On Sun, 22 May 2005 10:58:19 +0100, "Mary Fisher"
wrote:


"Peter Parry" wrote

There will be if you write the same on your registration for your ID
card - £2,000 or a few months in jail.

A doubt that anyone would be sentenced to a few months in jail for not
paying a £2,000 fine - and has all that been decided yet?

It is in the second draft, unchanged from the first. It is unlikely
to change.

You're assuming that there WILL be bent insiders.

There are now, many hundreds of them in the Civil Service. There
were when we last had ID cards,

What was the effect then?

The effect is (and was) that information is used to the detriment of
innocent people and to remove from people the legal protection
Parliament felt they required. What is the point of a Data
Protection Act when today information from police and civil servant
databases, supposedly protected by that act, is freely available to
anyone for small payments?

Misuse also took place officially.

"The wartime ID card used in the UK outlived the war, and found its
way into general use until the early 1950s. Police became used to the
idea of routinely demanding the card, until in 1953 the High Court
ruled that the practice was unlawful. In a landmark ruling that led
to the repealing of the National Registration Act, and the
abandonment of the ID card, the Lord Chief Justice remarked :

... although the police may have powers, it does not follow that
they should exercise them on all occasions...it is obvious that the
police now, as a matter of routine, demand the production of national
registration identity cards whenever they stop or interrogate a
motorist for any cause....This Act was passed for security purposes
and not for the purposes for which, apparently it is now sought to be
used.... "(Wilcock v. Muckle (1952) 1 KB 367, page 369)



--
Peter Parry.
http://www.wpp.ltd.uk/