Identity Cards -- A Pointless Exercise?

How do you stop terrorists? Easily - just treat everyone like terrorists and sooner or later you're bound to stumble across one.

The electronic storage of personal details is an increasingly risky business. After the Department of Work and Pensions accidentally sent out thousands of people's personal and bank details to the wrong people, this Government's record in electronic security is questionable, and its strategy of progressively increasing the use of information technology has resulted in bloated, over-funded, under-achieving projects.

The issue of identity cards has been on the political agenda for a few eyars now, and proponants espouse the same view each time the need for them is brought into question. ID cards will help us in our war on terror, help reduce benefit fraud and enable the police to identify criminals. It has also been mooted that they will enable the NHS to determine who is, and isn't, eligible for treatment -- if you don't have one, you don't go on the waiting list because you may be an illegal immigrant over here on a hospital holiday.

Identity cards will be available, voluntarily, from 2008 and mandatory from 2014. Which begs the questions: in the intervening 6 years, just how many terrorists do they expect to sign up for biometric ID cards? How many benefit cheats are going to spend the money to get one, especially if the cost alone would eb enough to make the DSS wonder how you could possibly afford one? How many criminals are willingly going to enable the police catch them more easily? How many pensioners are going to be refused hospital beds because they thought paying for winter fuel was more important than an ID card in the last years of their lives?

I would imagine that the answer to all (except, possibly, the last one depending on how close the NHS was to bankruptcy at the time) would be: none. Which, in turn, forces us to ask what, exactly, the point of the scheme is? The only people who will sign up for this are going to be ordinary, law-abiding citizens with nothing to hide. It's not going to reduce crime, prevent terrorism or reduce fraud, it's just going to make the average person easier to track as they go about their day-to-day business.