UK to Keep Personal Information of All Passport Applicants in ID Database

Related subjects: Europe, L'accés: Society of Access, Open Government, Rights & Freedoms, Security & Surveillance, The Global Intercept, United Kingdom Comments (0)

1 July 2009 :: J.E. Robertson

The British government is planning to move ahead with the establishment of a national identity database, to which they will add the personal information of anyone applying for a new or renewed passport, starting in 2011. Despite majority opposition to establishing a biometric national ID-card system, the government appears to be using the passport registry idea to implement the national ID-card scheme “through the back door”. 

The compulsory nature of the ID-card scheme, which required the storage of a significant amount of personal biometric information, was a significant contributing factor to the widespread opposition to the plan. The government had then aimed to apply the compulsory biometric ID-card scheme to at least 30,000 “critical workers” at specific airports, but Home secretary Alan Johnson says he has halted that plan. 

But now, according to the Guardian: 

The regulations also include powers to levy a fine of up to £1,000 on those who fail to tell the authorities of a change of address or amend other key personal details such as a change of name within three months.

Johnson says he will press ahead with plans for a “voluntary” ID-card system and that he expects “early adopters” will see the system as a “useful” form of personal identification. There is a £30 to £60 fee, which Johnson says might be waived for those over 75 years of age who seek to join the system. 

Johnson repeated the kind of worrying language that raised concerns among privacy and civil liberties advocates when former PM Blair used it, saying “There will be significant benefits to individuals from holding an identity card, which will become the most convenient, secure and affordable way of asserting identity in everyday life”. It is not clear why the government believes it would be convenient to have to demonstrate identity constantly throughout one’s daily life. 

Blair had referred to the benefits of a card that could serve as a “single gateway” to everyday life. In 2006, Cafe Sentido reported on growing concerns that in fact, Blair’s meaning was that “without it, you could be shut out of your own life, or made unequal to your fellow citizens, both in law and in practice.”

There are mounting concerns that the UK government is intent upon establishing a kind of permanent record of all human activity within Britain or relating to British citizens and that, just as this ID-card system is being expanded under the guise of voluntary adoption, such a record may be built and expanded without the public’s having full knowledge of the system. 

Security experts have said the ID-card scheme is of dubious security benefit for a number of reasons: 1) private software technology companies, including Microsoft, have said the establishment of a national database of compulsory biometric records could lead to the most aggressive wave of irreversible identity theft ever seen, putting individuals at risk and throwing digital banking into chaos; 2) some experts believe such a massive database would serve to consume huge amounts of human effort that could be devoted to investigative work, thus interfering with the proper exercise of police-work, crime-prevention and lawful prosecution. 

In the US, where personal civil liberties are more directly protected by the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, a compulsory biometrics proposal could be enough to end any politician’s career. Already there has been widespread criticism among privacy advocates who say the new US passports, equipped with RFID chips, endanger the individual and may lead to violations of Constitutional protections. 

As the Guardian reports: 

The only way for ID card critics to avoid being included on the national identity card databases will be not to apply or renew their passport –and so not to leave the country. As about 80% of the population currently hold a passport, the Identity and Passport Service believe that take-up of the voluntary scheme would be high.

Essentially, the population of Great Britain is being told: either you concede and grant us this unprecedented control over your personal information, or you are barred from ever leaving the country again. Specific civil liberties are being stripped of every UK citizen, in order to impose a system that was supposed to have been made voluntary. 

That coercive element to this new attitude toward expanding the ID-card database may raise serious civil liberties concerns at least on a par with the problems inherent in compulsory ID-card carrying. With the technology itself unproven, with public opposition to the scheme high, with members of the government essentially making false claims about the system being “voluntary”, it seems the UK’s ID-card scheme is now a bigger political mess than ever, and one must ask: what are the specific public virtues to be served by any of this?