> Of Markus Kuhn >The US id cards are only for historical resons called drivers >licences. >They are already id cards in most but name. In no country >I have visited, I had to identify myself by photo ID card >more often then in the US,
I share your opinion that US drivers licences are de facto ID cards. I found myself very surprised about how many times I was asked for my 'drivers license' in the US. A lot of this was due to the attitude towards stopping people buying or consuming alcohol. All police motoring stops in the US start with a requirement to produce the license, this I found to be at the other end of the spectrum from my UK experience (where I only get asked for it about once a decade). The US attitude towards using Stop rather than Yield signs at junctions is a gift to police who wish to interfere in private lives. > Today, its actually a plastic identification card in ISO 7810 ID-1 > format (the inch-based US banking card standard format 85.60 x 53.98 mm). I have just looked up the regulations. You are right. All new ones are photocards. Current paper ones still continue to be valid until it expires when the driver is aged 70. > If the UK introduced an ID card, then for the majority of the > population, the drivers licence would also be your ID card at the same > time. The introduction of a government identity scheme means merely, > that the government maintains a high-quality register of all citizens > and legal residents in the country, including their current resitental > address, something which neither the US nor the UK have at the moment, > hence their need for electrolar registers, arcane semi-secure > authentication methods involving utility bills, bank statements, etc. in > many business transactions (such as opening and accessing bank > accounts). It's really more a convenience than a privacy issue, IMHO. I agree that it would be more convenient if the government got involved in the commercial relationship between a business and a customer. Government databases can be kept accurate by coercion whereas businesses have to use other means. That is not to say that commerce cannot do a good job by itself, I worked for a commercial database company that had a very successful business providing a high accuracy service to business clients. Expediency cannot be used to justify the introduction of compulsory ID in the UK. The European Convention on Human Rights (the Human Rights Act in the UK) requires that interference with privacy must be "necessary in a democratic society", fulfils a "pressing social need" and is "proportionate" to the legitimate aim pursued. Incidentally, the German experience is different to that in the UK. Germans are protected by a constitutional ruling in 1983 that individuals have the right to "information self-determination" and the German ID Card Act of 1987 contains that protection. The UK has no written constitution and so UK citizens are vulnerable to the ebb and flow of current government thinking. I know that people from countries with ID cards often cannot see why it doesn't exist in the UK and don't like the extra effort to get a bank account etc. I experienced this first hand when I tried to help my Spanish girlfriend set up home here. Compulsory ID requires a whole set of 'administrative offences without a victim' e.g. failure to register, failure to possess, failure to update, failure to produce. It gives police a starting point for harassment, which incidentally was why they were abolished in the UK. I also know somebody in the US who was arrested and jailed for failing to produce her license. If somebody wants to know who I am, they can ask me. I might even tell them. I have plenty of identity documents, all voluntary. I don't want a compulsory one even if it would make some things simpler. Here are two online references: http://www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk/mpress118.html http://www.charter88.org.uk/id_cards/index.html
