On Sat, 21 May 2005 17:37:54 +0100, ":::Jerry::::"
wrote:


"Stefek Zaba" wrote in message
...
snip

if you have the inclination. How long before B&Q will require you
(yes,
*everyone*, so as not to be accused of being discriminatory!) to
show
your ID card to buy knives and glue?


But again, what is the problem with the above, unless you *are* the
knife man of Tooting Broadway ?!

Seriously, if such a requirement stopped just on person being killed
will it not have been worth the slight invasion of privacy,
considering that if you paid via a credit card B&Q (or more likely)
the Police can still obtain your personal details [name, address, date
of birth and your ware-abouts etc.] as and when you used your CC.

And think of the huge cost of cross-referencing. A knife is bought
somewhere. The details of the purchaser are entered. Let's say, the
following:

Knife
Irish Catholic
Lives in London
Been here six months

Or

Weedkiller
Iranian Muslim
Lives in London
Been here 10 years

Both cases may, of course, be bona fide. (The guy with the knife is a
friend of the bloke with the weedkiller. First guy is helping second
guy at the latter's allotment. He uses the knife to cut string for
beanpoles and tomato plants. The other guy uses the weedkiller to, er,
kill weeds.)

But to the police? The Home Office? The Security Services? If they
have the opportunity, using the ID card data, to check and
cross-refer, they are more or less bound to make those checks.
Largely, the ID card will be a solution in search of a problem.

Over the whole country, with millions of transactions every week, the
combinatorial explosion of possible permutations is so massive, the
police would need 10,000 years with the world's most powerful
computers just to scratch the surface.

And suppose they do even attempt it, cross-referencing I mean. Suppose
the cross-referencing task, even with so-called 'smart' extrapolatory
software, needed to recruit tens of thousands of extra civil servants
with an overall cost just to run the system of £5bn PER YEAR? That's
in addition to signing up new bods for ID cards, processing those who
have died or left the country and ensuring that their ID cards are
returned from all points of the kingdom and destroyed, replacing the
hundreds of lost cards every day, prosecuting the forgetful, the wily,
and the recalcitrants for failing to comply with one or other arcane
aspect of the card. The country's security forces could in fact be so
bound up in ID card stuff that there is no resource left for
'ordinary' policing. We could even see a huge rise in crime, as whole
districts become starved of any police presence and are left to get on
with it, which would very quickly lead to vigilantism by the locals.

And suppose, despite all that, that a terrorist here as a tourist and
therefore not on the government's database simply straps some homemade
bomb to himself and walks into the Underground?

What a waste of time and money! Think what those extra resources, if
spent instead on more intensive intelligence gathering in the
old-fashioned way, could be used for.

This scenario I paint is as much for Mary as anyone else, because the
anti-ID card debate needs people with influence and I believe Mary has
that in some circles. But Mary doesn't seem to care one way or the
other, because like so many people in Britain she surmises that 'it
can't happen here, not in good old Britain!'

MM