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A CONSERVATIVE CASE AGAINST IDENTITY CARDS
(in the United Kingdom)
by Sean Gabb - cea01sig@gold.ac.uk
(Internet version 3)
THIS E-TEXT IS THE COPYRIGHT
SEAN GABB (1994)
IT MAY BE PASSED FREELY ROUND THE INTERNET
BUT MAY NOT BE REPUBLISHED IN HARD COPY
WITHOUT THE EXPRESS CONSENT OF THE AUTHOR
CONSENT WILL USUALLY BE GIVEN
AND THE AUTHOR WILL AT THE SAME TIME
SEND AN UPDATED VERSION OF THE TEXT
FORMATTED IN WP51
Right, all the above being said, I'll say that
I want this text distributed as widely as possible.
I don't think anyone else has written about privacy
and identity cards from a British angle.
Being a first effort, however,
it suffers from a number of defects
that I will ask my Internet readers
to help me supply.
I ask:
1. In what ways is my discussion of the potential
for electronic surveillance inadequate?
2. Are there any facts, primary or illustrative,
that I ought to consider for any longer version
of this pamphlet?
3. What other defects are apparent?
Despite its outwardly impenetrable wall of secrecy,
my own Government is in many respects
more open than your Federal Government.
This pamphlet in hard copy has been read
by various Ministers and Members of Parliament,
and a debate is starting about the costs and benefits
of electronic identification systems.
I do not pretend that we can win this debate;
but it would be at least useful
if hostility to the designs of authority
were to spread to the second centre
of the English-speaking world.
Therefore, I'd be grateful for wide distribution,
and for the fullest and most penetrating criticism
of what I've written here.
Sean Gabb, 30th November 1994
cea01sig@gold.ac.uk
A CONSERVATIVE CASE AGAINST IDENTITY CARDS
by Sean Gabb
CONTENTS:
INTRODUCTION
1. "PAPIEREN BITTE..."
2. NOTHING TO FEAR, NOTHING TO HIDE
3. IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE
4. OTHER COUNTRIES
5. LOOKING AHEAD
6. THE NEW DESPOTISM
7. POSSIBLE RESTRAINTS
8. THE FIGHT AGAINST CRIME
CONCLUSION
NOTES
APPENDICES
I The British Eugenics Movement
II The Regulation of Childbirth
III Memorandum of Peter Tatchell
IV Privacy in the United States
A CONSERVATIVE CASE AGAINST IDENTITY CARDS
Sean Gabb
INTRODUCTION
On the 13th October last, addressing the Conservative Party
Conference at Bournemouth, the Home Secretary, Michael Howard,
spoke thus:
I've always made it clear that I am determined to
give the police every possible help.
I know many of you believe - as do the police - that
identity cards could be useful to them.
Brian Mawhinney [Secretary of State for Transport]
has already proposed that new driving licences
should contain photographs. And Peter Lilley
[Secretary of State for Social Security] is bringing
forward proposals for a new card to help stop the
dole cheats.
Today, I can tell you that the Government will
publish next Spring a Green Paper setting out
proposals on how a new identity card might work and
inviting views.[1]
His own suggestion was that identity cards would in the first
instance be voluntary. "It could be used" he said,
both as a driving licence and as a benefit card.
This would mean that three quarters of the
population had the new card. No one else would be
forced to get one but I believe that in time the
vast majority would.
It would help publicans to stop underage drinking.
Tobacconists would spot teenage smokers. And video
shops to stop young children getting hold of adult
videos.
The new technology could also make it possible to
replace a wallet full of cards with just a single
bit of plastic. Bank card. Driving licence.
Social security card. Kidney donor card. All in
one.
In time, carrying your ID card would seem as natural
as carrying a credit card is at the moment.
I know there are lots of views about identity cards.
We need to hear them. There should be - and will be
- a full national debate before any decision is
taken. And I hope you will all join in.[2]
I offer this paper as a contribution to that debate. I do so
as a libertarian conservative. I have voted Conservative ever
since I came of age in 1979. I stood as a Conservative
candidate in the 1986 local elections. I have consistently
supported the Government's policy of privatisation and
deregulation; and I am aware that, of our three main parties,
only the Conservatives oppose the presently corporatist
tendency of the European Union.
I believe, however, that there is more to "rolling back the
frontiers of the State" than paying regard to economic
indicators alone. It is not enough to control the money
supply and deregulate the unemployed back into work. It is
necessary to roll back the frontiers in social and political
matters as well. My ideal England - the England that largely
existed before 1914 - is one in which individuals and groups
of individuals are free to pursue their ends, constrained only
by a minimal framework of laws.
I have no doubt that an identity card scheme would be
absolutely fatal to the realising of this ideal - even the
"voluntary" scheme that Mr Howard proposes for the moment.[3]
It would undermine the half-open society in which we now live.
Given the technology that will soon be available, it would
allow the erection of the most complete despotism that ever
existed in these islands. I am astonished that such a scheme
could be put forward by a government that dares call itself
Conservative. It is a betrayal not merely of the libertarian
and classical liberal wings of the Party, but also of the most
reactionary High Toryism. I will not argue whether this is
socialism by other means. But it is undoubtedly collectivist.
This is my opinion. It is also the opinion of many others
within the Party - and not only of those on my own wing.[4]
Even if identity cards really were likely to produce the
benefits announced by Mr Howard, without any of the costs that
I predict, I suggest that they would remain a politically
unwise innovation. Their attempted introduction would bring
about a split in a Party that is already split on Europe and
economic policy. They are also deeply unpopular in the
country as a whole.[5] So far as the protest against them
would involve people from all backgrounds, and so far as the
protest need involve just a single act of defiance - namely a
refusal to carry them - it would be comparable not so much to
the recent Criminal Justice Bill disorders, as to the campaign
against the Poll Tax. I cannot imagine that any member of the
Government, or any of its supporters, can want this. I cannot
imagine that a Government that started so fair in 1979, and
has achieved so much of good since then, is willing now to
discredit itself over anything so vile and absurd as identity
cards.
This being said, I will proceed with a more detailed
discussion of why they are so vile and absurd.
ONE: "PAPIEREN BITTE..."
Those of us who watched the film Schindler's List will have
been struck by the efficiency with which the Germans committed
their great crimes. There were moments of passion, when
individuals were shot or beaten to death. But the main
impression was one of bureaucratic purpose. Every edict would
produce long queues in the open behind trestle tables. Every
sentence - of death or momentary reprieve - would so far as
possible be carried out by the authorities. There is a list
in the film's title. The posters advertising it showed a
blurred list of names.
Now, it is worth asking - how these lists were compiled. How
was it that the Jews of Poland, and of Central Europe in
general, found themselves on a list of those to be robbed and
deported, and in many cases killed? Not all of them looked
like extras from Fiddler on the Roof. Most of them were
indistinguishable from their Gentile neighbours, in dress, in
speech, in occupation. Many had become Christians. Some did
not look "Jewish". A few even looked "aryan", with their blue
eyes and blonde hair. Yet onto the lists the overwhelming
majority went. How?
The answer is that every Central European had an identity card
which carried details of name, address, age, and religion.
Since these cards had to be shown on all official and many
other occasions, it was quite easy to catch any Jew who failed
to register as demanded by the Germans. Weeding out the
converts and their children was more difficult, but not
greatly so. Though identity cards here would have classed
their bearers as Catholics or whatever, they referred back to
central or local archives where further details were
available.
I could immensely elaborate this point, showing the ubiquity
of identity cards in these societies, how no one could be said
to exist without one. But I have made the point. I can say
that without identity cards, there could have been no full
persecution of the Jews. I will turn this to a more general
proposition - That identity cards make such things possible,
and even encourage the kind of people who want to make them
happen. By abolishing anonymity, identity cards enable the
authorities to find their victims among populations of
millions or hundreds of millions.
It was identity cards that enabled the massacres in Rwanda.
Here, as in Central Europe, there was no immediately obvious
distinction between persecutors and persecuted.[6] Though
claiming an infallible eye for who was Hutu and who Tutsi, the
killers notoriously relied on checking identity cards. These
stated tribal origin, and determined the fate of their
bearers.[7] What little hope the region has of a return to
peace may rest on reforms to the identity card system, so that
members of both tribes can go anonymously about their business
in public.[8]
It is identity cards that enable the Turkish authorities to
persecute Kurdish pagans and separatists. Everyone in Turkey
must by law carry a card at all times in public; and cards
bear details of religion. Moreover, the cards of "political"
offenders are said to be routinely punched with holes to make
their bearers visible to the authorities, and so more easy to
persecute outside the criminal justice system.[9]
It is identity cards, together with residence and work
permits, that allow the Chinese Government to maintain one of
the most quietly bestial forms of rule that ever existed.
Without the right documents, no one is allowed into the towns
from the growing violence and stagnation of village life.
Those who move illegally are called "the three withouts" -
without a valid identity card, without a residence permit, and
without a work permit - and are subject to immediate
deportation if caught, and sometimes also to savage
beatings.[10]
There are, of course, two common objections to my case. First
- the Nazis were beasts: black Africa is often a terrible
place; Turkey and Red China are scarcely better. The argument
is about whether we should have identity cards in this
country, where we have courts of law and a vigilant press and
public opinion. I hear the mantras endlessly chanted against
me - "It can't happen here" and "Those with nothing to hide
have nothing to fear". I am paranoid. I am a fanatic. I
look at PC Plod, and see the Gestapo. I think of identity
cards, and hear the telescreen calling me to order.[11]
Second, identity cards do not exist only in despotic
countries. With the exception of Ireland and ourselves, every
other member state of the European Union has them in one form
or another. Are these countries any less free than we
are?[12] Indeed, comparing our various laws on pornography,
drugs and consensual sex, many of are significantly more free.
The French and Germans may need to carry identity cards; but
their courts do not send men to prison for being caught in bed
together in a hotel or some other "public place": nor can a
sado-masochist be convicted of "aiding and abetting others to
cause injury to himself".[13]
We all know that identity cards can be made into an engine of
oppression; but we are also facing a crisis of law and order.
Should we not be looking at how, to quote Mr Howard, we can
"give the police every possible help", while ensuring that we
may avoid the potential disadvantages of identity cards? If I
insist on denouncing them, am I not indicating that I have
something shameful to hide?[14]
If simply because they are so often made, these are
substantial objections; and they must be properly answered.
It is a weakness at the moment, I feel, of libertarians that
we have not answered them as we might. We can easily have the
best of any economic argument. If someone speaks up for
tariffs, or a minimum wage, or public enterprise monopolies,
we have a body of economic argument that cannot be answered.
The "economic calculation debate" of the past 70 years, for
example, has not actually been a debate. It has been a
history of a case put on one side with increasing loudness and
clarity, until the other side could no longer ignore it, but
could only concede. There has been a similar history of
arguments over social matters such as drugs and so forth.
While the authoritarians have power on their side, that -
given reasonably free debate - is not in the long term enough
to win the argument.
Nevertheless, in defending the indirect supports of freedom,
we remain weak as a movement. In this country, we have
entirely failed to prevent a government, with which we have
been closely associated, from putting the Common Law through
the legislative equivalent of a shredding machine. The right
to silence under police questioning has just been abolished.
The burden of proof in criminal cases is being rapidly
reversed. The right to trial by jury has been limited to
about 15 per cent of criminal cases. The right to peremptory
challenge to Jurors has been abolished. There are calls to
give the prosecution a right of appeal from "perverse" jury
verdicts.
Similarly, in the argument over identity cards, we are weak in
putting arguments that answer the specific points made in
their favour. I do not suppose that I can by myself supply
that defect. But I do hope that I can state a case that
others more able and diligent than I can improve. This said,
I will try to answer the common objections to my case:
1. That we have nothing to fear if we have nothing to hide;
2. That "it" can't happen here;
3. That "it" doesn't happen in other Western countries that
have identity cards;
4. That we can effectively restrain potential abuses of
identity cards; and
5. That identity cards can help in the fight against crime.
Let me begin with the first of these.
TWO: NOTHING TO HIDE, NOTHING TO FEAR
I say that, though more civilised than other peoples, we are
still human beings. We are swayed by the same basic passions.
We need a smoother presentation of the lies; but we are not
deaf to the voice of persecution. We are certainly better
than the Nazis, but perhaps not much better than the German
people, who in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
accounted themselves - and with very good cause were accounted
- the most civilised people in Europe.
Let us return to the Jews of Central Europe. They were so
easy to find because their papers made it so plain who they
were. Yet words like Jude, ~id, ~yd, or whatever, had not
always been a badge of shame. According to Hans Momsen,
There was no inner logic of any kind determining
that German historical development should lead from
Weimar to Auschwitz.[15]
This is hard to contest. By 1933, the Jews could look back on
at least 80 years of emancipation and assimilation. It is
difficult to cross the gulf of the intervening catastrophe and
realise how completely secure the Jews had felt during this
period. But, with the opening of the ghettos around the
middle of the last century, they had emerged into a German-
speaking world which they embraced, and which on the whole
embraced them.[16]
In this country, emancipation came later than elsewhere; and
without conversion, Jews found it difficult to rise in society
and the professions. In France, despite formal emancipation
in 1790, they were still subject to many discriminations. In
Germany and the Habsburg Empire, there were few checks to
Jewish ability. In law, in medicine, in business and the
arts, the Jews were freely able to make their way.[17] The
names of the preeminent are in every civilised mind -
Mendelssohn, Mahler, Shoenberg, Klemperer, Kafka,
Hoffmansthal, Kokoshka, Freud, Popper, Mises, and many more -
all Jewish or part-Jewish. And these were just the
preeminent. Those of middling or lesser ability were
everywhere. They set the tone for bourgeois Vienna. With the
Czechs, they created everything that is wonderful about
Prague. They helped make Berlin into a centre of the arts.
And it must be emphasised, that these people did not think of
themselves primarily as Jews. They were Germans of the Jewish
faith, or of no faith at all; and they were often morbidly
proud of their German culture.[18] If some, like Rosa
Luxemburg, were revolutionary socialists, they were German
revolutionary socialists. Many more were German nationalists.
They fought loyally in the Great War; and no one was surprised
when the invading Axis armies proclaimed the liberation of the
oppressed Polish and Russian Jews.[19] The Allies worried
about the loyalties of their own Jewish citizens. "Scratch a
Jew, and you'll find a German" was a common cry in England.
It was only the Balfour Declaration of 1916 that persuaded
American Jews to declare against the Axis - and then not all
of them.
The Jews of Central Europe felt safe, as perhaps Jews never
have before or since.[20] The religious classification on
their own or their parents' documents was a little thing.
Indeed, the later Habsburg authorities had for a while been
inclined to discontinue it. The Germans and Hungarians,
fearing the higher birthrates of their subject Slavs,
preferred to classify Jews in the census reports not by
ethnicity but by language. Its retention owed much to Zionist
lobbying. Among the assimilated Jews, their propaganda was a
total failure until after the Great War. Their electoral
following was tiny: even in the main Jewish centres of Germany
and Austria, it seems that more Jews voted for the German
nationalist parties than for the Zionists.[21] It was feared
that without some official recognition, the assimilated would
eventually cease in all but the vaguest sense to be Jewish.
Here is no criticism. Had anyone told the Zionists that there
might later be problems, they would have laughed. They had
nothing to fear, and therefore nothing to hide. This was
Central Europe in the nineteenth century - the most civilised
of times and places.[22] Pogrom was a Russian word; and even
that semi-asiatic despotism was coming within the European
orbit.
Unfortunately, they had rather a lot to fear. German policy
turned as suddenly anti-semitic as day turns to night in the
tropics; and if we can now study the whole sequence of events,
their precise connection remains a mystery. And by the time
the Jews could be brought to realise they had anything to
fear, it was too late to hide.
I am not claiming that the British Jews will suffer from the
introduction of identity cards. All considered, that is most
unlikely.[23] But, while history is not like a needle stuck
in a gramophone record, it is like a theme with limited
variation. There are many other minority groups beside the
Jews. There are black and brown people. There are Moslems.
There are the followers of new and strange religions. There
are homosexuals and sado-masochists. There are socialists and
fascists. There are libertarians and Tories. There are
pacifists and war-mongers. There are anti-Darwinists and
holocaust revisionists. There are smokers and carnivores and
vegans. There are those suffering from or carrying congenital
disorders. There are the rich and there are the poor, and
there are those in between. 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? - especially since "it" not only can
happen here, but may already be happening.
THREE: IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE
No one expected, or could reasonably have expected, the
assimilation to end so badly. But the collectivist ascendency
over the German mind was plain before 1914. If liberals could
not describe the terminus, they knew which way the line was
going. They knew that something horrible lay ahead. We, with
our benefit of hindsight, can see much more. I have said
enough about the potential danger of collecting data on
religion or nationality. But there was the same potential in
the development of German medical theory.
>From about 1860, the role of the doctor in Germany was seen
decreasingly in terms of treating sick individuals. The new
ideal was the improvement of the race as a whole. Modern
science had apparently shown the value - for healthy and
unhealthy alike - of prescribing lifestyle; and, as a means of
enforcing these prescriptions, politics came increasingly to
be seen by medical writers as an adjunct of medicine.
Certainly, there were eugenicists and social Darwinists and
"racial hygienists" in other countries - the word "eugenics"
is even of British coining.[24] But only in Germany did they
ever get a government that wholeheartedly agreed with them.
For Hitler, coming to power was "the final step in the
overcoming of historicism and the recognition of purely
biological values".[25] For one of his colleagues, National
Socialism was nothing but "applied biology".[26]. It seemed
natural for the doctors to join the Party in large numbers,
and to give their enthusiastic support to policies of racial
health and purity that they had long taken as self-evident
propositions.
At last, they were free to prescribe lifestyles. Health being
integral to the German national interest, they argued, it
could no longer be possible to tolerate lifestyles damaging to
society as a whole, whatever individual preference might be.
They openly attacked the "liberal perversion" that the
individual should have the right to dispose of his body as he
saw fit - the "Recht auf den eigenen Krper". They spoke
instead of the obligation to be healthy - the "Pflicht zur
Gezundheit".[27]
The corollary of this was the elimination of "lives not worth
living" - these being defined as mental and physical
defectives, homosexuals, Gypsies, Jews, and anyone else who
seemed to stand in the way of a pure and healthy German Volk.
Dr Joseph Mengele, the Chief Medical Officer at Auschwitz, was
not a lone maniac: he and many others like him just applied
more radically a doctrine that was the consensus of German
medical opinion. In 1895, the medical writer Ernest Ploetz
had observed that the achievement of national health might
often require harshness towards "weak" individuals.[28]
We have yet no Mengeles in this country. But the notion of
preventive medicine is becoming hardly less dominant.
According to The Nation's Health, which is the most honest
official statement so far of our own lifestyle activists,
doctors are fast coming to
believe that the health of its citizens is one of
the most important resources needed by a nation for
the pursuit of most other legitimate national
objectives.[29]
It is becoming legitimate here as well for patients to be seen
not as individual clients to be treated as ends in themselves,
but as State property, to be frightened or harassed into
behaving as current medical fashion deems good for them.
Look at smoking. When I was a boy this was almost a virtue.
Harold Wilson took up pipe-smoking as part of his effort to
look reliable. One of my aunts used to spend hours in front
of a mirror training herself into the most elegant way of
blowing smoke. One of my uncles blew smoke rings as a party
trick. Today, smoking is deemed a thoroughly bad thing by the
doctors. Smokers are burdened with oppressive taxes and
frequently absurd propaganda.[30] They are forbidden by law
to smoke on most public transport, and may soon be forbidden
to smoke anywhere in public. Smoking is already restricted,
where not forbidden, by most employers.[31] It is considered
by some adoption agencies when assessing where to place
children.[32]
But these are indirect means. So far as they have not
entirely stamped out the horrid vice of smoking, there is a
more direct prescription of lifestyle. Consider:
In February 1993, Harry Elphick had a heart attack. It seemed
that he needed immediate tests and perhaps a by-pass
operation.
The consultant at the Wythenshawe Hospital in Manchester, to
whom Mr Elphick was referred, refused to see him, and wrote:
I have emphasised that we would not normally perform
these tests on people who smoke cigarettes.[33]
The justification here was that, with a stretched National
Health budget, resources should be devoted to the treatment of
those patients whose lifestyles had not so obviously
contributed to their illness.
After Mr Elphick had stopped smoking, a new appointment was
made for him on the 19th August 1993. On the 13th August,
however, he died suddenly of a second heart attack.
Commenting on these events, Dr Keith Ball, an anti-smoking
activist, wrote that
[h]opefully, the publicity aroused by Mr Elphick's
unfortunate case will bring home to smokers the
enormous benefits of stopping smoking.[34]
This has not been an isolated case. There is the case of John
Gibson, of Robert Stewart, of Roy Towler, of Mike Sale, of
Brian Ashmore, of Gareth Williams, of Mrs Linda Wright, of Ms
Denise Bannister, and of Anthony Munday - all refused
treatment under the National Health Service on the grounds of
smoking.
This final case is particularly significant. The person
refused treatment here was a boy of four years - a non-smoker.
In September 1993, he went to Thanet General Hospital to have
two of his front teeth removed under anaesthetic. On learning
that the mother smoked, the anaesthetist cancelled the
operation, and told her that there would be no operation for
her son until she had stopped smoking.[35]
What next? We are told that smoking produces disorders in the
children of smokers. There are calls for the licensing of
child-bearing. It is not a big step to demanding the
sterilisation of smokers - and perhaps of any existing
children of smokers who might be carrying congenital disorders
linked to smoking.[36]
Now from all this, we can derive a principle which,
consistently applied, would lead to a general persecution of
"deviant" lifestyles. If we can say that illnesses related to
smoking should not be treated at public expense, why should
money be spent on treating AIDS? Certainly, those who
contracted HIV before about 1985 did not understand the full
risks of needle-sharing or unprotected anal sex. But it can
be argued that anyone who has contracted it since then is at
least as negligent as a heavy smoker with lung cancer. Why
punish one and not the other?
The answer at the moment is merely political. During the past
generation, homosexuals have enjoyed a gradual emancipation.
The criminal law against homosexual acts has been greatly
softened. There has been an immense growth of private
toleration; and bigots like Stephen Green MA of the
Conservative Family Campaign are objects of middle class
derision.
Yet have we not seen this before? If the Jews, with all their
strong family traditions of how to behave when the Gentiles
turn nasty, could not see and avoid what happened to them
after 1933, how securely can homosexuals look into the
future?[37]
But the principle applies to more than homosexuals. Why
should dentists "waste their time" on people who eat lots of
sweets or do not brush their teeth properly? Why should the
very fat - or just the fat - stand in the same line as the
athletic for heart by-pass operations? These questions are
even now being asked by the lifestyle activists.[38]
Disturbingly, many of these people know in which tradition
they stand. While we have our own history of eugenic
campaigning, there is also a long history in this country of
praise for the - at least theoretical - basing of Soviet
medicine on the doctrine of prevention rather than cure.[39]
And take the quotation that heads Chapter Eight of The
Nation's Health:
Medicine is a social science, and politics nothing
but medicine on a grand scale.[40]
The author of this, the German medical reformer Rudolf
Virchow, died long before Hitler came to power. But note the
similarities of wording. It is far from silly to claim that
Virchow stands in a line that leads straight to Mengele.
We have not abandoned liberalism to the same extent as the
Germans had by 1933. For all that has happened this century,
it remains our distinguishing national characteristic. But
the parallels are obvious. The State is not naturally a
benign institution. Within my own relatively short lifetime,
states have murdered people by countless millions. I repeat
my question - Are we prepared to gamble on the future? Are we
happy to assume that our own State, in spite of repeated
experience elsewhere, and in spite of the specific parallels
drawn above, will always be the relatively mild thing that it
is today? Can we rest assured that who or what we are at the
moment will not one day work to our disadvantage, or that of
our children or their children?
FOUR: OTHER COUNTRIES
Here I face another objection. Unless the times should alter
quite beyond recognition, identity cards are unlikely to have
stamped on them words like "smoker" or "homosexual" or
"rubber-fetishist" or "lover of boiled sweets".[41] These
things might be recorded somewhere - as, doubtless, they are
now - but there is a limit to how much checking anyone can do,
or will want to do. By combing through the archives in the
occupied territories, the Germans were often able to trace the
children and grandchildren of converted Jews. But they did
everything with a diligence unknown to our own slothful
bureaucrats. And none of this happens in those other Western
countries that have identity cards. Again, am I not paranoid?
Am I not making a fool of myself?
I am not. Let us look at the experience of these other
countries. I start with Germany. Its experience in these
matters is unique. Since 1948, first West Germany and then
all Germany has been a state based on law. Unlike with us,
its rulers cannot with an airy wave of the hand dismiss
arguments about the potential of police state machinery. They
know what can happen as no other civilised people can. In
addition, they know they are on probation in the eyes of the
world. The least illiberality there can be seized on by their
own liberals and broadcast by morbidly - though not
unnaturally - sensitive Jewish groups. Yet, for all this,
identity cards have been used for illiberal purposes.
At the moment in Germany, the law requires every person above
the age of 16 to carry an official form of identification with
a photograph. This can be a passport, or a driving licence -
which in Germany, as in the rest of Europe, includes a
photograph - or an identity card issued by one of the Lnder.
It is required for all official transactions, and to open a
bank account, among much else. It is also used by the Police
to harass unpopular minorities. Take, for example, a case
involving nudists from 1951 - just after the restoration of
constitutional government. The arresting Officer, Paul
Birkenfeld, wrote in his report:
I was so excited, when I suddenly saw the Defendant
and his wife walk about naked in the meadows by the
river, that it had never occurred to me, that I
could stand in the discreetly tolerated bathing
grounds of the Naturist Federation and immediately
demand to see their identity cards - which both were
unable to produce.[42]
I saw a similar incident in a Munich park in the summer of
1992. Several young men stripped off to their underpants and
began dancing under a grass sprinkler. After a few minutes,
they were accosted by two Police Officers and ordered to
produce their identification. On this occasion, they were
allowed to go back to their clothes and dig out their cards.
But I saw their details copied into a notebook; and they were
ordered out of the park - despite there having been no
complaint from me or the few other people eating their
sandwiches there.
Again, it is common for the Police to check identification in
public houses and cinemas and gay clubs, to make sure that
young people there are not just below the legal age at which
they are permitted to be there. These details also are
recorded, irrespective of whether any law is being broken.
It is also necessary for hotel guests to produce
identification when checking into hotels. The registers are
routinely inspected by the Police, to see who has been using a
prostitute, or if any known homosexuals have stayed there -
this though homosexual acts in hotel rooms are not illegal
under German law.
There are other abuses. In 1988, a Sigrid Wolf from Wuppertal
in Westphalia won about DM700 at a casino in Dortmund. She
left with an unknown man, and was found robbed and murdered
later that evening. The Police confiscated the casino
register, and obtained search warrants from a Judge to arrest
and search all 1,037 men who had been in the casino at the
same time as the deceased. Each warrant stated that the man
was suspected of murder and that a search of his person and
home might lead to the discovery of stolen property. No
charges were laid as a result of this operation.[43]
In France, where a voluntary scheme has become effectively
compulsory, the Police routinely demand the identity cards of
black and brown people - ostensibly to establish immigration
status, but in reality to harass them.[44] Also, K.
Cowmeadow, writing to The Sunday Telegraph, gives an
interesting anecdote:
A young mother [in Paris] was called away
unexpectedly to go to her parents, one of whom had
been taken seriously ill. She left her husband to
look after their baby at home. He popped out in his
shirtsleeves and slippers to get some food from the
corner shop - yards away. Unfortunately he was
stopped by police outside who asked for his ID and
wouldn't let him go back up to his flat to get it.
They took him to the police station, despite
protests that there was a baby left alone, saying
that as soon as they had checked, he could go back
home.
He was put in a cell and was not allowed to phone a
friend or neighbour to keep an eye on the baby. As
far as he knows, they didn't make any check on his
identity. They merely, in the early hours of the
morning, said: 'OK, you can go.' No lift home. The
baby luckily was fine, only needing a bit of
attention at both ends. Innocent? No. The father
should have been carrying his ID card.[45]
In Greece, the authorities are deeply suspicious of any
religion but Orthodoxy. It has long been a criminal offence
to try converting any Orthodox communicant; and the law is
strictly enforced. During the past 10 years, around 2,000
Baptist, Pentecostalist and Jehovah's Witness missionaries
have been arrested there.[46] Non-Orthodox religions are
restricted in where they may open their places of worship, and
must even petition the Orthodox hierarchy for permission
before they can open.
In 1993, the Greek Parliament passed a law requiring citizens
and resident aliens to have details of religion put on their
identity cards. This has made religious persecution much
easier. For many years, the National Intelligence Service has
been keeping files on non-Orthodox Greeks and classifying them
by religion. In a confidential report leaked to the press in
1993, it proposed using the new identity card entries to
divide the population into two categories. There would be the
Orthodox, or "genuine, pure, incorruptible Greeks" and the
heterodox, or "non-genuine, impure, corruptible Greeks" -
against which "traitors" "repressive and preventive measures"
should be taken.[47] This report was officially denied, but
the penal laws remain in force.
In this country, we had an identity card scheme between 1939
and 1952. Introduced as a means of restraining the black
market sale of rationing coupons, it quickly became a general
nuisance. Production of a card was demanded by the Police on
almost every occasion.[48] On the 7th December 1950, Clarence
Henry Willcock, a middle aged manager of a dry cleaning
company, was stopped while driving his car in Finchley by PC
Harold Muckle. No evidence was ever produced to show that Mr
Willcock had been committing an offence, but he was ordered to
show his identity card. When he refused, PC Muckle gave him a
notice requiring him to produce his card at a Police Station
within 48 hours. Mr Willcock threw the notice onto the
pavement with the words "I will not accept this form".
When he was convicted by the Magistrates, he appealed into the
Court of Criminal Appeal; and his case was considered so
important that it was attended by Lord Chief Justice Goddard
and six other Judges. The Court upheld his conviction and the
sentence - an absolute discharge - but the Lord Chief Justice
denounced the identity card scheme with the words:
Because the police may have powers, it does not
follow that they ought to exercise them on all
occasions.... [I]t is obvious that the police now,
as a matter of routine, demand the production of
national registration cards whenever they stop or
interrogate a motorist for whatever cause.
To demand production of the card from all and
sundry, for instance from a woman who has left her
car outside a shop longer than she should... is
wholly unreasonable. To use Acts of Parliament
passed for particular purposes in wartime when the
war is a thing of the past tends to turn law-abiding
citizens into lawbreakers, which is a most
undesirable state of affairs.[49]
In 1952, as part of its general "bonfire of controls", the
second Churchill Government abolished the identity card scheme
to general approval. "There was" says Anthony Sheldon, the
chronicler of this Government, "a great feeling that we needed
to get away from the war and austerity."[50] For the next 40
years, there was little pressure to introduce a new scheme -
little pressure, that is, until this year.
FIVE: LOOKING AHEAD
It is true that the experience of identity card schemes in
this and other civilised countries has shown so far only that
they are vexatious. But this is unlikely to remain the case.
Without a really exceptional effort - and then for a single
purpose - there are natural limits to what can be done with
the relating of paper identity cards to paper records. But,
increasingly nowadays, information is recorded on computer
databases. Once there, it is wonderfully easy to access. If
I take the version of the Oxford English Dictionary recently
published on compact disc, I can in seconds gather information
that would once have required months of patient scholarship.
I can find how many words of Arabic derivation came into
English between 1660 and 1715. I can find how many words
containing the letter C that Shakespeare borrowed from French.
I can find every philosophical word first used by Thomas
Hobbes. I found much of the information for this pamphlet in
an electronic database called FT Profile, which holds the
complete text of most articles published this decade in the
British press. In half an hour, I downloaded 96,189 words,
being the text of 274 articles containing the words "identity
card". Exactly the same kind of search is possible of a
database containing personal details - and these are in
computers far larger and more powerful than anything that I
have.
Moreover, the knowledge that information, once gathered, can
be stored at almost zero cost, and retrieved at once in any
permutation, is proving an incentive to gather the sort of
information that it has not so far been convenient to keep on
any but a small minority of the population.
We can see this most plainly in the United States, where the
education system is fast acquiring a national network of
electronic student records. Its purpose is to allow the
exchange of information between various agencies, both public
and private, and the continuous tracking of individuals
through school and higher education, through the armed forces,
through the criminal justice system, through their civilian
careers, and through their use of the medical services. At
the moment, these databases are being fed "only" the following
information:
- An "electronic portfolio" for every student, containing
personal essays and other completed work that has been
submitted on computer disk;
- Assessments by teachers of every student's work and work-
related behaviour;
- Every student's Social Security Number, to allow later
additions from other databases.[51]
The National Education Goals Panel, a Federal committee set up
under the Goals 2000 Act 1993 to coordinate the national
reform of education, has recommended as "essential" the adding
of further information to these portfolios, this to include:
month and extent of first prenatal care; birthweight; name,
type, and number of years in a pre-school programme; poverty
status; physical, emotional and other development at ages five
and six; date of last routine health and dental care;
activities away from school; type and hours per week of
community service; name of post-secondary institution
attended; post-secondary degree or credential; employment
status; type of employment and employer's name; whether
registered to vote.
It also notes other "data elements useful for research and
school management purposes": names of persons living in
student household; relationship of those persons to student;
highest level of education for "primary care-givers"; total
family income; public assistance status and years of benefits;
number of moves in the last five years; nature and ownership
of dwelling.[52]
Though intended mainly for the authorities, access to these
records is available also to private agencies. This is
intended. In Together We Can, a book published jointly by the
U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Health
and Human Services, there is talk of "overcoming the
confidentiality barrier". The purpose of the new databases is
to give all agencies "ready access to each other's data".[53]
Already, the databases are being used. In Kennewick, in the
State of Washington, more than 4,000 school students were
assessed by their teachers on how often they lied, cheated,
stole, showed a "negative attitude", acted aggressively, and
were rejected by their peers. The completed assessments, with
names still attached, were sent to a private psychiatric
centre under contract to help "at risk" students. "All this
was done without the knowledge and consent of the children or
their parents."[54]
The argument is not simply about identity cards. It is about
the nature and use of the information to which they now can
give immediate access. There is no need to mark on an
identity card that its holder is a smoker or a homosexual. It
is enough that it give anyone inspecting it easy access to a
central database where these details are stored or can be
accessed.[55] In his Bournemouth speech, Mr Howard spoke not
about a piece of card with a photograph and a few typed words.
He spoke about a smart card:
The new technology could also make it possible to
replace a wallet full of cards with just a single
bit of plastic. Bank card. Driving licence.
Social security card. Kidney donor card. All in
one.[56]
Exactly so. Even something as cheap as a bar code could give
access to a central database of information. But far more
sophisticated means are available. The smart card is a piece
of plastic with an embedded microprocessor carrying a personal
identification number giving access to the database - just as
our bank cards give access to our accounts. Or there is
something called a "PCMCIA card", which can contain megabytes
of personal information, and which can be made to communicate
with the database. In this new scheme, an identity card is
nothing less than a key that, carried about, gives the
authorities - and, in all probability, many others besides -
the means to unlock a filing cabinet filled with information
on the holder.
Let us consider what sort of information we can expect to be
in this filing cabinet. If we are somewhat behind the
Americans in the use of digital technology, I have no doubt
that we shall soon follow their example, and start opening
electronic portfolios on everyone in the country. Even now,
MI5 is connecting all the government databases that already
exist, 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".[57]
Mr Howard himself has made one proposal. Earlier in his
speech, he announced that
I am giving the police extensive powers to take DNA
samples from suspected criminals. That will enable
us to create the first national DNA base in the
world. When I told the Attorney General of the
United States about it, her jaw dropped. A DNA
database is one of the most powerful new weapons in
the fight against crime. The police must have it.
And I want it working by early next year. From then
anyone on that database will know that he is a
marked man.[58]
Note the adjective "suspected". Note also what is really
meant by "criminal". It is an offence to smoke in an empty
railway carriage, to import spirits above a certain potency,
to have a screwdriver in one's car "without reasonable cause
or lawful authority", for one man to kiss another in public,
and for having one's name left off the Electoral Register. On
present trends, we shall soon live in a country like old
Germany, where everything that is not compulsory is
prohibited. Already, millions of people in this country have
criminal records for acts that by no stretch of the
imagination might be described as attacks on life or property.
I have no idea how many people have been arrested for such
acts, only to be released later without charge. But all will
have their individual genetic codes fed into Mr Howard's
database.[59]
And I see no reason why this database should omit information
gathered and held by private organisations. Indeed, where
serious crimes are concerned, banking and other financial
confidentiality is already dead in this country - and the
death has happened within the last ten years. Before then, a
bank had an implied contractual obligation not to disclose
information concerning the affairs of a customer. This
obligation extended to all facts about a customer known to or
discovered by the bank, and not merely to the state of his
account.
The obligation was qualified in various ways, the most
important of which for this discussion was compulsion of law.
By s.7 of the Bankers' Books Evidence Act 1879 - amended by
the Banking Act 1979 - a party could by court order inspect
and copy entries in a banker's books. This allowed the Police
to gain access to a suspected person's records, but only after
charges had been laid. If other disclosures were made to the
Police, they were not strictly lawful; and they were very
seldom made.
By s.17 of the Taxes Management Act 1972, a bank was further
obliged to inform the Inland Revenue of interest paid to a
customer above a certain level.
However, the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, the Drug
Trafficking Offences Act 1986, the Criminal Justice Act 1987,
the Criminal Justice Act 1988, The Companies Act 1989, and the
Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act 1989,
together with the Criminal Justice Act 1993 and the Money
Laundering Regulations 1993[60] - which both give effect to
the European Union's Money Laundering Directive - and numerous
statutory instruments and "voluntary" codes imposed by the
Bank of England, have entirely altered this state of affairs.
A bank today is obliged to disclose information virtually on
demand to the Police, the Revenue, the Department of Trade and
Industry, and the Serious Fraud Office, to name only the most
frequent applicants.
Further, the banks and other financial institutions must
report all "suspicious transactions". These include the
making of unusually large cash deposits - that is, deposits
larger than 10,000 - numerous deposits and withdrawals of
cash, using night safes to make large deposits of cash.
Failure to report is a criminal offence, and on conviction, a
bank or other financial official can be jailed for a maximum
of five years. In many cases, usually connected with drugs or
terrorism, it is for an accused official to prove he had no
reason to suspect that a transaction was irregular. If it can
be proved that he actively assisted to hide a transaction, he
faces a maximum of 14 years' imprisonment.
Still further, even if no suspicious transactions can be
proved, a senior manager can face a fine or two years'
imprisonment, or both, for failing to put adequate safeguards
in place.[61] This requires every financial institution to
appoint a "money laundering reporting officer", to make and
maintain regular contact with the authorities. Apart from
this, financial staff are encouraged to make anonymous reports
to the National Criminal Intelligence Service.[62]
In addition, "financial institution" is defined not merely as
bank, building society, insurance company, and so forth, but
also as solicitor, accountant, estate agent, auctioneer,
antique dealer and general shopkeeper, and casino. Anyone who
receives large sums of money from the public is covered.[63]
These provisions breach the previously fundamental rule of
Common Law - that every accused person is innocent until
proven guilty. They also turn just about every member of
staff in every financial institution into a part-time
policeman.
Therefore the sudden mass of paperwork required to open a bank
account in this country. The traditional two references are
no longer enough. It is necessary to produce passports,
driving licences, and so forth, to establish full proof of
identity. Identity numbers from these documents are kept on
file for future inspection.
Such safeguards as exist in the modern legislation are to
protect the banks, not their customers - therefore the
relieving of banks from civil liability to their customers for
any disclosure of information to the authorities, or for not
informing their customers of any such disclosure.[64]
All these regulations are intended for the detection and
prevention of serious crimes - few of which, terrorism aside,
are connected with attacks on life or property. But their
extension, to allow an inspection and supervision of everyone,
can be expected to follow as a matter of course. This is the
opinion of Dr Michael Levi, Reader in Criminology at the
University of Wales. He says:
It appears... as if the foundations of the
international finance-police state are being laid.
In six years [to 1989], the UK has moved from a
legal position in which bank account details could
be revealed only after the account holders had been
charged, to one in which routine interchanges -
court-authorised or not - take place between banks
and a plethora of police and regulatory
agencies.[65]
Turning to the shops, the gathering and storing of information
here also is far advanced. At the moment, this is for purely
commercial reasons. Competition is driving retailers to learn
as much as possible about their customers. Age, income,
credit rating, marital status, location of address, known
propensity to buy certain goods or classes of goods, likely
propensity to buy others - these details and many more are
routinely collected and often sold or traded. So far as it
minimises our costs of search for the things we want or may
want to buy, this is a beneficial activity. But it too will
go into the central database, for inspection by the
authorities - or it may be there now.
Then there are our shopping receipts. 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. These records are all
still outside the database. So far as I can tell, they are
regarded as unimportant, and are quickly deleted. It is too
expensive for the shops to keep them and make them available
to the authorities. But this is a problem of time, not
possibility. A few years more of falling hardware prices, and
someone need only find a plausible justification, and our
shopping details will no longer be a secret. Some of us, no
doubt, will turn to 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.
The same can be said for the records of books borrowed from
public libraries. I have never asked if anyone at my local or
university libraries can find out yet what I borrow. But, as
soon as money and technology allow, this information surely
belongs with everything else. It plainly shows the sort of
person I am, and indicates what I may be inclined to do.
Nor do I see why our e-mail records should not be available.
For many years, postal surveillance has been almost impossible
in this country. There is the huge volume of letters passing
through every day through the Post Office. There is the
possibility of slightly misaddressing a letter, or changing
the addressee's name, to evade inspection at the sorting
office while relying on the local experience of the Postman to
ensure delivery. The creation of the Post Office in the
1660s, and the protection of its monopoly since then, has owed
at least as much to a desire to intercept our post at will as
to the huge revenue that has usually been derived. Its
suggested privatisation may be in part a recognition that its
use as a means of surveillance is over.
The redirection of our post through the Internet allows this
control to be reimposed. If I send an e-mail message, it can
be read by the administrator of the site to which I am
connected, or of the recipient's site. It can also be
intercepted at any convenient point on the vast web of
telephone lines which contain the Internet. The cost in human
labour of steaming open and reading or copying every letter
sent in this country is too high for serious consideration.
Ordering us to send our post in unsealed envelopes would cause
a general uproar, and would, again, be too expensive. But to
monitor e-mail for certain words or combinations of words is
quite simple, and is now within many surveillance budgets.[66]
Then there are future developments that can now only be
imagined. At the moment, many of us must wear identity cards
in our places of work. This saves the security staff from the
effort and intrusion of demanding identification whenever we
enter the building or a restricted place in the building. I
have no doubt that someone will think of an advantage to
requiring the same in public with general identity cards.[67]
On the Tuesday following his Bournemouth Speech, Mr Howard
promised to spend money on installing more video cameras in
public places. Speaking in London at the eighth International
Police Exhibition and Conference, he said:
We know that CCTV has great potential to help in
detecting and preventing crime. The new scheme will
provide funding, to a total of 2 million in this
financial year, to bidders from local partnerships
with imaginative applications for closed circuit
television.
Given the success of CCTV in many parts of the
country in preventing crime and increasing arrests
for crimes committed, this is an important
development. It will help to reduce the fear of
crime and will make our communities safer places in
which to live and work.[68]
It may today be possible - if not, it will be no later than
the end of this century - for digital cameras to monitor and
record identities from the wearers of interactive identity
cards. Moving somewhat further ahead, it will eventually be
possible to match the faces of customers or people in the
street 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.[69]
I am not alleging some evil conspiracy here. The people who
are gathering all this information on us, and those who are
calling for it to be made accessible at will through an
identity card scheme, simply want what is best for us. They
see only benefits in the growing structure of surveillance.
They will ask me:
- 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 bomb explodes at a railway station, to think how the
police computers might scan the station 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.
The problem is that I can imagine rather more.
I think of someone like the consultant who refused to see Mr
Elphick, standing over a patient and waving a print out of all
the cakes and ale bought during the previous ten years.
I think of social workers breaking into a house at three in
the morning, and removing children from people whose recent
purchase of a vibrator, or conversion to Buddhism, clearly
disqualifies them from being parents.
I think of somebody sacked from his job, because his son
downloaded a file from a deep green bulletin board in Finland,
or wrote an essay at school in which he gave some received
opinion less than its proper respect.
I think of a woman whose DNA code shows a high probability of
her bearing a deformed child, forced into sterilisation.
In short, I really do think of the most complete despotism
that ever existed. Here I am thinking of a state of affairs
that my reading of the dystopian science fiction has been
inadequate for me fully to imagine. Yet, by following through
those things that are now happening to their natural
conclusion, it is possible to see its general outlines.
SIX: THE NEW DESPOTISM
I repeat and must stress, that this despotism will not overtly
be a "boot stamping on a human face - for ever".[70] 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. It
will be wholly unlike the great despotic empires of our
century.
In those empires, surveillance and control could never be
total. Minorities like the Jews or the old middle class could
be singled out. Known dissidents could be followed round and
watched. Informers and secret police could frighten everyone
else to some extent. But while whole populations could feel a
certain pressure to conform to the wishes of those in
authority, it was impossible to enforce conformity in all
cases. It would have generated a mountain of paper.
Economies, already weakened by socialism, would have been made
still weaker by the diversion of labour to accumulating and
using this mountain.
Moreover, the propaganda was too crude to be wholly effective.
It contained too many lies that were contradicted by what
people actually saw around them, or heard or saw on foreign
broadcasts. And, except in the Soviet Union, the despotism
did not last beyond a single lifetime. Always, there was at
least an older generation able to remember the freedoms of the
preceding bourgeois state, and able to pass on to the young
the belief that these freedoms were normal and desirable and
might one day be recovered.
But this future despotism will not face such problems. The
system that I can dimly see will not collapse under the weight
of its own folly. It will not be socialist in the old sense,
of central economic planning, but will keep enough of a free
market to ensure some coordination of activity. This will not
be enough, I suspect, to lift the economy from permanent
recession, with high unemployment and periodic bursts of
inflation. It will serve, though, to reinforce the pressure
of public and other opinion.
As a proportion, there are perhaps today fewer people of
independent means than at any time in our history. Until the
Great War, and for a while after, it was possible for many
people to do more or less as they pleased, free from any need
to court or keep the good opinion of others. In a society
still deeply religious, it was possible for someone to bring
religion into disrepute. Charles Darwin, with his fortune
safely in the bank, could overturn the foundations of
conventional religion. Edward Gibbon could outrage the whole
religious establishment with his account of the early Church.
During the American war, the Whig aristocracy could denounce
every British victory. During the wars of the French
Revolution, it could first praise the Jacobins and then
worship Napoleon. There were transvestites, and open
adulterers, and believers in every hated doctrine - from
socialism, to female suffrage, to the dismantling of the
Empire. I am not saying that poor radicals were not
persecuted; but those with independent means could be punished
with nothing worse than the obloquy of those whose good
opinion they generally despised.
Today, most incomes are earned, and all are heavily taxed.
Few even in the middle classes have time for any dissenting
speculation; and then we must take care not to upset our
employers or customers beyond an often narrow limit. I think
of Colin Jordan, sacked from his teaching post for his -
admittedly absurd - opinion about the Jews. I think of other
national socialists, sacked from local authority jobs. I
think of smokers, told to give up or face dismissal.
The surveillance state, to which we are fast advancing, will
make it easier than ever before to know what people are
thinking and doing. And a moderate but firm pressure of this
sort to conform, imposed over several generations, not impeded
by the existence of other free countries, and not compromised
by the sort of overt tyranny that provokes internal where not
other resistance, will at last produce a new humanity. The
difference between people in this and in earlier despotisms
will be as the difference between an animal chained and an
animal tamed.
Most of us, after all, are quite timid. We do not pick our
noses in public, or scratch our bottoms, for fear of how we
shall be regarded by the world. For myself, I remember how,
when I was 19, I trembled for what seemed an age at the
entrance to a sex shop in Soho, terrified to go in, thinking
that every passer-by was watching me and would laugh if I
entered this temple of masturbation. Today, I will not smoke
in front of my mother, though she smokes more in a day than I
do in a month. There are many other trivial things that I
still prefer others - or just a few others - not to know that
I like or do.
Nearly everyone else is the same. To be ashamed, even of
nothing very serious, is a natural, indeed a necessary
feeling. I have a homosexual friend who would never go to a
gay bookshop or club or any other gathering place if he
thought he might be recognised there by his relatives or his
colleagues at work. I have another friend who drives a
minicab in a part of London far from home, who lets his
neighbours think that he is still a solicitor. But we are now
facing a return to the conformity 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.
The effect will an invisible but effective control. The
knowledge or prospect of being watched will for most of us be
a greater deterrent from whatever may then be classed as sin
than a whole mass of legal prohibitions. There will be no
definite formulation of what we must not do, nor any Act or
article in a code against which protest might be made. 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. I read somewhere once of a man in Leningrad, who in
1968 protested against the invasion of Czechoslovakia.[71]
There were flamboyant homosexuals in this country all through
the grim persecution of the 1940s and 50s. There are people
now who stand up and announce that the world is flat, or that
the Moon landings were a fake. But I will not think much of a
world in which such people have become the only individuals.
Nor do I think much of that world's chances of further
progress. During the past 300 years, we have fallen into the
habit of believing progress to happen automatically. We
complain about the rapacity and waste of big government; but
we still assume that private effort will somehow accumulate
wealth faster than most governments can destroy it. There is
nothing automatic in this. For the human race as a whole,
improvement has come in irregular jumps - with ages of
progress here and there. But the normal state has been
stability; and for the majority of past civilisations,
progress in one age has been followed by decline or even
collapse in the next. Despite all the triumphs of our science
and technology, we have no reason to believe that these must
continue indefinitely.
Margaret Thatcher's less reflective supporters have always
surprised me with their assumption that economic success is no
more than a matter of economic incentive. Certainly, a free
market is the greatest forcing house of individuality so far
discovered. But the Thatcher and Major Governments have not
managed to deliver anything approaching a free market. Their
market is regulated and taxed at every point. It enables a
certain economic rationality, but does not shelter individual
achievement against the disapproval of those whom it will or
might disturb.
And here is the death of progress as we have come to
understand it. The achievements of our civilisation have in
almost all cases been the fruits of individual excellence:
and, whether in the arts or the sciences or in commerce, the
rate of improvement has been proportionate to the toleration
of individuality. 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.[72] Cut down that tree of individuality - or, as I
am now discussing, merely strangle its roots - and there will
be no more fruit.
The Soviet socialists came closer than any other modern state
to reversing the direction of progress. But that needed a
continual vigilance, a readiness to step in and smother all
private initiative with punishment and frustration. In this
world of the future, there will need be nothing so crude.
There will be no prohibitions of initiative, because none will
exist. 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.[73]
SEVEN: POSSIBLE RESTRAINTS
It is argued that no such results will follow from the system
now being constructed. Either the authorities can somehow be
persuaded not to use all the powers that it puts into their
hands, or it will be circumvented by incompetence or evasion.
Roy Hattersley, for example, claims to be "an avowed civil
libertarian" who yet believes that "the case for identity
cards in Britain is irresistible".[74] The sole objection he
sees is a "lack of confidence in the integrity, indeed the
honesty, of the police". But, he answers,
[i]t is easy enough to deal with the officious or
over-aggressive policeman who helps the hours to
pass by challenging innocent pedestrians.
Challenged in court, the officer would be obliged to
show that he had 'good cause' for demanding to see
an identity card - a theft in the neighbourhood or
merchandise obtained by fraud from a local shop.
Then there is the problem of the man or woman who,
although innocent of any crime, is caught doing
something of which they are ashamed - out to dinner
with someone else's spouse or reading a dirty
magazine. Using information - who was where, when -
obtained from examination of an identity card would
be made a criminal offence.[75]
Colin Darracott, who is the Organiser of Charter 88 and
another "libertarian" believes that a "minimal" identity card
would be a good thing - but only after his scheme of a Bill of
Rights and Freedom of Information Act has restored faith in
the authorities.[76]
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 no law yet made on the sharing of information
has ever covered the ability of the security services to dip
into whatever file takes their fancy. Nor have our strict
official secrecy laws prevented unauthorised persons from
gaining access to data stored on the Police National Computer
- to which, in any case, numerous organisations, both public
and private, including the BBC and the National Gallery, have
open access.[77]
Also, the value of a unified database is that the information
on it can be shared very widely. That is the main purpose in
the American case given above. 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.
A variation on this argument is to call for a law to protect
privacy. We should, that is, have a right enforceable by the
courts to say "no" to many demands for information, and to
compel the deletion of much else; and we should have a remedy
for uses of information that expose us to ridicule or other
embarrassment. A tort of breach of privacy has existed in
American law for the better part of a century. Following the
example set, privacy is a legal right recognised in Canada,
Australia, France, Germany, and many other jurisdictions. It
has been repeatedly proposed that the right should also be
recognised in this country.
But, while this seems a reasonable notion, experience has
shown it to be objectionable on two grounds.
First, it has been found impossible to give the word "privacy"
a clear and distinct legal meaning. Reviewing the American
cases and the literature that surrounds them, Raymond Wacks
concludes that it "has grown into a large and unwieldy
concept"[78] Is it a condition, or a state, or an "area of
life"? Or is it synonymous with "human dignity"? Is it an
end desirable in itself, or a means of achieving some other,
such as creativity, love, or emotional release? In the
absence of any satisfactory or commonly agreed definition,
privacy has come to mean anything that a judge and jury can be
persuaded to accept. Breach of it has meant anything from the
denying of a woman's right to an abortion, to the compelling
of someone to cut his hair.[79]
Second, actions for breach of privacy have tended insensibly
to obscure, and thereby to weaken, other protections under
American law. They are taking over from defences under the
First Amendment in freedom of speech cases; and bearing in
mind the clarity of the one and the obscurity of the other as
legal concepts, this is to be regretted.[80]
Our own law of torts is less chaotic than the American, and a
privacy law might not to the same extent disorder the other
protections of life liberty and property under the law - or
such as may soon be left to us. Nevertheless, the ambiguity
of the notion will surely render it useless against the
gathering and use of embarrassing information. Look at the
recent agonising over the "outing" of the new Bishop of
Durham. Ought a privacy law have given him redress against
The News of the World? Or was there a public interest in the
revealing of his old conviction for indecency? Look, for that
matter, at the electronic portfolios being assembled in
America: in the most litigious nation on earth, did a privacy
law keep the parents of Kennewick from having the
psychiatrists knock on their doors? The same can be asked
regarding any of the other uses of information discussed
above.
Nor can anything better be expected from the privacy directive
now under discussion in Brussels: the talk there is all of
"balance". Whatever finally emerges will be as feeble as the
European Convention on Human Rights, which gives us all an
absolute right to freedom of speech, except where the
authorities decide to allow otherwise.[81]
Like dignity and happiness, privacy is a very good thing. In
legal terms, however, it should perhaps be regarded as a
secondary quality, contingent on the upholding of other rights
and a strict limitation of the size and role of government.
It is the absence of these that must be addressed, not the
specific effects that flow from their absence.
I move now to the argument from incompetence - that the
databases are and will remain so full of mistakes, that no one
will dare trust them. According to Dr Edgar Whitley, writing
to The Daily Telegraph, this is a "fundamental flaw". He
cites a National Audit Office report in which it was claimed
that 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. "With this level of inaccuracy" he concludes,
one cannot hope to implement a successful smart card
system for driving licences. It is likely that any
other form of computer-based national identification
system will suffer similar flaws.[82]
It may be that a catalogue of errors, more or less serious,
would soon bring identity cards into disrepute. Something
like this has recently happened in Sweden. While there is no
identity card scheme there, all Swedes are given a personal
identity number at birth. These have by gradual extension
become required for every public transaction, from health and
tax to banking and nursery school waiting lists. According to
Anitha Bondestam, Director of the Data Inspection Board in
Sweden, "you need them for everything, and to change your
number you need a sex change."[83] They are also used as a
common identifier for information held in different databases.
Not surprisingly, there are frequent mistakes due to
incompetence and fraud. Ms Bondestam cites the case of a
young woman who had her son taken away on the grounds that she
was a drug abuser. It finally turned out that somebody else
had been using her number in dealings with hospitals and the
Police. Her case became a national scandal; and the law is
being reformed, to limit the use of personal identity
numbers.[84]
Some writers have made fun of the ruin that such levels of
inaccuracy would soon bring to an identity card scheme. There
would be wrong names on them, and wrong photographs. People
would suffer immense inconvenience from the use of incorrect
data. No two officials or other persons would demand or
accept them in the same way. The central computers would be
forever "down".[85]
Otherwise, much is said about the costs of an identity card
scheme: The Home Office has estimated that a compulsory
scheme using a plastic card, with photograph, fingerprints,
date of birth and signature, would cost 500 million to
establish, plus 100 million per year to maintain
thereafter.[86] These costs are based on the assumption that
the scheme can be made to work properly from the first, and
that no further unexpected costs will occur. Bearing in mind
that the Home Office civil servants will almost certainly 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.[87]
There is also the certainty of malicious hacking. 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".[88]
This brings me to the argument from evasion. There is good
reason at the moment to believe that governments are losing
the battle to impose a total electronic surveillance. Look at
the current protections available for e-mail and other
electronic data. In the past few years, various kinds of
strong public key encryption software have become widely
available. Of these, PGP - or "Pretty Good Privacy" - is
currently the most popular. This does things that I do not
fully understand to an electronic document, and allows it to
be sent through the Internet so that only its intended
recipient can decrypt it, or allows it to be securely
encrypted for storing on a floppy disk.
The algorithm on which the programme is based is said to be
proof against any known method of cryptanalysis. It is
possible to decrypt a text by brute force - by setting a huge
computer to try every combination of characters. But this is
presently so slow and expensive, that we need not regard it as
a serious threat. Again, the algorithm may have been broken
without our knowing it. But to keep that a secret from us,
the fact would have to be so securely classified, that the
authorities themselves would be mostly ignorant of it.
Certainly, in a case from 1993, given wide publicity on the
Internet, a Californian paedophile had to be released after
arrest, because all his private records were encrypted with
PGP, and the Police were unable to read them.[89]
There is a huge "techno-optimist" literature, showing how the
future world that I have tried to describe will not and cannot
ever exist, because the development of computers has made it
more impossible than possible. But while the forces of
privacy and anarchy may now be ahead in the race, I do not
believe that this will always be so. Governments have fallen
behind because the people who run them are mostly in late
middle age, and have still not learned how to programme a
video recorder, let alone how to encrypt and send an e-mail
message. As soon as they do find out what is happening, they
will have the money and the moral authority to catch up and
overtake in the race.
This has begun in America, where the first steps are being
taken to nullify the benefits of strong encryption. That is
almost certainly the purpose of the Clinton Administration's
"Clipper Initiative". For the past year or so, it has been
urging the incorporation of its own e-mail encryption
standard. This offers all the security of PGP encryption -
for anyone who is not worried about the authorities. The
standard allows "properly authorized persons" access to the
means of decrypting suspicious documents. There are no
proposals yet to prohibit other, more secure standards. But
by imposing its own standard on most public agencies - though
not including the armed forces and security services - and
encouraging its adoption as the industry standard, the
Administration may be trying to minimise the use of other
standards in advance of prohibiting them. Even if it cannot
entirely prohibit the use of stronger standards, it will be
able to discredit and therefore limit their use to a small
minority.[90]
Apart from this, there is ordinary "traffic analysis". At the
moment, much can be gathered about someone's activities just
by looking at his telephone bill, to see whom he calls, how
often and for how long. This is a cheap means of checking to
see if it is worth tapping the line. Exactly the same
monitoring is possible of an e-mail account. Let the messages
be all strongly encrypted - it will be possible to see where
they are going and where coming from.
Against this, there are anonymous remailers, which are the
electronic equivalents of dead letter boxes. I have no faith
in these; and no one with the smallest common sense would ever
use one - or half a dozen in sequence - to subscribe to a
newsgroup like alt.sex.pedophile, or perhaps one day to
alt.politics.libertarian.
Or there is a programme called Steganography, which allows an
encrypted document to be broken up and hidden in the eighth
bits of a picture file.[91] It is not easy to check a picture
file, to see if it contains an encrypted file - which, of
course, cannot then be read. To check all the picture files
that are sent through the Internet, or may be seized on floppy
disk, is wholly impossible. But this again is a matter of no
more than time and money. It means bigger and faster
computers, plus a few moral panics about the data being
encrypted.
Equally, hacking is a simple thing to detect and prevent.
That it happens so often is due far more to the ignorance of
those in charge of computers than to the genius of the
hackers. At the worst, it can be made so expensive and
legally dangerous, that only other large organisations will be
able to consider breaking into government databases.
Nor will financial cost be any preventive. The Thatcher and
Major Governments have been the best in generations at saying
"no" to people with clever ideas for spending money -
something for which praise is due. Even so, 500 million is
just outside the bounds of petty cash. It may be a statistic
worth throwing at ministers who dislike the thought of
identity cards on other grounds. But it is not in itself an
argument against having them. It is surprising how much money
even a relatively frugal government can throw away when it
decides to.
As for bureaucratic incompetence, this too will eventually be
overcome. It is strictly analogous to the typographical
errors that plagued the first three centuries of printing.
For all his devoted pedantry, John Locke could never ensure
that his works were printed as he had written them.[92] But
the development of proofreading since his death has given us
rather more than a 99 per cent confidence in the textual
accuracy of books published by printers of even modest
competence. It is the same with electronic data held by the
authorities. Improvements of software will compensate for, or
replace, the humans who must for now feed in the data.
I am not optimistic about any of the means proposed for
restraining the future use of identity cards even to the
merely vexatious. Institutional barriers will be permeable
from the start, and will soon be overthrown. The informal
barriers that we ourselves erect may appear solid, but will
not long stand the pressure that must come against them as
soon as the authorities notice their existence and find them
inconvenient.
EIGHT: THE FIGHT AGAINST CRIME
At last, I come to the stated purpose of identity cards, which
is to help in the fight against crime. Having considered
their potential and actual costs, I do not need to argue in
support of the assertion - that their benefits must be so
obvious and immense, that all objections fall away before
them. What, then, are these benefits?
Roy Hattersley gives several examples:
It would be more difficult for conmen to talk their
way into pensioners' bungalows, harder for bogus
garage mechanics to drive away cars and less likely
that shopkeepers could be persuaded to give credit
on false guarantees backed up by stolen bankers'
cards....
I have watched the West Midlands Police make
methodical door-to-door enquiries as they pursue the
brutal murderer of a young girl. Hours of police
time were wasted confirming that visitors, lodgers
and live-in boyfriends were who they claimed to be.
And the men - not the sort to possess driving
licences and credit cards - deeply resented being
told that they could not leave the house until they
proved who they were and where they lived.
Fortunately, on that occasion the murderer was
caught. But identity cards would have speeded up his
capture - and avoided the horror that the victim's
neighbours felt during the couple of hours when they
believed that they were suspected of battering a
child to death with a house brick....
Time after time, day after day, we are asked to
prove who we are. 'Have you any identification on
you?' is one of the most frequent questions asked in
modern society.
A single card - complete with photograph - that
gives name and age will help pensioners to receive
their concessions and baby-faced 20-year-olds to
drink in public houses without risking humiliation
at the hands of over-zealous landlords. It will also
prevent teenagers renting pornographic videos, at
least without first committing an act of fraud.[93]
Other benefits alleged are that identity cards will reduce
fraud of all kind. It is estimated that Social Security fraud
costs the taxpayers 500 million per year - or enough to cover
the initial costs of an identification scheme, with a saving
of 400 million thereafter.[94] The car magazine Auto Express
estimates that 1,000 people every week have someone else pass
their driving tests for them.[95] There is the concern,
voiced by Mr Howard and Mr Hattersley, about confidence
tricksters who, claiming to be telephone engineers or
whatever, get into the homes of old people and rob them of
their treasures. There are the persistent worries about
illegal immigration.
There is also the claim that to have an identity card is to
confer a sense of belonging to the community. Douglas
Cousins, writing to The Herald, was proud of his wartime card:
it gave him a sense of identity, told him who he was.[96] The
Labour politician Jeff Rooker agrees:
There is a socialist case, as well as a democratic
case, for insuring the right of a citizen to be able
to assert their own identity.[97]
It is even said that identity cards will diminish the amount
of police harassment of black motorists. Stopped by the
Police, they will at once be able to identity themselves, and
will not, as now, be forced to collect a pile of forms
requiring them to produce their driving documents at a Police
Station within 48 hours.[98]
These are the alleged benefits. For these, we are to have
identity cards and all that will naturally follow from them.
Yet it is a short and almost brutal work to dismiss them - to
show that the benefits advanced either are minimal or do not
exist.
Peter Lilley, the Secretary of State for Social Security, has
said that 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.[99]
Nothing short of total surveillance might prevent this -
something that almost no one is yet suggesting.[100]
It is also worth asking where all these estimates of fraud
losses come from. How do we know what is being defrauded from
the social security budget? How can anyone know how many
people fraudulently obtain their driving licences? The answer
is that nobody does know. Like the figures quoted about
illnesses related to smoking, they are plucked out of thin air
to support a case for which no other hard evidence exists.
This is admitted with regard to money laundering: there are
no reliable figures on how much money is laundered, because if
there were, it would not have been laundered effectively.[101]
As for confidence tricksters, their whole advantage rests on
the fact that they are so persuasive, that the old do not
bother to ask for the identification with which real workers
for the utilities are already provided. And, as for black
motorists, these are stopped by the Police because they have
black faces. A piece of plastic would simply require the
Police to find a new excuse for harassment.
Mr Hattersley's point about the murder investigation is a good
one. He has, however, fallen into a standard trap of bad
reasoners. He wishes to prove a specific conclusion - that
identity cards will help in the fight against crime. He has
then assumed a major premise of vast extent; and having found
it to contain his desired conclusion, gives little
consideration to what else it contains.[102] I have not
bothered to check how many children are murdered each year in
this country; but, though a horrible crime, I do not think it
happens on a scale so large and regular as to justify giving
everyone an identity card. If Mr Hattersley's argument were
to be allowed, I do not see where any line could logically be
drawn. Torture in police custody would, no doubt, lead to
faster confessions of guilt, and the apprehension of
accomplices. Equally, giving the Police duplicates of our
house keys would make it easier for them to search for stolen
property[103]. The point here, though, is one of cost and
benefit. There are no utopias. We are instead permanently
faced with the need to accept large evils for the sake of a
greater good - or at least, for the avoidance of greater
evils.
The same is true with regard to the general supervision of
children. I will not discuss whether it is so bad for them to
watch adult videos, or drink, or even smoke. But again,
either we trust parents to bring up their children as best
they can - and this best will often be less than others would
like, or, more often, different - or we turn everyone into a
child, fussed about or tyrannised over by an omnicompetent
state.
Mr Hattersley also assumes - as do most of the other advocates
- that people will carry the right identification. This is a
most dubious assumption. It should be plain to anyone with a
little experience of the world, that any document a state
cares to produce can be falsified by criminals. This has long
been the case with banknotes, passports and paper identity
cards; and a while ago, there was an exhibition at the British
Museum of forged banknotes, many produced with nothing but pen
and ink. To suppose that digital technology has changed
anything here is to know nothing of computers, and nothing of
the criminal classes. One should never underestimate their
abilities. They can get heroin into high security prisons,
and steal paintings from the best protected galleries. We can
have a photograph, a thumbprint, a retina pattern, and a
direct line to the central database, all built into our cards
- 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 protected bank cards
presently issued are available as blanks for a few
pounds.[104] The Loompanics Main Catalog is full of books on
the art of making or altering real identification.[105]
In a sense, computers are - and will for a long time remain -
easier to trick than human beings. In many cases, we have a
basic common sense, that makes us suspicious in circumstances
that cannot always be justified on rational grounds. Give a
computer what it is programmed to ask for, and it will give
whatever it is asked for, and with no questions asked. Short
of total surveillance - and perhaps not even then -
professional criminals, and terrorists, will be inconvenienced
by an identity card scheme only to the extent that it will
impose slightly higher operating costs.
This has been the experience in France, where electronic
identity cards are now being introduced. They have not
reduced the French crime level to any noticeable degree; and,
according to Peter Lloyd, a former Home Office minister, "the
main problem faced by the immigration officers at Dover is
fake French ID cards".[106]
Fred Broughton, the Chairman of the Police Federation,
believes that
[i]n 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.[107]
Dr Michael Levi disagrees. Speaking In Birmingham, the day
after Mr Howard's speech, he told the Council of Mortgage
Lenders that
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....
[While an ID card would have a modest effect in
helping to reduce some types of fraud,] whether,
even at a pragmatic rather than rights-based level,
their benefits outweigh the cost to civil liberties
is an open question.[108]
It is not, I suggest, an open question. Nevertheless - and I
will say this yet again - people like Mr Broughton cannot
simply be dismissed as liars with a hidden agenda of total
control. Crime is a serious problem. I understand very well
that the statistics often produced here in support are open to
question. We can ask precisely how many crimes are actually
being committed, as opposed to increases in reporting.
Alternatively, we can ask how the present rates of crime
against property might compare with those of the 1950s, if we
allow for the huge growth in the ownership of portable
electronic and other goods. But it still seems reasonable to
say that crime of all kinds has increased in this country, and
is continuing to increase; and people are right to worry, and
to look round for some easy means of bringing it under
control. Here, though, is the paradox.
Introducing Mr Howard's speech to the 1993 Conference, Lord
Archer voiced a common fear:
Michael, I am sick and tired of being told by old
people that they are frightened to open the door,
they're frightened to go out at night, frightened to
use the parks and byways where their parents and
grandparents walked with freedom.... We say to you:
stand and deliver![109]
What Mr Howard delivered was a promise to abolish the right to
silence under police questioning; and people like me are still
shaking with the horror of it. But, while undeniably tough on
the Constitution, he - like all other Home Secretaries during
the past 30 years - was being thoroughly tender on crime.
There are, broadly speaking, two ways of fighting crime. The
first is to wait until somebody breaks the law, and then catch
and punish him very severely. The purpose of this is prevent
him from repeating his offence, and to make the example of his
punishment a warning to others. The second is to make people
obey the law by limiting their means of breaking it. The
first, though usually harsh, involves a known use of power - a
collection and focussing of it over a small area, much as a
burning glass does to the sun's rays. Only criminals are to
be in fear of that power: the rest of us are to be left to go
undisturbed about our business. The second, though apparently
more humane, requires the most constant state supervision of
everyone and everything. This is because, with no death
penalty or flogging, or other punishments considered barbarous
by those whose opinions count, there is no effective
deterrence. And so, when mildness and attempts at the
reformation of character fail - as they inevitably must as
tried so far - the only alternative to giving up and calling
for the hangman is to treat everyone as a potential criminal;
and to treat civil liberties as a hindrance to the smooth
functioning of the criminal justice system, rather than its
highest glory. Therefore video cameras in public places.
Therefore the Money Laundering Directive. Therefore, perhaps
soon, identity cards. Therefore the wholesale destruction of
the Common Law, when the most likely result is to turn the
country into a police state.
It is no reply to say that the prisons are already full, and
that we have a higher percentage of the population locked away
than any other European country, not excepting Turkey. The
problem here is that the lifestyle activists have been allowed
to corrupt the definition of crime. When the Police are
diverted from the protection of life and property, to
arresting people for the unlikely crime of having their
nipples pierced, or to sniffing their cigarettes to see if it
is tobacco inside or something else, there will naturally be
more burglaries and muggings - especially if all the sniffing
of cigarettes is effective enough to drive up the price of
recreational drugs.
Mr Howard has been told by the Police Federation that he
"should... have nothing to be ashamed of in being a
reactionary".[110] But, for all the name-calling of the past
year, he is not a reactionary. If he were, he would have
stood up at Bournemouth and quoted the High Tories on the need
for more than Green Papers when presented with apparently
bright ideas. He would have lectured his audience on the
value of a spontaneous, self-sustaining order, and explained
how this can so easily be ruined by clumsy legislation. He
would have taken his stand on the traditional safeguards
contained in the Constitution, and suggested that the real way
to fight crime was to punish the criminals - always, of
course, after a fair trial. In his desire "to give the police
every possible help", Mr Howard has instead proposed a
transformation of British society more radical than anything
proposed by a Libertarian Alliance pamphleteer - a
transformation that should be far more shocking to those who,
in their need for a sense of identity, are now doing
everything but hold up their arms for the tattooist's needle.
CONCLUSION
I have tried in this pamphlet to make the following points:
- That identity cards give the authorities actual, and
still greater potential, powers of oppression;
- That this has been the regular experience in every time
and place that they have been established;
- That we have good reason to suppose these powers will be
used no less oppressively in this country;
- That identity cards will contribute nothing to the fight
against real crime, or that they will contribute
something only at the most terrible cost.
I will end by asking, what we can do to stop their imposition.
Here again, I am pessimistic. It may be that the current
plans will come to nothing. Perhaps the financial costs will
be thought too high - especially since the Ministers will be
aware of the potential costs, both financial and political.
To people who still cannot think of the poll tax without
shuddering, cost may be a safe excuse for backing down.
But only for the moment - not in the long term. Though
identity cards may be hated, on present trends they will 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 an identity
card scheme take it for granted that a government large enough
to impose and use one is a good thing. They like the welfare
state, and do not object to 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, the technology of electronic surveillance cannot be
uninvented; and it will continue to be used by private
enterprise. Even without the prompting of government, a
central database of sorts would exist. Banks and insurance
companies would still want to minimise their risk; employers
and landlords to know with whom they were dealing. The new
technology cannot be trusted in the hands of a big government.
But neither is it entirely benign in the hands of big
business. There is large potential here also for abuse.
Yet, this being said, the ordinary legal foundations of
privacy that existed even into the 1980s would be enough to
prevent the growth of an enormous central database. Breach of
contract and breach of confidence would check the routine
sharing of information. Doctors would not lightly expose
their records to an insurance company; nor banks their records
to each other and the mail-order companies. To these
protections must be added market pressures: who would
download adult videos from an Internet supplier known to open
its subscriber list to private investigators?
Moreover, without the crushing weight of taxes and regulation
that now stops up many of the avenues to independence, fewer
of us would stand to the world as impoverished wage slaves,
unable to laugh in the face of public disapproval. With less
to fear, we might have less to hide.
The problem, however, lies in getting any of this onto the
political agenda. And this is why, in spite of all else, I
continue to support the Conservative Party. I have said that
economic liberalism is not enough; but no other Party is
offering even that. Elsewhere, the argument is not about the
size of government, but only about what it is to do. The
Conservatives may now be considering identity cards; but only
they are open to the full argument against. I am not
optimistic that this argument will prevail. But here is the
only place where it can be made with the slightest chance of
prevailing.
NOTES
1 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.
2 Ibid..
3 I will say now in parenthesis - A government that invites
cooperation of this kind soon slides insensibly into demanding
it. In France, there is no legal requirement to carry
identification; but it has become so essential for carrying
out any public - and most private - business, that it is
compulsory in all but name: see Simon Davies, "Please my I
see your identity card, Sir", The Daily Telegraph, London,
13th October 1994.
See also Richard Ford, "Fears voiced over voluntary ID card",
The Times, London, 15th October 1994:
A voluntary identity card scheme could become
compulsory and lack safeguards for the public, the
Data Protection Registrar said yesterday. Elizabeth
France suggested that those without a card would be
at a disadvantage.
Her fears were confirmed when Detective
Superintendent Mike Shorter, of the Metropolitan
Police, said: 'The public with an identity card will
be treated more favourably than those without in
terms of finance and jobs and in the way the rest of
society reacts to them.' Mr Shorter said that
identity cards would help to reduce crime,
especially credit card and cheque fraud, and help
police to combat drug smuggling and illegal
immigration. 'I look on their introduction as merely
the first step. Identity cards will creep in. There
will be concerns but the police will begin to accept
those cards as a form of identity and they will be
accepted by the public gradually and most will
eventually carry cards,' he told a conference on the
issue in Birmingham.
4 On this point, see two recent letters to the press:
I have always supported the Tories, and would do so
again yes, even now. As an anti-federalist
free-marketeer, there is nowhere else to go. But
there are limits: I will never, never vote for the
party that brings in compulsory identity cards. Am
I alone in this?
Barry Chapman, "Letter: Tories trigger an identity crisis",
The Sunday Times, London, 15th May 1994.
Michael Howard has said that he will be calling for
a study into the possibilities of introducing
national identity cards (Guardian, October 14). As
a lifelong Tory supporter and also a Guardian reader
- an unusual combination I am told - for me this is
the last straw, my resignation as a local chairman
has already been submitted.
My hope is that you at least will stay true to the
principle of civil liberty and do all in your power
to get this iniquitous proposition killed even
before it gets started.
There is not a shred of evidence that a card can
improve the certainty of identifying perpetrators of
crimes, but worse than this, it is evidence that
this government is totally bereft of real solutions
to the increasing social malaise in Britain, a
malaise the cause of which it dare not admit. By
constantly focusing on the well-being of the City
and almost totally neglecting our primary resource
ie our people, they are reduced to looking for
solutions not much better - or effective - than the
hanging of sheep stealers.
Adrian M.B. Bates, "Letter: National ID cards 'the last
straw'", The Guardian, London and Manchester, 17th October
1994.
I know many other Party members who will resign if Mr Howard's
proposal is not quickly smothered.
5 In a recent poll, only 37 per cent of respondents were
found to be in favour of identity cards, with 48 per cent
against. Moreover, the percentage strongly against was found
to be more than twice the percentage strongly in favour.
Source: David Hughes, "ID cards scrapped over fears of
'revolt'", The Daily Mail, London, 10th September 1994.
6 "Tutsi v Hutu: Origins of division", The Economist,
London, 20th August 1994.
7 See Richard Dowden, "Identity card was passport to
death", The Independent, London, 7th July 1994:
A passport to life, or death - the Rwandan identity
card can be either, writes Richard Dowden. In the
picture (left) [photograph omitted] you can see that
the first line of information below the photographs
denotes ethnicity - Hutu, Tutsi, Twa or naturalised
Rwandan citizen. When the Hutu militias, the gangs
of killers, began their genocidal massacres of
Tutsis in April, they needed only to ask for
identity cards to decide who lived and who were
chopped or speared to death. Like Protais Gahigi, a
38-year-old Tutsi man with five children who were
all murdered in the church at a Spanish mission at
Musha in eastern Rwanda. The card was picked up
recently by Carlos Mavrolean, a cameraman for the
American Broadcasting Corporation. He said it was
lying on the floor, not far from the altar. Among
the splintered pews and scraps of clothing on the
floor were three unexploded grenades and a discarded
machete. The blood on the card was still sticky. The
bottom card was lying outside the customs shed at
Rusumo, on the border with Tanzania. Mugema, a
20-year-old Hutu peasant, was one of hundreds of
thousands of Hutus fleeing the rebel army. It would
have helped him through the roadblocks set up by his
fellow Hutus but Mugema was probably one of those
who threw away his card to try to conceal his ethnic
identity as the mainly Tutsi rebels closed in,
fearing they would seek revenge.
8 See Alec Russell, "Tutsi victim calls on Hutus to help
rebuild Rwanda", The Daily Telegraph, London, 2nd August 1994:
The new, Tutsi-dominated government has said it will
abolish the custom of having identity cards
inscribed with the carrier's tribe. In this most
intolerant of regions there can be no guarantee that
this brave new sentiment will survive. But it is at
least a start.
9 Identity Cards and the Threat to Civil Liberties,
Briefing No. 12, National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL),
London, 1989, p.2.
10 See James Pringle, "Peasants fall from grace in reformist
China" The Times, London, 10th August 1994.
11 See Fred Broughton, Chairman of the Police Federation:
The fears of the civil libertarians are unfounded -
we live in a democracy and our police are
accountable and responsible.
Source: "Identity card high on Tories' agenda", The
Independent, London, 10th September 1994.
12 See Sir John Junor, "Cowardice on Crime Front", The Mail
on Sunday, 18th September 1994:
[L]ibertarians... see ID cards as a restriction on
personal freedom. What bloody nonsense.... The
French have identity cards and I do not regard them
as a people less free than we are. Furthermore, no
one objects to carrying a passport when abroad. Why
then should anyone object to carrying an ID card
when travelling at home?
13 This happened in December 1990 to John Atkinson, a
middle-aged antiques restorer and restauranteur. He was one
of the defendants in the "Spanner" case, and was given two
years' probation. See "The Guilty men and their sentences",
The Times, London, 20th December 1990. For this whole bizarre
case, see the judgments in R v Brown [1992] 2 All ER 560
(Court of Appeal), and R v Brown [1993] 2 All ER HL 82 (House
of Lords). For interesting commentaries on the case at its
various stages, see Anthony Furlong, Sado-Masochism and the
Law: Consent versus Paternalism, Legal Notes No.12, the
Libertarian Alliance, London, 1991; and Anthony Furlong,
"Reflections on the Case of R v Brown", Free Life (a journal
of the Libertarian Alliance), London, No.18, May 1993, pp.4-6.
14 See "Overburdened", the strongly-worded letter from
Professor J.P. Duguid, published in The Scotsman, Edinburgh,
2nd August 1994:
Whenever a measure is proposed to strengthen the
forces of law and order, 'civic rightists' usually
oppose it on the specious grounds that it will
enable the authorities to victimise the vulnerable.
A national system of identity cards is opposed
because it might help the police to fight crime, the
welfare services to detect benefit fraud and the
immigration authorities to combat illegal entry.
See also "The drive towards identity cards", the very
strongly-worded letter from James Tye, Director General of the
British Safety Council, published in The Times, London, 10th
August 1994:
Sir, For 15 years I have advocated that we should
have identity cards, complete with photograph
(report, August 9), medical information and donor
information. I'm advised by card manufacturers that
this could all fit on a standard 3in x 2in laminated
card.
At the time the misplaced 'freedom from controls'
movement was against it and it got nowhere. But when
confronted the only people who really object are
criminals who don't want their identity known,
illegal immigrants or holiday visitors who overstay
and with whom the police have lost touch, and the
crooks who stand in for learner drivers and take
their tests.
We should take a lesson from the Americans who use
their driving licences (which include a photograph)
for all legitimate occasions, including proving
their age when entering a bar.
Again, in December 1993, I appeared on a radio programme in
Birmingham to argue against a proposal to put photographs on
driving licences. My opponent, a prospective Conservative
candidate called Alan Blumenthal (approximate spelling)
denounced me as "irresponsible", and called the Libertarian
Alliance, for which I was speaking, "the Criminal's Friend
Alliance".
15 Hans Momsen, From Weimar to Auschwitz: Essays in German
History, translated by Philip O'Conner, Polity Press,
Cambridge, 1991, p.10.
16 It is the same with the Jews in the Hungarian part of the
Habsburg Empire. But theirs is a different story, and I will
deal with only the German-speaking world, which then included
the German and Habsburg areas of Poland and what is now the
Czech Republic.
17 In Germany, during 1905-06, 25 per cent of Law and
Medicine students were Jewish or of Jewish origin: See Sarah
Gordon, Hitler, Germany and the "Jewish Question", Princeton
University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1984, p.13. In parts
of the Habsburg Empire, the figure was still higher: See
Stephen Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1867-1938, Oxford
University Press, Oxford, 1989.
18 See Marsha L. Rosenblit, The Jews of Vienna:
Assimilation and Identity, State University of New York Press,
Albany, New York, 1983. See also Adolf Gaisbauer, Davidstern
und Doppeladler: Zionismus und Jdischer Nationalismus in
sterreich, 1882-1918, Blau Verlag, Vienna, 1986.
It is worth mentioning that the German Jews thoroughly
despised the unassimilated, and distanced themselves from East
European refugees: see the works cited above, passim; and
Gordon, op. cit., p.10.
19 This sounds incredible today, but is true: see Gordon,
op. cit., p.46.
20 Against Dr Momsen's claim above, see a new book by John
C.G. Rhl, The Kaiser and His Court: Wilhelm II and the
Government of Germany, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
1994. Reviewing it in The Sunday Telegraph on the 6th
November 1994, Andrew Roberts Quotes the Kaiser:
Jews and mosquitoes are a nuisance that humanity
must get rid of in some way or other - I believe the
best would be gas!
This, however, is a new revelation. The statement was not
published at the time to the German people. Indeed, it was
kept secret from them. The respectable classes would have
been variously outraged and embarrassed to learn that their
Head of State held such plainly illiberal views. In 1891, a
group of German Christians had set up the Association for
Defence Against Anti-semitism. By 1893, it had grown to
13,000 members, mostly non-Jewish; and it continued to publish
its journal without interruption until 1933: see Gordon, op.
cit., p.28.
Again, Paul Michael Rose (Revolutionary Antisemitism in
Germany, from Kant to Wagner, Princeton University Press,
Princeton, New Jersey, 1990) traces a continuous strain of
anti-semitism in German thought that culminates at Auschwitz.
But, while an accomplished researcher, Dr Rose has employed
the doubtful methodology of quoting every passing remark in
the German classics, and almost every crank who ever wrote to
the newspapers. I can think of "anti-semitic" remarks in the
works of Hume, Gibbon, Burke, Tom Paine, and H.G. Wells, among
many others. These prove nothing - not even that the writers
named were anti-semites. Against Dr Rose, I will quote the
German philosopher Hermann Cohen, writing in 1916:
In Germany equal rights for Jews have deeper roots
than anywhere else.
Source: Karl A. Schleuner, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz:
Nazi Policy Toward German Jews, Urbana, Michigan, 1970, p.5.
Before the 1930s, anti-semitism was in Germany, and perhaps in
Austria, very much what colour prejudice is in this country -
the mark of the ill-educated and unenlightened. And if the
British National Party ever comes near power, I shall be just
as surprised as many Germans were at Hitler's Jewish policy.
21 Rosenblit, op. cit., and Gaisbauer, op. cit., both
extensively discuss the Zionist failure before 1918.
22 Before deciding on Palestine, the Zionists had considered
pressing for their Jewish National Home within the Habsburg
Empire: see Gaisbauer, op. cit., p.298. They did not then
see Jews as a uniquely threatened minority that could only
ever be safe in its own state. With the Czechs and Croats,
they wanted an expansion of the 1867 deal between the Germans
and Hungarians, to turn the Empire into a federation of
nationalities, each with its own territory and its own
representation in a federal assembly.
23 Or so many seem to think. A short while ago, I called
the Board of Deputies in London. I was looking for any small
Orthodox sects that might object to photography. I explained
to a gentleman in what I think was the Press Office how useful
a fact this would be for me. I added helpfully: "After all,
Jews suffered rather badly in Europe earlier this century from
having their identities so easily known."
The reply: "That's as may be, but look on the other side. We
all had to carry identity cards in the War; and my son has to
carry one in Israel...."
No luck here - nor any later with an Islamic group in
Birmingham. No matter this, however: here was the last place
I ever expected to find myself quoting Santayana:
Those who do not remember the past are condemned to
relive it.
Source: The Life of Reason, vol. 1, chapter 12.
24 See Appendix One: the British Eugenics Movement.
25 Source: Robert N. Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine
under the Nazis, Harvard University Press, Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 1988, p. 64. See Proctor in general on German
medicine before 1945.
26 Ibid..
27 Ibid., pp.240-48.
28 Source: ibid., p.15. See also a book just published:
Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance: "Euthanasia" in
Germany 1900-1945, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
1994. In 1920, Karl Binding, a Judge, and Alfred Hoche, a
psychiatrist, published a pamphlet with the title The
Sanctioning of the Destruction of Lives Unworthy to be Lived.
They suggested that the cost of preserving such lives was an
unreasonable burden on the community, and that they ought
therefore to be terminated.
In July 1933, the new National Socialist Government made a law
"for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Progeny". This
permitted compulsory sterilisation for congenital mental
defectives, schizophrenics, manic-depressive psychotics,
epileptics, severe alcoholics, and various others. "Between
1933 and May 1945, about 400,000 people were actually
sterilised - about 1 per cent of the population capable of
producing children"; source: Burleigh, op. cit., pp.230-31.
No one is quite sure how many "defective" adults and children
were murdered by doctors during this time. In one hospital,
though, the medical staff had the right to "cut-price dental
work, which utilised gold recycled from the mouths of their
victims"; source: ibid., p.350.
29 Alweyn Smith and Bobbie Jacobson (ed.s), The Nation's
Health: A Strategy for the 1990s: a Report from an
Independent Multidisciplinary Committee Chaired by Professor
Alweyn Smith, King Edward's Hospital Fund for London, London,
1988, p.4. This document may be considered a leading summary
of lifestyle activist views. The Sponsors were:
The Health Education Council (to April 1987), The Health
Education Authority (from April 1987), King Edward's Hospital
Fund for London, The London School of Hygiene and Tropical
Medicine, The Scottish Health Education Group.
30 The fraud of "passive smoking" is too large a subject to
discuss here. My readers will find a radical dissection in
Antony Flew, Passive Smoking: Scientific Method and Corrupted
Science, Freedom Organisation for the Right to Enjoy Smoking
Tobacco (FOREST), London, 1994.
For a manifestly absurd claim, see Douglas Model MRCP,
"Smoker's Face: An Underrated Clinical Sign?", British Medical
Journal, London, vol. 291 (21-28th December 1985), pp.1760-62.
The introductory abstract reads as follows:
In a prospective survey of patients attending a
general medical outpatient clinic roughly half the
current cigarette smokers who had smoked for 10
years or more were identified, using defined
criteria, by their facial features alone. These
facial features, designated "smoker's face", were
present in three (8%) of those who had smoked
cigarettes for 10 years or more in the past and in
none of the non-smokers. The association of
smoker's face with current smoking that had
continued for 10 years or more was significant
(p<0.001) and remained after the patient's age,
social class, exposure to sunlight, recent changes
in weight, and estimated lifetime consumption of
cigarettes were controlled for. Smoker's face may
be a helpful indicator in antismoking campaigns.
This epidemiological breakthrough was made by looking at a
sample of 122 people!
Here is the best definition I have been able to find of
"corrupted science":
First, corrupt science is science that moves not
from hypothesis and data to conclusion but from
mandated or acceptable conclusion to selected data
to reach the mandated or acceptable conclusion.
That is to say, it is science that uses selected
data to reach the 'right' conclusion, a conclusion
that by the very nature of the data necessarily
misrepresents reality. Second, corrupt science is
science that misrepresents not just reality, but its
own process in arriving at its conclusions. Rather
than acknowledging the selectivity of its process
and the official necessity of demonstrating the
right conclusion, and rather than admitting the
complexity of the issue and the limits of its
evidence, it invests both its process and its
conclusions with a mantle of indubitability. Third,
and perhaps most importantly, whereas normal science
deals with dissent on the basis of the quality of
its evidence and argument and considers ad hominem
argument as inappropriate in science, corrupt
science seeks to create formidable institutional
barriers to dissent through excluding dissenters
from the process of review and contriving to silence
dissent not by challenging its quality but by
questioning its character and motivation.
Source: John C. Luik, "Pandora's Box: the dangers of
politically corrupted science for democratic public policy",
Bostonia, Boston, Massachusetts, Winter, 1993, pp.50-60;
source: Petr Skrabanek, The Death of Humane Medicine and the
Rise of Coercive Healthism, The Social Affairs Unit, London,
1994, p.135. I lament Dr Skrabanek's recent death. This, his
last book, is a masterpiece. If all else published by the
Social Affairs Unit were to be lost, this alone would show the
value of its contribution to the debate on lifestyle control.
31 For an interesting new extension of this campaign, see
John O'Leary, "Teachers told to quit smoking as part of anti-
drugs drive", The Times, London, 9th November 1994.
32 C. Hall, "Babies 'should not be placed with smokers'",
The Independent, London, 31st January 1993; source:
Skrabanek, op. cit., p.124.
33 Quoted by D. Ward, "Smoker dies after operation was
denied until he gave up", The Guardian, London and Manchester,
17th August 1993; source: Skrabanek, op. cit., p.123. For
the general details of this and the other cases given below, I
am indebted to a private memorandum supplied by Mrs Marjorie
Nicholson of FOREST.
34 Keith Ball, "Smoking out priorities", The Guardian,
London and Manchester, 19th August 1993; source: Skrabanek,
op. cit., p.123.
35 See an article from The Sunday Express, London, 5th
September 1993; source: Skrabanek, op. cit., p.124 (no title
given).
It should not be inferred from any of these cases that I think
the National Health Service to be a good thing. I do believe,
though, that while it continues to exist, those who must pay
to finance it should not suffer discrimination on the grounds
of lifestyle.
36 See Appendix Two, on the Regulation of Childbirth.
37 On these points, Peter Tatchell, a spokesperson for the
homosexual rights organisation Outrage, has kindly supplied me
with a Memorandum, which is printed here as Appendix Three.
38 See the whole of Skrabanek, op. cit.. It is a rich mine
of argument and quotation.
39 See, for example:
The Russian method seems to be paying dividends.
While many middle-aged men and women appear drab and
weary, the children and young people seem to be
healthy, happy, and friendly. 'Forestall illness'
is the national motto. 'Adopt healthy living
habits' urges the State. A State which helps by
restricting vodka sales and rasing the price. There
is great emphasis on physical exercise
Source: "Visit to Russia of British Doctors", Journal of the
American Medical Association, 1961, 175, p.159; quoted by
Skrabanek, op. cit., p.154.
I saw much the same when I first went to live in
Czechoslovakia after the 1989 Revolution. Though I have no
medical training, it seems common sense to me that young
people will generally look fit and happy. They need only not
be actually starving, or persistently threatened with death or
imprisonment. But one learns a lot in 30 years.
40 Smith and Jacobson, op. cit., p.105.
41 Then again, perhaps not. At the 1988 Conservative Party
Conference, delegates were handed leaflets published by the
Conservative Aids Screening Campaign, a group based in
Newbury, Berkshire. The leaflets claimed:
During the Black Death, a red cross was painted on
the doors of victims. We need only put a cross on
an identity card to indicate people with Aids.
Source: NCCL, op. cit., p.4.
42 Ich war so aufgeregt, als ich den Herrn Angeklagten
und seine Gattin pltzlich nackt in den Wellen am
Flua spazierengehen sah, daa ich gar nicht auf die
Idee kam, ich knnte im diskret geduldeten Nacht-
Luftbad des Freikrperkulturbundes stehen und
verlangte sofort die Vorzeigung der Kennkarten, was
die beiden nicht vermochten.
Source: Emil Waas, Sehr Geehrter Herr Firma, Deutscher
Taschenbuchverlag, 1976 - a humorous book reprinting foolish
letters, printing errors in newspapers and so forth.
I am indebted for this to an anonymous German friend of Ted
Goodman, the Chairman of the Campaign against Censorship, and
a civil liberties activist within the Labour Party. I wish
here to thank both for their help.
43 Justiz: "Fden gezogen", Der Spiegel, No.20/1988, pp.
73-78. The article contains a photograph from the National
Socialist period of prisoners being marched away. It is
captioned "Candidates for death" - "Lauter Todeskandidaten".
This article was sent to me by Mr Goodman's German friend.
44 Martin Kettle, "Commentary: Calling card of racism", The
Guardian, London and Manchester, 15th October 1994. See also
Francis King's letter published in The Guardian, London and
Manchester, 31st August 1994.
45 K. Cowmeadow, "Letter to the Editor: The identity of the
criminals", The Sunday Telegraph, London, 14th August 1994.
46 Source: Leonard Doyle, "Greece marks out limits of
tolerance", The Independent on Sunday, London, 22nd May 1994.
47 Source: ibid..
48 The police, who had now got used to the exhilarating
new belief that they could get anyone's name and
address for the asking, went on calling for their
production with increasing frequency. If you picked
up a fountain pen in the street and handed it to a
constable, he would ask to see your identity card in
order that he might record your name as that of an
honest citizen. You seldom carried it; and this
meant that he had to give you a little pencilled
slip requiring you to produce it at a police station
within two days.
Source: C.H. Rolph, Personal Identity, Michael Joseph,
London, 1957; quoted in NCCL, op. cit., p.3.
49 Source: ibid.; also Nick Cohen, "Identity cards: The
man who said 'mind your own business'", The Independent on
Sunday, London, 28th August 1994. The whole case can be found
in Willcock v Muckle (1951) 49 LGR 584.
50 Source: Cohen, op. cit..
51 Taken from Policy Fact Sheet K-12: Student Records:
Privacy at Risk, Computer Professionals for Social
Responsibility, Seattle, Washington, July 1994; available from
CPSR, P.O. Box 85481, Seattle, Washington 98145-1481;
telephone: (206) 365-4528; available on the Internet from
cpsr-seattle@csli.stanford.edu. To subscribe to CPSR, send e-
mail to listserv@cpsr.org.
52 National Education Goals Panel, Publication 93-03;
source: CPSR, op. cit.. See also Council of Chief State
Officers, Student Data Handbook for Elementary and Secondary
Schools; source: CPSR, op. cit..
53 Source: ibid..
54 Ibid.
55 I talk here onwards about a "central database", though it
need not exist in any single location. On the Internet, I can
use a programme called Veronica to search every file in
"gopherspace" - that is, every file stored at every site that
is accessible via gopher. These sites are often thousands of
miles apart, and the administrator of one site will be unaware
of what is available at other sites. However, when I search
the Internet through Veronica, I have the impression that I am
searching a single database. Therefore, the term "central
database" is to be understood as something distinct from a
number of unconnected databases.
56 Howard, op cit., p.16.
57 David Hencke and Richard Norton Taylor, "MI5 hacks its
way into privacy row", The Guardian, London and Manchester,
19th October 1994.
It is worth saying here that MI5 is desperate to justify its
continued existence, now that the Cold War is over and the
insurrection in Ulster may be abating. This search for new
targets is described in Larry O'Hara's new book, Turning Up
the Heat: MI5 After the Cold War, Phoenix Press, London,
1994; available from Phoenix Press, PO 824, London, N1 9DL.
See especially p.94:
Here we have a situation where MI5 is in severe
identity crisis, seeking to expand its empire in
order to survive. They push for control of mainland
anti-IRA/Loyalist operations [from Special Branch],
but realise that that on its own is hardly likely to
yield the level of 'terrorist threat' necessary to
maintain and expand their budgets, as well as,
crucially, keep in employment valuable specialists
in the area of 'domestic subversion', whether Left
Right or Green.
It is ironic that Mr O'Hara is a socialist of the Militant
Tendency. A few changes of terminology, and his book would
read like something by a "public choice" economist. See, for
example, Nigel Ashford:
The self-interest of bureaucrats is 'size
maximization' or empire-building, because the
status, salary, power, and desire for a quiet life
are increased with the size of the agency or bureau.
Bureaucrats are in a strong position to obtain their
goals because of their strategic location, their
control of information, their low costs of
organization, and their ability to co-operate with
interest groups. Bureaucrats are usually monopoly
suppliers of their services to politicians with
responsibility for the oversight of bureaucrats
often represent groups with a high demand for the
service, so there is an oversupply of the
service....
Source: Nigel Ashford and Stephen Davies (ed.s), A Dictionary
of Conservative and Libertarian Thought, Routledge, London and
New York, 1991, article "Public Choice" (by Dr Ashford),
pp.214-15.
58 Ibid., p.13. It must take a lot to impress the architect
of the massacre at Waco.
59 This is not entirely possible at the moment. According
to Dr Philip Webb, the Managing Director of Cellmark
Diagnostics, a subsidiary of Zeneca,
If we looked at all of a person's DNA we would
produce a perfect match as everyone's DNA is unique.
But we only look at a small part so we have to
produce probability figures, and therefore, we
cannot say whether something is black or white.
Source: Mike Dailly, "Law: Casting doubt on the use of DNA",
The Herald, Edinburgh, 19th October 1994. Until the methods
of sampling improve - which they certainly will - there could
be 2,500 males in the United Kingdom alone with a matching
profile.
60 "Money laundering" is defined by Article 1 of the Money
Laundering Directive 1993 as:
[T]he conversion or transfer of property, knowing
that such property is derived from a serious crime,
for the purpose of concealing or disguising the
illicit origin of the property or of assisting any
person who is involved in committing such an offence
or offences to evade the legal consequences of his
action, and
the concealment or disguise of the true nature,
source, location, disposition, movement, rights with
respect to, or ownership of property, knowing that
such property is derived form a serious crime.
61 Source: Paul Durman, "Bankers face jail over laundering:
Institutions will need systems to deal with suspicious
transactions", The Independent, London, 28th October 1993;
also Dan Atkinson, "20/20: Liberty lost in the wash", The
Guardian, London and Manchester, 22nd August 1992.
See also Michael Curtis and Christy Sinclair, "Law Times:
Obliged to act on suspicion", The Times, London, 25th August
1992:
To avoid potential difficulties in proving knowledge
of the money's origins, the EC directive requires
the legislation to say this 'may be inferred from
objective factual circumstances'. But what of the
defendant who was insufficiently worldly to
recognise the indicators?
62 Reports of suspicious transactions made to the
National Criminal Intelligence Service have risen
from 1,981 in 1990 to 11,300 in 1992.
Paul Durman, "Bankers face jail over laundering: Institutions
will need systems to deal with suspicious transactions", The
Independent, London, 28th October 1993.
See also Ian Watson's interview with Ian Watt, who heads the
Confidential Inquiries Unit at the bank of England:
Money Laundering: 'We receive a number of anonymous
calls and suggestions of malpractice in connection
to money laundering and all these have to be looked
at seriously,' he says.... Watt's unit acts as a
conduit to the NCIS.
Ian Watson, "City: The Bank's fraudbuster", The Sunday
Telegraph, London, 20th June 1993.
63 Michael Curtis and Christy Sinclair, "Law Times: Obliged
to act on suspicion", The Times, London, 25th August 1992.
64 Barclay's Bank v Taylor; Trustee Savings bank of Wales
and Border v Taylor [1989] 1 WLR 1066. Banks are no longer
under any contractual obligation to inform their customers
that a production order has been made, or to say what has been
produced. In R v Southwark Crown Court, ex parte Customs and
Excise and R v Southwark Crown Court, ex parte Bank of Credit
and Commerce International SA [1989] 3 WLR 1054, it was held
by the Divisional Court of the Queen's Bench, and upheld by
the Court of Appeal, that a Circuit Judge had no authority to
prevent the handing over of General Noriega's banking details
by the British to the American authorities. The ambiguous
protections contained in the 1980s legislation were resolved
in favour of the authorities, there being a paramount public
interest in an efficient prosecution of the "war against
drugs".
65 Michael Levi, "The Regulation of Money Laundering: The
Death of Banking Secrecy in the UK", The British Journal of
Criminology, vol. 31 (2), 1991, pp.122-23.
Things in America may be still worse. According to Mitch
Radcliffe of Digital Media - available at dmedia@netcom.com,
President Clinton is considering an executive order to allow
the Internal Revenue Service to monitor individual bank
accounts, and automatically collect taxes based on the
results. This will be presented as saving people the trouble
of filing their tax returns. Though asked to comment on this
rumour the White House has apparently not yet done so.
For how these various regulations are applied, see Margaret
Stone, "Money: Is it time to bring back the identity card
again?", The Daily Mail, London, 25th May 1994:
The Government has put building societies and banks
in the frontline in the fight against drug
trafficking, and it is now an offence for them not
to make rigorous identification checks on anyone
wanting to save or borrow money. Mortgages can be
used to launder money if crooks take out a big loan
and then use illegal cash to repay it quickly.
See also Liz Dolan, "Why the Halifax wouldn't play with the
bingo caller", The Times, London, 18th June 1994:
Julio Bruno, a Spanish national who has lived and
worked in Britain since last September, was branded
a possible money launderer when he tried to open an
Instant Xtra Plus account at his local branch of the
Halifax Building Society in Croydon this month.
Mr Bruno says that all he wanted was a safe place
for 1,000 cash and a cheque for 500 from the
Inland Revenue, but his unwitting ignorance of
tougher rules on opening accounts set off alarm
bells with the building society. The cash was from
his accumulated salary his employer pays all
employees in cash and his landlord advised him to
open a building society account because he was
worried about burglars. 'They gave me the money back
over the counter,' he said. 'The place was full of
customers staring at me. I felt really embarrassed
and insulted. I am sure the other customers thought
I had tried to pass off counterfeit money, or
something.'
66 See Eric Robbie, "Letter: ID card fears justified by
police abuse", The Guardian, London and Manchester, 12th
August 1994:
...[O]ne of GCHQ's Cray II's goes through 30 million
phone conversations every day, hunting for 'trigger'
words, so that human operatives ('humint') can
follow up the 'offending' calls in greater detail.
67 The Editor of The Sunday Express already has:
But why stop with identity cards? In the Aer Lingus
terminus at London's Heathrow Airport are giant
pictures of men with shaven heads.
Over their right ears are tattooed bar codes. It is
supposed to be somebody's idea of art. But what a
splendid way of keeping track of yobs and habitual
criminals.
One zap from a policeman's supermarket-type checkout
gun and all would be revealed.
An invasion of privacy? Absolutely right. And
about time too.
Source: Brian Hitchen, "ID cards for all", The Sunday
Express, London, 16th October 1994. Mr Hitchen does not seem
to be a pet owner. At my local vet, there is an advertisement
for a microprocessor that can be fitted in the ear of my dog,
so that I can have her traced if she ever goes missing.
There are also experiments, here and in the United States,
with the electronic monitoring of prisoners serving out their
sentences at home. See Michael Cavadino and Michael Dignan,
The Penal System: An Introduction, Sage Publications, London,
1992, pp.178-79.
68 Source: Picture This: CCTV to Get a Two Million Pound
Boost, Home office News Release 197/94, 18th October 1994.
69 The monitoring of journeys is at the moment being tried:
In the London Borough of Harrow, passengers with
passes now get on to busses and touch cards with
their photograph against a grey box instead of
showing them to the driver. The eventual idea is to
introduce this throughout the capital so that the
authorities will know which journeys have been made
and each of the new privatised companies will get
the right amount of money. London Regional
Transport say that all the information it has on
passengers is carefully separated by officials
should not work out who is travelling where. 'Only
one or two' people have objected.
Matthew Engel, "Second Front: Licence to snoop", The
Guardian, London and Manchester, 22nd August 1994.
See also Luke Blair, "Smart cards call to track vehicles", The
Evening Standard, London, 12th August 1994:
MPs today called for vehicles to carry electronic ID
cards, enabling police to monitor the movement of
all 30 million motorists in Britain....
An electronic 'tag', fixed by law to all vehicles,
would give the police a cheap but effective new tool
in the fight against crime, they said.
70 From O'Brien's speech in Room 101:
But always - do not forget this, Winston - always
there will be the intoxication of power, constantly
increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always,
at every moment, there will be the thrill of
victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who
is helpless. If you want a picture of the future,
imagine a boot stamping on a human face - for ever.
George Orwell, 1984 (1949), Penguin Books, Harmondsworth,
Middlesex, 1973, p.215.
71 He was sent to a mental hospital. Perhaps he belonged
there.
72 Take this, for example:
Once upon a time, there was a workman who made a cup
of unbreakable glass. He got himself an audience
with the Emperor, and pretending to had over his
invention, he allowed it to fall to the marble
floor. The Emperor was astonished: the man picked
up the unbroken cup - it was only dented as if it
had been of bronze - and knocked it back into shape
with a little hammer. He thought he had his fortune
made. But the Emperor asked: 'Does anyone else
know how to make such glass?' When told it was
still a secret process, he had the man's head cut
off, remarking that such a process, if generally
known, would lower the price of gold, since it
would no longer be used for making cups of the best
quality.
Petronius, Cena Trimalchionis, 51 (translated by SIG). This
story is also told somewhere in Dio Cassius and in Pliny the
Elder, though I forget exactly where. The Emperor may have
been Tiberius.
For the same reason, though on less solid grounds, laws were
persistently made against the alchemical transmutation of
metals.
See also Suetonius, Uita Uespasiani, 18:
An engineer offered to haul some huge columns up to
the Capitol at a moderate expense by a simple
mechanical contrivance, but Vespasian declined his
services: 'I must always ensure,' he said, 'that
the working classes earn enough money to buy
themselves food.' Nevertheless, he paid the
engineer a very handsome fee.
Translated by Robert Graves in The Twelve Caesars,
"Vespasian", Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1957,
p.283.
Think also of the English Luddites, with their machine-
smashing riots in the early nineteenth century; and the fears
repeatedly voiced since then that automation will lead to mass
unemployment. Even I sometimes feel a twinge of worry that
computers will one day be able to correct defects of grammar
and construction, thereby eliminating what little advantages I
have in this area.
73 Since I have been paraphrasing J.S. Mill, I ought to
quote him at least once:
Among the works of man, which human life is rightly
employed in perfecting and beautifying, the first in
importance surely is man himself. Supposing it were
possible to get houses built, corn grown, battles
fought, causes tried, and even churches erected and
prayers said, by machinery - by automatons in human
form - it would be a considerable loss to exchange
for these automatons even the men and women who at
present inhabit the more civilized parts of the
world, and who assuredly are but starved specimens
of what nature can and will produce. Human nature
is not a machine to be built after a model, and set
to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a
tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on
all sides, according to the tendency of the inward
forces which make it a living thing.
John Stuart Mill, Essay On Liberty (1859), "Everyman" edition,
J.M. Dent & Sons, London, 1972, chapter three, "Of
Individuality, as One of the Elements of Well-being", p.117.
This work is also available as an e-text from
gopher://gopher.panix.com/misc/reference library/classics of
literature.
74 Roy Hattersley, "How Britain can solve its identity
crisis", The Daily Mail, London, 10th August 1994. Mr
Hattersley's libertarian credentials rest, no doubt, on his
principled stand in defence of Salman Rushdie.
75 Ibid..
76 Quoted in Matthew Engel, "Second Front: Licence to
snoop", The Guardian, London and Manchester, 22nd August 1994.
See also Mr Darracott's letter of clarification, "What's on
the cards for freedom", published in The Guardian, London and
Manchester, 24th August 1994.
77 Geoffrey Robertson, Freedom, the Individual and the Law
(sixth edition), Penguin Books, London, 1989, pp.106-07.
78 Raymond Wacks, "The Poverty of Privacy", The Law
Quarterly Review, vol. 96, January 1980, p.88.
79 Ibid..
80 See Appendix Four, on Privacy in the United States.
81 For a discussion of privacy from a European perspective,
see Charles D. Raab and Colin J. Bennet, "Protecting Privacy
across Borders: European Policies and Perspectives", Public
Administration, vol. 72, Spring 1994, pp.95-112.
82 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.
To speak from my own experience, my Medical Card had on it for
years the wrong date of birth. I passed my driving test in
1984, and only this year did I notice that the surname on my
Driving Licence - a word of four letters - was misspelled.
Aware that I had been breaking the law for ten years, I wrote
off to the DVLA in Cardiff with some trepidation. Back came a
new Driving Licence with my name corrected, and not even a
reprimand. I might just as easily have had the name changed
to John Major.
83 Source: Andrew Adonis, "I am just a number", The
Financial Times, London, 13th July 1994.
84 Ibid..
85 For a funny - and, for this country, perfectly credible -
account of how an identity card scheme might work in practice,
see Keith Waterhouse, "It's all on the cards", The Daily Mail,
London, 15th August 1994:
The identity card programme is set back six months
because of problems at the spanking new 50 million
National identity Card Office (NICO) in
Leicester, where the roof leaks, the central heating
is jammed at 120 degrees Fahrenheit, there are
mushrooms growing through the floor tiles and the
computer is not programmed to handle names of more
than seven letters. The chairman of ICS, or
Identity Card Services, the private agency hired to
issue the cards, defends his 250,000 a year salary
on the grounds that he could be earning a great deal
more if he were running one of the water
companies....
Customers wishing to pay by cheque at the Niceprice
supermarket discover that Sharon and Tracy wish to
see their identity cards as well as their bank
cards.
A Mrs Jones of Nottingham, entitled to apply for her
identity card by post by reason of being visually
challenged, receives 2,547 cards, most of them in
the name of Smith....
A poor old lady is found wandering in the snow in
Epping Forest, afraid to go home because she has
lost her identity card. She thinks she could get
into awful trouble without it. She's right, too.
Far from passport rules being relaxed as we get
deeper and deeper into Europe, immigration officials
now demand to see identity cards as well as
passports, so that they can compare the pictures. If
you have a moustache in one document and not in the
other, you have a problem.
There are huge pedestrian traffic jams in Oxford
Street when police carry out a spot check on people
they suspect may not be carrying their identity
cards - that is to say, everybody. Asked who
authorised them to cause disruption on this scale,
an inspector replies: 'Is this your identity card,
sir? You do realise that folding it in two is an
offence?'
The Vomiting Parrot public house in Wolverhampton
displays a notice reading: 'The management reserve's
the right to refuse service to any customer's not
carrying their identity card's'.
A Post Office in Acton refuses to accept a
pensioner's identity card as proof of his identity,
and insists on his producing his bus pass....
A racket is exposed in a Sunday tabloid: up to 100
social security claimants in Birmingham have been
regularly drawing benefits from a short-sighted
clerk on the same 'identity card', which is in fact
the nine of clubs with a photograph of a dog pasted
on it....
The Brixton Identity Card riots rage over a hot
weekend consequent upon a black being arrested for
insulting remarks made to a police officer after
being asked to produce his identity card for the
ninth time within the space of two hours.
86 Source: Richard Ford, "ministers facing a minefield",
The Times, London, 14th October 1994.
87 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.
88 Source: "Hacker hunt after smear campaign", Computer
Weekly, London, 20th October 1994.
According to the Audit Commission, hacking and other computer
fraud is 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.
89 It should not be supposed here that I am indifferent to
the sexual abuse of very young persons. I use the case as an
illustration: if the police could not read these files, they
almost certainly cannot read anything else.
For a long discussion of public key encryption in general, see
the Pgp User's Guide, supplied in two files with any version
of Phil Zimmerman's PGP software, which is available from
various sites outside the United States, including
ftp://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/computing/security/software/PGP,
ftp://ftp.demon.co.uk/pub/pgp, and
ftp://nic.funet.fi/pub/unix/security/crypt.
90 See, for example, Stewart A. Baker, "Don't Worry Be
Happy: Why Clipper Is Good For You", published on-line by
Wired, 26th May 1994; available from
gopher://gopher.wired.com/Clipper Archive. Mr Baker is the
senior legal counsel to the National Security Agency in
America; and it says much for his employers's concern about
PGP that he has written a fairly long attack on it for
publication in an opposition magazine. He says of the
arguments in its favour:
This sort of reasoning is the long-delayed revenge
of people who couldn't go to Woodstock because they
had too much trig homework. It reflects a wide - and
kind of endearing - streak of romantic high-tech
anarchism that crops up throughout the computer
world.
Also, there is a huge literature on the Clipper initiative.
See the archive held at
ftp://toad.com:/pub/cypherpunks/clipper/.
91 The programme can be obtained, I believe, from
ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/qwerty.
92 See on this point the Editor's Introduction to John
Locke, Two Treatises of Government: A Critical Edition and
Apparatus Criticus, Peter Laslett (ed.), Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 1960, pp.6-7:
[Locke's] statement in his will shows that he was
put out because [the Two Treatises] had been mangled
by the printer, and implies that he was anxious to
leave behind him an authoritative text. There is
evidence to prove that he went to great pains to
ensure that we should read him on politics in the
exact words which he used.... Our modern reprints
of Lock on Government represent a debasement of a
form of his book which he himself excoriated, and
tried his best to obliterate.
The author lived most of his life amongst books. He
was well informed about printing and publishing, and
the firm of Awnsham and John Churchill, one of the
great houses of his day, came to be a part of his
life. Yet he could write in June 1704:
"Books seem to me pestilent things, and infect all
that trade in them... with something very perverse
and brutal. Printers, binders, sellers, and others
that make a trade and gain out of them have
universally so odd a turn and corruption of mind,
that they have a way of dealing peculiar to
themselves, and not conformed to the good of
society, and that general fairness that cements
mankind."
93 Roy Hattersley, "How Britain can solve its identity
crisis", The Daily Mail, 10th August 1994.
94 Alan Travis, "Conservative Conference: Howard revives
idea of identity cards", The Guardian, London and Manchester,
10th October 1994.
95 Source: Lynn Cochrane, "New licence fuels identity card
row", The Scotsman, Glasgow, 10th August 1994.
96 Douglas Cousins, "Letter: A sense of identity", The
Herald, Edinburgh, 15th August 1994.
97 Jeff Rooker MP, "Letter: Identifying every citizen's
rights", The Guardian, London and Manchester, 1st September
1994.
98 Roy Hattersley, "How Britain can solve its identity
crisis", The Daily Mail, 10th August 1994.
99 Charles Reiss, "Cabinet clash over ID cards hits Howard",
The Evening Standard, London, 11th October 1994.
100 Except perhaps the Editor of The Sunday Express. His
tattooed bar codes might be useful to ensure that
dole scroungers would find it impossible to dip
their sticky fingers into the welfare pot.
Brian Hitchen, "ID cards for all", The Sunday Express, London,
16th October 1994.
101 See Dan Atkinson, "20/20: Liberty lost in the wash", The
Guardian, London and Manchester, 22nd August 1992:
Lest anyone think the problem must be so vast as to
justify these extraordinary measures, why not ask
the Bank of England how much money is laundered in
Britain each year? The answer is that the Bank and
the Treasury don't know. There are no reliable
figures with which to judge the scale of the
problem. There is, in fact, no way of knowing if
money-laundering is much of a problem in the first
place.
102 I am borrowing here from Macaulay's attack on the young
Gladstone:
He first resolves on his conclusion. He then makes
a major of most comprehensive dimensions, and having
satisfied himself that it contains his conclusion,
never troubles himself about what else it may
contain: and as soon as we examine it we find that
it contains an infinite number of conclusions, every
one of which is a monstrous absurdity.
Thomas Babbington Macaulay, "Gladstone on Church and State"
(April 1839), Critical and Historical Essays, J.M. Dent &
Sons, London, 1907, vol. 2, p.248.
103 This is said to have been the case in National Socialist
Germany:
NO FREEDOM HERE
German Householders Under New Search Threat
One of the German householder's last links with
freedom have just been severed. Under an order
issued by the German Ministry of the Interior - the
German Home Office - every householder must deliver
a duplicate of the keys of his home to the local
police authorities.
He is given a receipt, the set is numbered,
labelled, and carefully docketed.
The reason? Spread of 'underground' propaganda
aimed at the Nazi regime.
Activities of the German Freedom Party and the
secret radio stations have stirred the police to
action.
Armed with the keys of every home, the police can
enter without formality, and conduct a cellar-to-
attic search.
Source: Reynold's Illustrated News, 18th April 1937; quoted
by Moses Jackson, "Letters to the Editor", Free Life, the
Libertarian Alliance, London, No.21, November 1994.
104 Simon Davies, "Please may I see your identity card, Sir?"
The Daily Telegraph, London, 13th October 1994.
105 Parts of this catalogue have been published in Free Life,
the Libertarian Alliance, London, No.21, November 1994. The
books on alternative identity include:
Counterfeit I.D. Made Easy: by Jack Luger. (1990, 5+
x 8+, 131 pp, illustrated, soft cover, ISBN
0-915179-90-3, Order Number: 61111, $14.95)
A complete guide to making your own ID! Using common
tools and readily-available materials, you can make
photo ID cards, drivers licenses, birth
certificates, and much more. Includes illustrations
of forgery techniques and tips on using the ID you
create. There's no secret to making great looking ID
- not with Counterfeit I.D. Made Easy!
How to Get ID in Canada: Third Edition, by Ronald
George Eriksen 2 and Mr Completely. (1990, 5+ x 8+,
81 pp, illustrated, soft cover, ISBN 1-55950-033-6,
Order Number: 61109, $9.95)
There are many books available on how to get I.D. in
the United States. Now, you can get documented north
of the border, with How to Get ID In Canada. Learn
how to get these pieces of I.D.: * Birth
Certificates * Drivers License * Social Insurance
Card * Passport * Secondary I.D. * And much more,
including tips on using mail drops and staying free.
Reborn in the U.S.A.: Personal Privacy Through a New
Identity Second Edition, by Trent Sands. (1991, 5+ x
8+, 121 pp, soft cover, ISBN 1-55950-057-3, Order
Number: 61115, $14.95)
A complete guide to building a new identity in the
United States from the ground up. Covers birth
certificates, social security card, drivers license,
passport, credit cards, and much more. Learn how to
thoroughly document your new identity without
revealing any information about your former life.
Reborn Overseas: Identity Building in Europe,
Australia and New Zealand, by Trent Sands. (1991, 5+
x 8+, 110 pp, illustrated, soft cover, ISBN
1-55950-061-1, Order Number: 61127, $14.95)
The formation of the European Common Market has
created a paper-tripping paradise. With an identity
in any one nation, you can live, work and travel in
all 12. This book shows how get all the documents
necessary to build a complete paper identity without
leaving the United States. You'll also learn how to
fake education, employment and credit references.
Sold for informational purposes only!
Reborn with Credit: by Trent Sands. (1992, 5+ x 8+,
87 pp, soft cover, ISBN 1-55950-090-5, Order Number:
61131, $10.00)
Trent Sands takes you inside the credit machine to
show you how credit applications are processed and
graded, how credit bureaus get their information,
how credit decisions are made. The master of
identity then takes you step-by-step through
procedures for cleaning bad credit, establishing a
blank credit file, and building a credit rating that
will make tens of thousands of dollars available to
you in a matter of months.
106 Source: Alan Travis, "Conservatives at Bournemouth:
'Rubbish' cries greet Howard's ID card plan", The Guardian,
London and Manchester, 14th October 1994.
107 Source: "National identity card high on Tories' agenda",
The Independent, London, 10th September 1994.
108 Source: Christopher Elliott, "ID cards 'will not reduce
crime" The Guardian, London and Manchester, 15th October 1994.
109 Source: Alan Travis, "This way leads to Howard's end",
The Guardian, London and Manchester, 24th September 1994.
110 Dick Coyles, a former Chairman, addressing the 1994
Conference of the Police Federation; source: Alan Travis,
"This way leads to Howard's end", The Guardian, London and
Manchester, 24th September 1994.
APPENDIX ONE:
THE BRITISH EUGENICS MOVEMENT
The word "eugenics" was coined by Sir Francis Galton, a
relative of Charles Darwin, in 1884. He defined it as "the
study of those agencies under social control which may improve
or impair the racial qualities of future generations, either
physically or mentally".1 His articles on "Hereditary Talent
and Character", in Macmillan's Magazine in 1865, and his book,
Hereditary Genius of 1869, had raised the possibility of
producing a higher race by selective breeding. The corollary
of this was the selective elimination of unhealthy strains.
His theories gained a certain credibility from Darwinism, but
had little influence before the end of the century. Between
then and the Great War, however, they achieved a remarkable
dominance.
They seemed both to explain and to offer a solution to the
problem of British relative decline, worries about which, even
then, were common. The British Race, Galton's followers
asserted, was decaying. Mendel's genetic theories had just
been rediscovered. They were held up by the polemicists as
strict scientific proof for what even with the frequent
invoking of Darwin's name had never been regarded as a
coherent body of thought. They pointed to the slums, and
showed how those living in them were multiplying faster than
the middle classes. The pool of "bad recessive genes", they
feared, was increasing uncontrollably. A.J. Balfour, the
Conservative Prime Minister of the day, shared this belief.
He feared that the opening up of careers to the more able of
the working classes was contributing to the racial decay.
They were promoted and then bred more slowly than those who
were left behind.2
This belief was more than shared by the socialists. Sidney
Webb, whose memory is still revered at every Labour Party
gathering, warned that unless there were some "sharp turn",
the country would gradually be given over to the faster
breeding Irish and Jewish immigrants - and even to the
Chinese. What had at all costs to be avoided was "race
deterioration, if not race suicide".3
But the chief objects of fear were the "feeble-minded". The
campaign against them was launched in 1903 by one Dr Robert
Reid Rentoul. His Proposed Sterilisation of Certain Mental
and Physical Degenerates: An Appeal to Asylum Managers and
Others, and his Race Culture; or, Race Suicide (A Plea for the
Unborn), were read by thousands. He predicted a rapid descent
into universal degeneracy unless a vast programme of
compulsory sterilisation were adopted. Lepers, epileptics,
cancer patients, idiots, imbeciles, cretins, lunatics,
homosexuals, tramps, vagrants, habitual criminals, backward,
dull and weak-minded children - all must go under the knife.4
Not everyone was so extreme: moderate opinion preferred
compulsory segregation in special homes. This was the
conclusion reached by the Royal Commission on the Care and
Control of Feeble-Minded Patients, reporting in 1908. The
Commissioners accepted the definition given them by the Royal
College of Physicians - that the feeble-minded were those "who
might be capable of earning a living under favourable
circumstances" but were "incapable from mental defect existing
from birth or from an early age (a); of competing on equal
terms with their normal fellows; or (b) of managing themselves
or their affairs with ordinary prudence".5 They accepted that
feeble-mindedness might in large degree be an hereditary
failing. They recommended committal to "institutions where
they will be employed and detained".6 Committal was to be
ordered by a Judge or Magistrate, on medical advice.
But despite this promising start, the Mental Deficiency Act
1913, which followed from the 1908 Report, was the high point
of the eugenics movement in this country. Its more
objectionable sections were never brought fully into effect;
and they were largely discarded in the Mental Health Act 1959.
The Mental Health Act 1983 has gone still further, even
allowing Virginia Bottomley to close many of the mental health
institutions set up earlier this century under eugenic
influence.
NOTES
1. Source: Sir Leon Radzinowicz and Roger Hood, A History of
English Criminal Law and its Administration from 1750, Stevens
& Sons, London, 1977, vol. 5, p.29.
2. The Times, London, 18th August 1905; source: Radzinowicz
and Hood, op. cit., p.32.
3. The Decline of the Birth Rate, Fabian Tract 131 (1907),
pp.16-17; source: Radzinowicz and Hood, op. cit., p.32.
4. Source: Radzinowicz and Hood, op. cit., pp.326-7. I have
not read these works, but the latter contains the following:
"[N]ormally, the adult man produces on another man an
absolutely repulsive effect from the sexual point of view"
(p.182); source: Richard Davenport-Hines, Sex, Death and
Punishment: Attitudes to Sex and Sexuality in Britain Since
the Renaissance, William Collins Sons & Co, London, 1990,
p.107.
5. Source: Radzinowicz and Hood, op. cit., pp.326-7.
6. Source: ibid..
APPENDIX TWO:
THE REGULATION OF CHILDBIRTH
A leading British doctor believes that people in
Western nations should have to pass a parenting test
and gain a reproduction 'licence' before being
allowed to have children.
In a book published later this month, Professor Sir
Roy Calne argues that couples should have to satisfy
a licensing authority that they would make suitable
parents. Each couple that received approval would
be allowed no more than two children. People who
opt for larger families should face higher taxes and
other financial penalties....
'Everyone endorses the idea of a driving licence, a
recognition that you have certain necessary skills
for driving a car. Bringing a child into the world
is far more important, and I put forward the
licensing of this activity as a serious suggestion
for consideration', he told The Observer.
Source: Judy Jones, "Top doctor urges legal controls on
parenthood", The Observer, London, 7th August 1994.
Sir Roy does not mention stricter means of enforcement, or
smoking. But see Skrabanek, op. cit., pp.158-59:
According to The Christian Science Monitor, 'at
least 50 women have been charged with crimes for
their behaviour during pregnancy.'1 The
criminalisation of motherhood was discussed by
Ernest Drucker, professor of epidemiology and social
medicine at Montefiore Medical Centre in the Bronx,
where about a quarter of all women who give birth
use drugs.2 About half of the newborn babies who
test positive for drugs are removed from their
mothers and placed in foster care. Drucker
illustrated this practice in a case of a poor
Puerto-Rican woman, whose baby was taken away from
her after birth. When she returned to the hospital
and took her baby away with her, her action was
described as 'kidnap'....
A Wyoming woman was jailed for 'pre-natal abuse'
because the nursing staff detected alcohol on her
breath. A Nevada woman who drank some beer the day
before she went into labour lost custody of her
child.3
In several US states, obstetric interventions can be
made compulsory by court order.4
NOTES
1. R.L. Ley, "US targets maternal drug abuse as cost
problems escalate", The Christian Science Monitor, 22nd May,
1990; quoted in Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs, Praeger, New
York, 1992.
2. Ernest Drucker, "Children of war. The criminalization of
motherhood", International Journal on Drug Policy, 1989, 1(4),
pp.10-12.
3. P. Pringle, "A nihilism for the nineties sweeps America",
The Guardian, London and Manchester, 6th June 1990.
4. V.E.B. Kolder, J. Gallagher and M.T. Parsons, "Court
ordered obstetrical interventions", New England Journal of
Medicine, 1987, 316, pp.1192-96.
APPENDIX THREE:
MEMORANDUM OF PETER TATCHELL
While the current plans for ID cards are relatively
harmless, the big danger is that once introduced
they could be open to abuse for far more sinister
and malevolent purposes.
A universal ID card system is the first step towards
a total surveillance society in which the personal
details and behaviour of individuals can be
monitored by anyone who, either legally or
illegally, has access to the system.
Lesbian, gay and bisexual people still suffer much
discrimination. ID cards have the potential to make
discrimination easier, particularly if they become
required as a standard proof of identity or become
used as a means of verifying cheques and credit
cards.
The system could, in theory, be open to future
abuses such as monitoring people buying gay
magazines and videos or going to gay nightclubs and
cinemas. This possibility that commercial
transactions could, through ID cards, expose people
as gay might deter those who are closeted or under
the age of consent from activities which are lawful
and/or harmless.
There is no guarantee that in addition to storing
routine personal details ID cards would not
eventually include more information, added either
officially or covertly.
Once the system is in place, if a more authoritarian
government ever came to power there would be nothing
to stop it adding particulars about a persons's
sexual orientation, HIV status, political
affiliations, racial background and so on.
Instead of liberating us, the new information
technology could become a means of social
surveillance and control.
Peter Tatchell
London, November 1994.
I wish to thank Mr Tatchell for having taken the time and
trouble to provide me with this Memorandum. Its publishing
should not be taken as an endorsement by Mr Tatchell or by
Outrage of all else in this pamphlet. Certainly, as a
socialist and a former Labour candidate, he would wish to
distance himself from my belief that markets and minimal
government - and the refusal of positive legal rights for
minority groups - are good things.
Mr Tatchell can be contacted via Outrage at 5 Peter Street,
London, W1V 3RR, telephone and fax: 071 439 2381.
APPENDIX FOUR:
PRIVACY IN THE UNITED STATES
The Supreme Court was persuaded in Stanley v Georgia 394 US
557 (1969) to strike down a State law against the possession
of obscene material. Its judgment was based not on a
balancing of the First Amendment right to freedom of speech
against the claim that harm may result from the circulation of
certain kinds of literature, but on the Appellant's right to
privacy. It was held that "in the privacy of his home an
individual had the right to enjoy the materials of his
choice".
The property rights of others always being respected, no
libertarian would dispute this. In a purely libertarian
world, indeed, there would be no specific liberties. The
rights to speech and association and the like would simply
derive from a general liberty - within the obvious limits - to
do as one pleased with one's own. But this general liberty is
nowadays so little recognised in the United States - and, for
that matter, in the rest of the comparatively free world -
that its upholding in one instance may have been more to
restrict than to defend the right to freedom of speech and the
press.
Whereas, in a libertarian world, the specific right would
derive from the general one, in America, a limited form of the
general right should derive from the specific one guaranteed
in the Constitution. To decide otherwise, as the Supreme
Court seems here to have done, has been to allow the
authorities largely to nullify the right supposedly upheld.
One is free to read erotic or seditious books in one's own
home, but not necessarily to read them anywhere else. Nor,
certainly, is there a right to buy, sell or exchange such
books if the Justice Department and the U.S. Post Office - a
state monopoly - are in any way involved. The usual procedure
is to go through various big city magazines, replying to the
personal and business advertisements that offer literature and
other items. The replies are invariably sent from small,
conservative towns in the mid-west. The goods having arrived,
a complaint is lodged, and the advertisers are prosecuted for
having used the mails for an obscene purpose. Since trials
are held in those places where the complaints are lodged,
convictions are all but certain. If a Defendant is acquitted,
it will usually be only at a great personal and financial
cost.1
In Stanley v Georgia, Rather than decide the scope of the
First Amendment, for or against the right to publish obscene
literature, the Supreme Court grandly announced that an
American's home was his castle. It did nothing to protect
that castle from being laid seige to by the Justice Department
and Post Office.
NOTES
1. See Richard E. Geis, "Beware the Secret Sex Police", The
Main Catalog, Loompanics Unlimited, Port Townsend, Washington,
1989, pp.47-51.