we are posting extracts from an email sent to us today, originally written by Frances Stonor Saunders, former arts editor of The New Statesman, author of The Cultural Cold War, Diabolical Englishman and The Devil’s Broker and winner of the Royal Historical Society’s William Gladstone Memorial Prize.
as Mr Bobbin (who mailed it to us) points out, “it is well worth reading, although i am not certain of its absolute veracity, it seems realistic enough!”. further more it opens up some cool conspiracy ideas that wouldn’t be so far fetched as we will highlight later on.
in short the new proposed id cards and the adjoining ‘National Identity Register’ will create a situation where total government surveillance on individuals will be an actual reality. the crux of this being the way in which we presently need to identify oursleves in every day actions like going to the bank, buying a new mobile phone, buying alcohol or going on holiday to a foreign country. all of these actions require us to provide some kind of id information. once the id card has been established this will be the recognised format for proving/confirming you identity - no longer will you walk into the bank, to set up a new account, with a recent gas bill and one other piece of id to prove who you are.
so what goes the cry! well Frances Stonor Saunders, suggests that since we pretty much validate our id in some way or another nearly everyday - using your cash card for example - in every case where we are presently required to do this it is conceivable that we will now swipe our id card as well as or instead of. that swipe in turn will talk to the NIR and while it confimrs our id it is likely it will also record the data and circumstances surrounding the use of the id card, for example £50 of shopping at High Street Sainsbury’s plus £20 cash back. in short our every move could quite easily be on that database, our every phone call, our every financial transaction or visit to the garden centre (more on the threats of gardening later).
to read all of Frances’ comments click here
if this scheme exists solely to exert total surveillance and control over the ordinary free British Citizen (or citizen of any other state toying with the idea), while lining the pockets of the companies that will create the computer systems at the expense of your freedom, privacy and money, then my question is how worse could it hypothetically get??
fictitious scenario to ponder: one weekend you visit the garden center and buy various pots, plants and fertilizers for some spring gardening. a few days before hand you had been in the computer store for some hardware to upgrade your old PC that had decided to melt on you the evening you had been searching for cool communist propaganda posters on ebay. three weeks after the trip to the garden center you are kicking back lazing in your lovely new garden when it comes on the news there has been an unkown explosion at a railway station 35 miles from where you live. over the next few days the death toll reaches about 35… 6 days later there is a knock at your door you look out the window and there are armed police…
now stitching people up or at least arresting them on the notion that a few tenuous facts fit is certainly possible, there are people in Guantanamo Bay purely on the basis of being Muslim and files found on their PC’s!! so not that far fetched if it’s already happening. scarier still is the notion suggested by V For Vendetta that governments could stage there own terrorist acts and with an id card NIR system in place, pin them on the politically active gardeners amongst us!!
PEOPLE SHOULD NOT FEAR THEIR GOVERNMENTS, GOVERNMENTS SHOULD FEAR THEIR PEOPLE - maybe for once people can become informed and take some actions towards maintaining a sense of democratic civil liberty.
