The UK government last night secured the introduction of the Identity
Cards Bill into law. The bill finally breached the Lords via a cunning
amendment that retained the automatic inclusion of any new applicants
for passports on the National Identity Register, by simply ignoring the
issue of issuing of a card.
This demonstrates an interesting trend in the perception of technology
as the object of focus and concern in the press and amongst those MPs
and peers against the bill has consistently been the material object of
the card. The more insidious interlinked databases of the National
Identity Register (NIR) has been publicly discussed but in far more
superficial terms [1].
The 'soft' technologies that rest in the abstract and slippery digital
increasingly hold sway over significant parts of our lives. In the case
of the NIR one might ask whether one more number attached to our name
and yet another line of data in a database really matters. In fact the
NIR marks something of a sea-change in governmental approaches to
personal data. Many governments have and do keep records of varying
amounts of personal data on citizens / subjects. The best line of
defense of that data (for the governments - against leakage and loss -
and for the subjects against misappropriation of their personal data)
has been that this data has been disparate, held in different places, in
different forms and in different systems. The NIR will link ALL of the
personal data held by the various governmental bodies across many
databases with one simple and 'helpful' primary key of the subjects'
National Identity Numbers.
Apart from raising questions about the security of the data in such a
system, as any system is only as strong as its weakest part, this
situation raises broader socio-political questions in issues of
governmentality and discourses of state / individual power, particularly
in light of the recent growth in publication in this area from the likes
of 'Metapolitics' by Badiou to 'Multitude' by Hardt & Negri. For
example, there is talk of private companies buying access to this data
thus allowing Tesco and Wallmart to form extremely detailed pictures of
consumers.
These are debates that demand attention and one might argue that is the
responsibility of those in the academy to fully engage with them.
On a more pragmatic level, those who are concerned by these moves may
wish to renew their passports before 2007 to give themselves a 10 year
reprieve! You might also like to further explore this debate by
visiting the national campaign against ID Cards: http://www.no2id.com/
Sincerely,
Sam Kinsley
---
University of Bristol
[1]. With a few exceptions such as Henry Porter's recent comment
article in the Observer:
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1734265,00.html
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