ID cards...again

NSW Premier Morris Iemma backs ID cards, sprouts gibberish

NSW Premier Morris Iemma announced today that he backed the idea of Australian identity papers, an inquiry into which is expected to be announced by Federal Attorney General Phillip Ruddock.

"An ID card can be a valuable weapon in the fight against terrorism, crime and fraud," Mr Iemma told reporters.
Sydney Morning Herald

I disagree, but whatever. Iemma then proceeded to say that,

We also need to ensure that there are proper protections for civil liberties and for privacy.
ibid.

Civil liberties? I don't even need to start with the slippery slope arguments. I can rubbish the idea of ID cards without even needing to raise the bogeyman of authoritarian intrusion into our lives. I put it to you that the federal government, or anyone else, is stupendously incapable of instituting proper privacy protections on these things.

In this day and age of users needing help from dumb applications to identify phishing attacks, and card readers readily accessible over the counter at Dick Smith Electronics that there is no such thing as proper protections for privacy. Lost your wallet? Well, identity thieves don't even need a federally backed ID card to steal your identity, but it sure will make it easier with one.
avocadia: Weapon against terrorism?:

A valuable weapon against terrorism? Sure. Excuse my ignorance of exactly how security and police operations work, but are the police and intelligence services in the habit of approaching those they have under surveillance and asking to see their papers? I would have thought that might constitute alerting the target of the surveillance to the existence of the surveillance operation.
adam: Only Lord William Rees-Mogg can save us now!: Well, the House of Lords has about the same legislative authority as a wet dishrag, but its a wet dishrag talking sense in The Times today :

Not much of this optimism has survived. The 21st century has been a period in which most governments sought to reassert and extend control; often adopting policies that would once have been regarded as illegal and outrageous. The decisive event was 9/11. Public fear of terrorism gave governments the support needed to tighten systems of social control and supervision. In the United States, the clear constitutional safeguards against imprisonment without due process were set aside. Any president responsible for \"extraordinary rendition\" or Guantanamo before 9/11 would have been impeached; President Bush was re-elected.

These anti-terror laws have been fine pieces of demagoguery, only the undemocratically appointed - or non-majority appointed - arms of government (eg judges, British Lords, Green Senators) have had much chance to say against it.

Also in The Times today: this curiosity on archaic laws

From a statute of 1324, any whale washed up on the United Kingdom coastline has to be offered to the Crown and cannot be disposed of without the consent of the Sovereign. By tradition the head belongs to the King and the tail to his consort \"to furnish the Queen\'s wardrobe with whalebone\".
cam: Apparently in Victoria you can\'t wear pink pants: after midday. Presumably the National ID card will help prevent that offence against Victorians as well.

Claiming it will solve terror issues is a furphy. This is about government control. We already have a tax number which is how most people interact with government from week to week. This did not stop terror in Bali, New York or London. Maybe Australia hasn\'t had a terrorist attack yet and the government is over-reacting. Or maybe they just want more power simply because they can.

cam
adam: Mate: The new national ID card will paint your house, change nappies and fix the perfect martini.  It\'ll fix greenhouse gas emissions, tune your carbie, eliminate spam and cure malaria.  It\'ll prevent alien invasion and teach you karate.  The only thing it won\'t do is violate your privacy, because the little buggers will be grown in special Edwardian vats to ensure they\'re brought up proper, with liberal applications of the strap, and seen but not heard.  

Trust me, I held a royal commission into all this and it came back all lights green.

Surveillance Society Rankings

Privacy International has released a map showing the leading surveillance societies in the world . The shockers were the UK which ranked as badly as China and Russia. The United States didn't fare too well either. Australia was ranked in the middle of the pack, though with the ominous ranking of "systemic failure to uphold safeguards".

Privacy is a second-order effect of liberty. The greater the liberty, the greater the privacy, especially from state intrusion. I would not be surprised if trends in increasing surveillance and invasion of privacy by the state are commensurate with the intrusion on liberties.

Source: Privacy International

Australia was one of the worst ranked in the "Travel, Finances and Transborder" category. The stand out countries were Canada and Germany, with the UK being one of the worst. The foreign policy blog has some more commentary on the issue , especially in relation to Germany.

Marshall Kirpatrick argues that even studies in anonymous aggregate must be opt-in.
Permalink, Cell Phone Tracking and Privacy

Privacy is only going to become of increasing importance to be protected from digital intrusion. Not just from the state but from other organisations as well. I would not be surprised to see it become entrenched as a political right. It already is in some locations; the whole Swiss banking system is predicated on it.
Interesting way to send private information back and forth.
Permalink, JotOnce: Interesting Way To Send Private Information

Making Amazon's Wishlist Private

making the amazon wishlist private

One of the problems with online privacy is that you don't really know what is being leaked out as public data. You expect that most stuff is private, but the terms and conditions can change quickly - which facebook has a bad history of - or worse, something you assume would be private is actually public and it is non-obvious.

The Amazon Wishlist is in the latter category. You can view anyone's wishlist if you know their email address. Which I don't think is cool. I changed it to private but I was unaware that this was public information. My wishlist is boring, no dildos or anything like that, it was just books on software and classical history, but even so.

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