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Where ID cards and National Identity Registers can lead us.

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Message Ian Watson
Where ID cards and National Identity Registers can lead us.

Today, the day after Guy Fawkes Night here in Britain, where we as a nation celebrate the failed destruction of Britain's parliament. In the same building that Guido Fawkes tried to destroy, the Prime Minister Tony Blair goes on the offensive in supporting the ID card scheme, the mass DNA and Identity registers of every person here in the UK.

He claims it is an issue of "modernity" rather than civil liberties but unfortunately we do have one or two stark lessons in history that teaches us that such schemes are rarely benign and all too easily abused.

What Tony Blair asks us to do with regards to the NIR and ID Cards is to place the government in an arbitrary position of trust. This in Britain is very hard to do when we have time and again in 9 years of New Labour watched our trusts and our rights become eroded with each passing day, we are asking a government that is a proven den of corruption and lies to trust them with our very lives in some aspects, to protect us when all too easily the government will betray again that trust and it simply is not acceptable at this point to be asked to trust Blair's government.

Time and again, promises have been broken, time and again, lies have been exposed, time and again, corruption has been uncovered and that's before we get to the lies of Iraq and elsewhere, lies that kill and maim people, why should we trust such governance when they give us no reason to?

Even before we begin, the abuse has started, the British DVLA has already sold the Vehicle Ownership databases to as many as it can, from eBay to insurance companies, all now have access to private and confidential driver information that we as people are not allowed to know but it seems big business interests have a given right to such information.

History though can teach us in stark contrast what such schemes as ID cards and databases can achieve, the two simple examples are of course Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany but many people do not believe or understand the latter and how it was the introduction of such schemes that accelerated the demise of not only the Jews under the Reich but Gypsies, criminals, the mentally ill, Jehovah's Witnesses, in essence anybody that the Nazi state did not approve of.

In 1937, Thomas Watson of IBM gave Hitler the very means to begin his work against the "enemies of the Reich", without IBM's special tabulating machines, it is unlikely that the Nazi's would have even scratched the surface of German society and its "undesirables" and it is such a database that Tony Blair wishes us to embrace.

Already we are seeing the same pattern, political dissenters are classed as "terrorists", the Jews have been replaced with the Muslim, corruption and cronyism in the UK parliament is out of control and the state has asserted itself in mastery over the citizen in a frightening manner that was predicted by the much acclaimed George Orwell.

What is going to be the difference in reality to the Auschwitz tattooed arm to the implanted RFID chip? What is going to be the difference between the sewn on patches worn by so many of the Nazi's condemned to the orange jumpsuits that Blair wants criminals to wear?

It is very easy indeed to racially profile using DNA and a pound to a penny says that if such databases came into effect tomorrow, that every person with a Muslim or foreign name will be tasked for scrutiny, that every DNA sample that has non Caucasian typing will be marked for scrutiny and what then...? Because DNA will show that previous generations may have come from overseas, will we see the revival of the "Aryan" certificate program that the ID card will be the badge of...? Or a two tier system again like the Nazi's had where you had to qualify genetically as well as politically and socially to be a German?

And will it end there? Of course not because the number crunchers and spin doctors in the Government will highlight that black people are supposedly more inclined to commit crimes, that Muslims are more likely to commit acts of terrorism and so it goes on and we move from a situation of innocence before guilt to a system of pre-emptive "law and order" which could mean anything.

Already Blair has started along the "eugenics" road, in his mad proposals earlier this year of "pre-birth" intervention which at the moment would mean anything but if these mad schemes didn't work or the wrong minded people gained control, would we see state induced abortions simply because the mother wasn't married? Or the father broke the law once?

British children are being secretly databased and sampled for DNA already and everything they do now, at home, in school or anywhere on the streets is recorded by the state.

The potential here and now for Blair to launch us into a unparalleled fascist state is extremely frightening and it seems far too few people protest or even seem bothered by it.

Blair and his cohorts are building a system that the Gestapo itself would be in awe of, that Beria himself would only dream about and it is becoming a reality very quickly indeed.

Blair has put in motion the building of the DNA database up by stealth and it matters not now if you are caught speeding or murder someone, your DNA is forcedly taken and kept forever unless you can convince a senior police officer to take it off the database, whilst it may be seen as fighting crime and catching criminals it turns the British population into a nation of suspects at large and looking at recent cases in Scotland, it is not hard to understand why people are so wary when we see that Police are capable of not only planting DNA evidence but also fingerprint evidence as well.

This gives the state the ability to criminalise whoever they wish, at any time, by placing an easily captured DNA sample at the scene of a crime, easily captured in that someone in the Tube could pull a hair off your head and place that next to a murdered body and what defence would you have...?

Not many people understand either that the state wishes to photograph every single one of us and this is what has led to the recent clashes over Muslim women wearing veils, why it is going to against the law in the UK to wear a mask or anything that stops the cameras from taking your photo.

How hard is it for any of us that can use Photoshop or Fireworks to alter a picture to put someone else's face there...? Facial Biometrics are not unique in any sense nor as unique as example the fingerprint or retinal scan but for any technology to be worth its investment, surely we must be assured 100% that no abuses can occur, that the system is 100% failsafe?

It again comes down to trust, pure and simple and to the point, we cannot trust the politicians or the government with our governance, it is as simple and blunt as that.

Why should we trust the police in these matters either? When the poor Brazilian electrician Charles Menendez was brutally executed by police officers in south London, not only did the police lie profusely to cover themselves at the first showing but also proceeded to smear the departed man and accuse him in retrospect of heinous crimes which turned out to be unfounded.

Another such incident in the shooting of the Forest Gate man, the police again smeared him in an attempt to destroy any public sympathy for him by labelling him a child pornographer, an innocent man already under duress in his own country for being brown and Muslim is also shot and then labelled a child molester in short order.

If we had institutions that we could trust to get it right, that at least made an effort to get it right and to protect our interests over their own, then maybe a case for trusting the government and the police in such instances could be made but when such situations exist where we cannot even begin to trust the very words uttered from these people, we cannot trust them to protect us and in that case, it must be defined that this government and the civil service that supports it, the police that are supposed to protect us are NOT fit for service I any way, shape or form.

It is not a case of "modernity" that Blair claims, it is a case of watching a corrupt and blatantly oppressive government abuse our status as citizens and remove our rights and freedoms to suit their own need whilst elevating their own status and exempting themselves from the very laws that they apply to us.

History teaches and history has taught us that any government that needs to spy on its people is up to no good; Blair is no exception to that rule.

Ian Watson
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"But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their (more...)
 
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