If you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear
The UK government is attempting to introduce mandatory ID cards as part of its efforts to fight terrorism and crime in general. I have always been opposed to mandatory ID cards on principle but have often found it difficult to articulate why, beyond some half-hearted and vague mutterings about violations of civil rights.
Here’s an example of how, even with the best intentions, these things can go horribly wrong:
In the Netherlands, the effort at establishing a comprehensive population registration system for administrative and statistical purposes was completed even before the Nazi-occupation (Methorst, 1936; Thomas, 1937). In 1938 H. W. Methorst, who was then the director-general of the Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics and formerly also head of the Dutch office of population registration, reported on the rapid progress being made in the Netherlands in implementing a new comprehensive system of population registration that would follow each person “from cradle to grave” and open “wide perspectives for simplification of municipal administration and at the same time social research” (1938: 713-714). By early 1941 Methorst’s successor as head of the population registration office, J. L. Lentz, had quickly adapted this general “cradle to grave” system to create special registration systems covering the Jewish and Gypsy populations of the Netherlands. These registration systems and the related identity cards played an important role in the apprehension of Dutch Jews and Gypsies prior to their eventual deportation to the death camps. Dutch Jews had the highest death rate (73 percent) of Jews residing in any occupied western European country–far higher than the death rate among the Jewish population of Belgium (40 percent) and France (25 percent), for example.
Mark Waters marked time at 10:28 am on November 26th, 2004 .
