A must read article on ID cards = National Identity Register

Please read this article at Ministry of Truth. It is about Sir James Crosby's report entitled, "Challenges and Opportunities in Identity Management" and deserves reading for its analysis of that report and the way Gordon Brown's fundamentally dishonest Government is ignoring the report.


The part of Ministry of Truth's article that most appealed to me, however, was this:

"Crucially, amongst the disclosable information in the actual system is the National Identity Registration Number (NIRN), the serial number that uniquely identifies you and which can, and will, be used to tie together every single piece of information about you that the state possesses - from your tax and benefit records, to your medical records and any criminal record, to council tax payments, you entire life in digitally-recorded data, all in such a way that everything about you that is known by the state can be traced from that one number given the right systems access - or a badly secured system.

You know how you’re always being told that your medical records, and such like, won’t go on the system? Well that sort of true - they won’t go on the system because there was never a need to even think of putting them on the system, not when you can put the NIRN onto them instead and get to them that way.

And here’s the real kicker, folks - the NIRN, as I mentioned, can be legally disclosed to a third party, even those in the private sector, which means that just about every piece of information they hold on you can also be tagged with the NIRN - bank accounts, mortgage records, loan applications, supermarket loyalty cards. Any time you have to prove who you are to someone they can, quite legally as the law stands, grab your unique NIRN and once they have that and your data is tagged with it then they can easily talk to other private sector companies who hold information about you and who’ve also got your number and well… compare ‘notes’.

We’re not just talking about an all embracing, integrated state-owned data system here but the means to developing parallel systems in the private sector under minimal legal control - and that neither speculation or paranoia but a stone cold certainty because amongst the early ‘adopters’ once this system goes live with be the banks, finance companies, mortgage lenders, insurers and - of course - the credit reference agencies to whom all these other institutions ‘talk’ in order to try an find out as much as they can about you before doing business with you.

Scared? You should be… because in these systems you don’t ‘own’ your personal data, its your personal data, and whoever’s got their grubby, conniving, paws on it that’s going to ‘own’ you."


I have been banging on about this for quite a while - see here for my most recent missive. It is a critically important point, but one that most of the media seem unable or unwilling to understand.