WRITTEN ON May 23rd, 2005 BY Adam McGreggor AND STORED IN Across the Board, Identity
Having just taken some Parliament Channel, over lunch, I was rather shocked to hear the Home Office’s latest proposal… that to buy knives, one has to be 18: raising the existing age of sixteen. So, 16 is the age where taxes can be paid, and when young people can get married and set-up home… but a home without kitchen knives? How ridiculous…
ID Cards also cropped up: including the issue of identity fraud on the account of dead people, and false identities. Once again the Home Office promalgamated their belief in a ‘secure biometric’ method; even if such methods have yet to be tested on a large-scale and with informed doubt in their proposed systems. Prolly more on this once Hansard is printed tomorrow.
Just in: re-introduction of the Charities Bill — so the Home Office aren’t completely mad.
I think it’s easy – and to some extent understandable – to take a view the Home Office is ridiculous, behaving in a mad way etc. But that belongs on some “let’s say the Home Office is ridiculous but not completely mad” blog. What we need to do on Ideal Government is to set out what our requirements are for better e-enabled government.
One particular example is what we want from identity systems for an e-enabled world. I’d ask to Home Office (with which I’ve failed to engage to date) to say whether they’ll take on board that there are privacy-friendly alternatives to achieving the underlying objectives of an efficient e-enabled society. And I’d ask all those who wear a no2id T-shirt with pride to spell out, well, Yes2what?