Spent the day at a Public Sector Forums conference on ‘Identity management. Which was interesting, stimulating and provoked something of a genuine debate. Quite an achievement given the subject matter.

It’s argued in some quarters that we only remember three points from any given presentation. As there were over a dozen speakers, I should now have 36 new ideas or stories to record. Well maybe not; but some points that have already stuck in the grey matter:

  • Why is the state going to be involved in ‘identity management? This is a really bizarre idea.

  • Meg Hillier’s comment that the ‘debate about identity cards has already happened’ was also bizarre

  • Someone made a point that we’ve moved from the information society to the surveillance society – good point

  • Brendan O’Neill’s take on CCTV and surveillance wasn’t really answered by any of the civil servants present.

One fact he threw out was that the UK has 20% of the world’s CCTV. I personally never feel any safer with this proliferation of cameras – in fact I find the general aggression in UK society to be much nastier than it is in most European countries I’ve been to (and I’m sure this is backed up with research somewhere).

But at the end of the conference, after all the speakers, I’m still really unclear why the government is pushing ahead with identity cards. I didn’t hear any convincing arguments from any of the pro-ID card speakers.

Fight crime? When I had my wallet stolen from an office, my AA card was inside. A few weeks later I was visit by the Hackney riot squad in full body armour to be questioned about an armed robbery. My AA card had been found in the getaway car. So what happens when ‘our’ ID card is lost or stolen? Or what happens when someone learns to clone them?

Terrorism? My recent experience at Heathrow and Barcelona airports made me more nervous than the flying. All of the ’security’ people we dealt with were either bored or uninterested or had a ridiculous sense of their own importance. I can’t say I blame them, I presume it’s a low paid job with lots of performance management targets.

Deliver better services? Why can’t they just do that?

Improve democracy? I don’t think so. I made use of my democratic right to protest when the vile George Bush (lets not forget, a supporter of torture and rendition flights) visited County Durham. I have never been photographed so much by the police. Why? It was extremely intimidating. How do we guarantee against the misuses of the state with ‘our identity’? Answer we can’t.

It’s almost aligned with WG Sebald’s argument in the ‘Natural History of Destruction’ that once the allies had built a huge airforce of bombers, they had to use them; even though the war was ending, and the main casualties were German civilians. With the huge expenditure in IT systems, there has to be a justification; in this case the endless collecting of data, the surveillance, the monitoring and checking. Who now might the victims be?