, & on the rare ocassions they cock up still cause major problems to those concerned.
NHS numbers, while having some very personal data attached, are siloed across a number of systems with robust protections* regarding transfer, & also can't be used as general ID.
Neither of them are Home Office data surveillance mechanisms.
*May no longer fully apply to NHS England
@HighlandLawyer @fencoul @cstross exactly, maybe 10% of implement something like an NI or NHS number is the technical side of how to do it - the other 90% is the reams and reams of policy, legality and enforcement that supports it.
Something that our "oven ready" government have historically had a bit of trouble with.
Strong ID is inevitable, so we, the people, need to get ahead of this.
We need a Digital ID Bill of Rights:
Untrackability: verify identity while getting very little to track someone on.
Qualified anonymity: criminals can be unmasked; you can ban an offensive person entirely but they keep anonymity.
Erasability: a completely restart must be possible.
The first and third can be done with strong crypto; the second needs a trusted central authority that keeps secrets.
@TomSwirly @fencoul "We need a Digital ID Bill of Rights"
—Good luck getting that under the Tories (hint: the project would be overseen by the Home Office, so we're looking at the most depraved authoritarian bigot they can find, currently Suleia Braverman).
And good luck hoping for it under Labour led by Keir Starmer, a former Director of Public Prosecutions who is an instinctive authoritarian and went mediaeval on anyone the police collared in 2011 after the riots.
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Charlie Stross
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