Rafael Behr, writing in The Guardian, describes random ID card checks in Russia:

The essence of the identity check is to reinforce a false idea of permission. The street belongs to the state and you need to prove your right to walk down it. In Russia, that relationship is hardly questioned by citizens. Of course you depend on the Kremlin for its indulgence in allowing you to move around the country.

But in a democratic society, permission should work the other way round. We, as free citizens, give our consent to a small group of people, chosen from among us, to wield power for a fixed term and on the condition that they don’t abuse it. If we get up to no good, we give them licence to intervene – to use force if necessary – to stop us. But the rest of the time, we do not need permission. That is why, of all the various erosions of civil liberties introduced by New Labour, I find the idea of compulsory ID cards the most pernicious. I do not need leave from the government to walk the streets. They need permission from me to police the streets – my streets, our streets.

Fortunately, Britain is immeasurably freer than Russia. The police generally do not wander around harassing people for ID to remind them who owns the place. Let’s keep it that way.

Andrew Porter writes in the Daily Telegraph:

The cost of Britain’s “surveillance society” measures is now running at £20 billion, a new report reveals today.

The amount is equivalent to £800 per household and includes £19 billion for the planned ID card system and £500 million for CCTV cameras.

The report by the TaxPayers’ Alliance was highlighted by David Davis, the former shadow home secretary, who stands in a by-election this week on the issue of civil liberties. Mr Davis resigned as an MP after the opposition failed to defeat Government plans to hold terrorism suspects for 42 days.

Mr Davis said: “This is yet further damning evidence of Big Brother’s expensive tastes. ID cards, CCTV, the DNA database and other measures are a huge waste of taxpayers’ money on policies that undermine freedom and are utterly ineffective in fighting crime or terrorism.

The Taxpayers’ Alliance report can be downloaded here.

Vicki Woods writes in the Daily Telegraph:

One of our ancient liberties, the one that really makes my teeth grit, is the lunacy of the centralised database that will hold all our ID cards. I occasionally wear a badge given to me by No2ID.com, and often check their website. On Thursday it was a-buzz about a heavy-handed and rather stupid response to a No2ID.com protest.

What happened was that Meg Hillier, under-secretary of state at the Home Office in charge of ID, held what was purported to be a “public consultation” about ID cards at a hotel in Edinburgh. This “public consultation” has been going on for three months already on the Home Office website, and one might suppose it means that the Home Office is consulting the public. It does not. The ID Act was passed in 2006; it’s a done deal; I resent it, and the “public” who were being consulted in Edinburgh were invited “stakeholders”, being consulted about which of them wanted a share of the ID-card business.

Protesters from No2ID.com, some dressed up in East German Stasi uniforms, tried to get into the “public” meeting, one was manhandled out and nine people were arrested and held by police. For what? For being “on suspicion” (according to the Glasgow Herald) “of a breach of the peace.” For a political protest? In that cradle of liberty, the United Kingdom? This kind of thing makes me fizz with rage.

The Hull Daily Mail reports:

Sir Bob Geldof was today throwing his celebrity weight behind former East Yorkshire MP David Davis’s decision to highlight the issue of civil liberties.

Sir Bob – a close ally of Prime Minister Gordon Brown on tackling poverty and repression in Africa – was joining Mr Davis on the campaign trail in the Haltemprice and Howden by-election.

It is thought the pair will also speak at a rally at the Guildhall in Hull at lunchtime.

The text of Sir Bob’s speech, carried on David Davis’ web site, includes a passage on ID cards:

Why should I carry an ID card? I own my identity – not them. Why should I have to identify myself to the state? How dare they demand I identify myself? To whom am I identifying myself and for what? Spain, France and Germany have had identity cards for decades and have more or less the same levels of crime as us. So why insist on them. The war on terror is no answer. Indeed there will soon be a brisk business in false British cards and more seriously they didn’t stop the bombers in Germany or Spain.

It is of course almost comically Orwellian to trot out that comprehensively stupid, complacent and absurd excuse of the natural authoritarian The classic “Only the guilty need be afraid” line. And how sickening to hear it in England. “Only the guilty need be afraid”. Really? This repulsive expression beloved of tabloid and home secretary alike has at least got the virtue that it is demonstrably false.

The Economist covers the bye-election campaign in Haltemprice and Howden:

… thanks to its MP, David Davis, the seat has become a forum for the vexed debate on the trade-off between liberty and security that has gripped Westminster. On June 12th, the day after Parliament voted to extend maximum detention without charge for terrorist suspects from 28 to 42 days, Mr Davis resigned as the Conservative home-affairs spokesman and announced that he would quit his seat. He said he would campaign in the resulting by-election, which takes place on July 10th, on the issue of defending civil liberties from 42 days, identity cards, CCTV cameras, DNA databases and other incursions.

The author notes Mr Davis’ comments on changing public attitudes to the National Identity Scheme:

Instead, Mr Davis envisages his role after the by-election as that of one-man pressure group. Public opinion can seem an insurmountable barrier for civil libertarians (there was a clear majority in favour of 42 days). But Mr Davis notes that popular support for ID cards has slipped as voters have been made aware of their drawbacks.

Dan Milmo writes on the Guardian’s web-site:

Britain’s leading airline bosses have accused the government of using their industry as a political pawn in the national identity card debate by forcing aviation workers to join the scheme next year.

In a scathing letter to the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, the chief executives of British Airways, easyJet, Virgin Atlantic and BMI said that forcing airport workers to have an ID card from November next year was “unnecessary” and “unjustified”.

All airport airside workers, who work in departure areas and on runways, must enrol in the scheme from next year under government plans, but the aviation industry is claiming it will bring no security benefits.

“First and foremost, no additional security benefits have been identified. Indeed, there is a real risk that enrolment in the national ID scheme will be seen to provide an added, but ultimately false, sense of security to our processes,” said the British Air Transport Association (Bata) letter, signed by airline bosses including Willie Walsh of British Airways and Andy Harrison of easyJet.

The full text of the letter, expressing “joint and determined opposition to the proposal” is here.

STV reports a NO2ID protest at the final Home Office “ID card delivery consultation” in Edinburgh:

Dressed as East German secret police officers and wearing bar-coded face masks to depict what they say are the de-humanising effects of ID cards, opponents of the government’s plans who gathered outside this Edinburgh hotel were determined to be noticed. Inside, Home Office minister Meg Hillier was meeting councils, the police and other bodies who will be affected by the introduction of national ID cards. But the protestors were determined to have their voices heard too and tried to enter the meeting. One who’d got in using a false name was thrown out.

Geraint Bevan from NO2ID Scotland said: “We’ve asked if they would come to a proper public forum to debate the issues and they’ve refused. Instead, they’re having a very selective audience of people who will either profit from the introduction of ID cards or from people like the police, who they think they will get a more sympathetic hearing from. It’s all a propaganda exercise, rather than a real public consultation.”

Adrian Ramsay writes in The New Statesman about David Davis and the Haltemprice and Howden bye-election:

An even more systemised form of intrusion is the proposal for ID cards, and in particular the information database that sits behind them. David Davis is now voicing opposition to the scheme, but in 2004 he voted in favour of a national ID scheme.

Again it is the Green Party that has provided consistent political opposition to ID cards: we have endorsed the NO2ID campaign (something David Davis and the Conservative Party have conspicuously failed to do). In Charles Clarke’s constituency of Norwich South (where the Green Party is the main opposition party to Labour) we strongly campaigned against Clarke’s authoritarian proposals as Home Secretary – including his attempts to bring in 90 days’ detention without charge.

Tony Benn, writing in the Sunday Telegraph, lists the reasons why he supports David Davis’ re-election campaign:

There are two other critical ways in which liberties are being eroded, both highlighted by Mr Davis.

The first is identity cards. I have no objection to them in principle, because in the course of my life I have held many cards with my photo, name and profession printed on them. What matters more is the huge database being established in concert with ID cards, on which will be gathered every bit of information that it is possible to collect. It may contain your financial status, political opinions, email contacts and more - no one will really know what is on that database.

Indeed, the information held may be inaccurate. When I recently renewed my passport, I noticed that I am still described as a Member of Parliament. If the Government does not know that I am not an MP seven years after I stepped down, it does not inspire confidence that a more wide-ranging identity database would be very reliable.

The information may leak, and it would be valuable for commercial and other purposes, including fraud and terrorism. Despite the guarantees of ministers, and regardless of whatever safeguards are promised, we know from recent examples that information held by the Government can escape.

Hugo Rifkind writes in The Spectator:

Well I never. You think the government has taken its eye off the ball. You think they’ve got nothing to do except rear up in the Daily Mail to tell us how lucky we all are, or pen little slurs in political magazines because they are jealous that they never get to hang out with Shami Chakrabarti. Then, suddenly, they go and hit you with a move of real, breathtaking political genius. They decide to hand over ID cards to the Post Office.

That’s a good one, isn’t it? That’s raw, political cynicism at its best. How can you be anti-ID cards if those same ID cards are going to be saving the Post Office? No matter if they are only for dodgy foreign nationals at first. Your sleepy rural branch has just been handed a lifeline. Bing! Window Nine! ‘Ah, Mr Abu Qatada, is it? Yes, fingerprint here, please. And can we interest you in any of our additional services? Home insurance, perhaps? No? Not worried about burglary, sir? House quite secure? Ah. Jolly good.’

Brilliant. It’s only a proposal, for now, and the story looked like it came from the Post Office. The suspicion, surely, has to be that it did not. If the government plays this right, the issues of ID cards and Post Office preservation could become irrevocably entwined. I don’t mean to gush, but it really is damnably clever. Hand a new, loathed, controversial measure over to a beloved, failing national institution, and the traditionalist nay-sayers don’t know which way to leap. In the British psyche, some things are more important than liberty. The Post Office is one of them.

The home page of the Austrian government’s e-government web site shows the sort of excitement they hope the people of Austria will have for their ID scheme.

Their banner (shown below) is emblazoned with the slogan: “Get yourself activated … get an electronic ID card!”

Meanwhile the UK ID web site has gone with a much more sedate: “Everyone’s unique. Let us keep it that way.” After all of the recent data losses perhaps they should use: “Everyone’s unique. Let’s see how long that lasts.”

Robert Winnett writes in the Daily Telegraph about the Independent Police Compliants Authority report on the HMRC Child Benefit data loss:

The investigation found “no evidence whatsoever” of misconduct or criminality by any member of HMRC.

Nigel Jordan, a senior official publicly blamed for the loss, was completely exonerated by the inquiry.

Instead it blamed the loss on institutional problems and said it was “symptomatic of a wider problem”.

George Osborne, the shadow Chancellor, said that there had been a series of similar data losses since the child benefit scandal and that 37m items of personal data have been lost by the Government in the past year alone.

He accused Mr Brown and Mr Darling of misleading the public and urged ministers to abandon plans for a national ID card scheme.

The IPCC report (downloadable here) was published on the same day as a review of the same events by Kieran Poynter (available here) and Sir Edmund Burton’s report on the MoD’s loss of a laptop containing 600,000 personal records of recruits or potential recruits (available here).

Jan Morris writes in The Guardian:

Anyone can see that in Britain, 2008, individuality is being suppressed, so that year by year, generation by generation, the people are being bullied or brainwashed into docile conformity. What is more ominous is that so many want to be docile. They want to be supervised, cosseted, homogenised, obedient.

The ubiquitous CCTV cameras are the emblems of this malaise, not because of their existence but because people accept them as necessary for the public good: the police tell them so, councils tell them so, statistics proclaim it, and so they believe it, and are perfectly willing to be spied upon, night and day, wherever they go, by unknown, invisible strangers out of sight.

The so-called war on terror is of course the supposed excuse for this appalling violation of all our privacies, together with the ominous rise of the secret intelligence agencies. The public has been gulled into acceptance of the supervisory state, with all its paraphernalia of surveillance and identity cards, DNA databases, armed police and arbitrary search, by the mantra: “If you don’t do anything wrong, why worry?”

Nick Heath writes on the ZDnet web site:

Experts have warned that the ID-card scheme risks being derailed by mistakes in fingerprint matches.

The £4.4bn National Identity Scheme’s (NIS’s) reliance on fingerprint and facial-recognition biometrics exposes the system to error, according to the independent Biometrics Assurance Group (BAG).

BAG urged the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) to adopt iris scans as a ‘fallback’, for when there are problems taking or matching a fingerprint.

However, it seems the experts’ advice will be ignored:

An IPS spokesman said: “It is unlikely that iris scans will be used in the scheme. Suppliers can use whichever biometric they choose in their solution but they will have to show it meets minimum standards and provides cost benefits.”

The BAG report can be downloaded here.

David Davis answers readers’ questions in The Independent:

You’ll be running against the Monster Raving Loonies and a fruit seller. Hasn’t the gamble failed? (Liz Cromfield, Sheffield)

It speaks volumes that Gordon Brown will not defend his record by contesting this election. But my aim is to launch a national debate on the defence of British liberty – and that is bigger than any one politician. I will spend the next three weeks making the case against ID cards, 42 days and the increasingly intrusive surveillance society – and for habeas corpus, free speech and the right to trial by jury. I am willing to debate anyone, any time, anywhere.

There is wide cross-party support for what I am trying to achieve – not to mention overwhelming support from outside the world of politics. Mr Brown has gagged all ministers from participating in any televised debates. He’s terrified of the electorate and he’s terrified of the debate. He is right, at least, on that.

Marina Hyde writes in The Guardian:

‘The individual has no right to anonymity,” Andy Burnham once explained during a robotic defence of identity cards. “The state has a right to know who you are.” Yet despite his concerted efforts to draw attention to himself with dazzling feats of brown-nosery, the cloak of anonymity has hung heavy on the current culture secretary, with very few citizens of this state having the first clue who he is. Indeed, for most of the final years of Tony Blair’s premiership, he was presumed to be lodged in the prime ministerial colon, only emerging blinking into the daylight the minute Gordon took over, whereupon he announced to the press: “I was a Blairite, and now I am a Brownite.”

This week, however, Burnham gave people a better of idea of who he is, when he broke his silence on David Davis’s endearingly misguided decision to trigger a byelection to campaign against the government’s plan to detain terror suspects for up to 42 days without charge. Burnham found “something very curious”, he told Progress magazine, in Davis’s “late-night, hand-wringing, heart-melting phone calls with Shami Chakrabarti”.

Ms. Chakrabarti is threatening legal action. Marina Hyde points out:

But we ought to note that this is not the first time he has been accused of slander. A couple of years ago, the London School of Economics published its Identity Project, a report on ID cards that was the collective work of 60 LSE academics and 40 external experts. Burnham was one of several ministers who repeatedly dismissed it as the work of one man - a man who was eventually forced to seek legal advice and write to Blair to stop what he called a “systematic and malicious deception”.

That “one man” is Simon Davies. Spy Blog documents Mr Burnham’s comments about Mr Davis in the House of Commons April 2006; Ian Brown notes similar comments in late 2005 and February 2006.

Patrick Wintour writes in The Guardian:

Ministers are being urged by the Post Office to give it valuable contracts to take over the distribution of ID cards, biometric data, and e-passports, in a bid to save it from a further round of politically-damaging closures, and loss of customers.

The organisation is arguing in private talks with ministers that it is best placed to take on some of these contracts since it is already responsible for checking passport applications and has an existing national network to draw upon. Ministers in both the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform and the Home Office are stressing that they cannot hand out the contract without open commercial competition, but see both political and business advantages to a deal.

Ministers have met top figures in the Post Office to discuss the contracts, and other ways in which government can provide customers, after the Post Office was criticised for a sweeping closure plan.

Tom Espiner writes on the ZDnet web site:

The Liberal Democrats have taken the government to task following this week’s round of high-profile official data losses, suggesting the breaches show the government could not safely administer an ID card database.

The revelation on Tuesday of the loss of a personal computer from cabinet minister Hazel Blears’s Salford office, coupled with two instances of civil servants leaving top-secret documents on trains from Waterloo this week, calls into question the government’s ability to look after sensitive data, according to the Liberal Democrat shadow home secretary, Chris Huhne.

Huhne said the proposed National Identity Register behind the ID cards scheme could not be adequately administrated by the government.

The Home Office response:

“We understand public concern about security of personal data and one of the most important benefits of the scheme will be to improve the individual’s protection against fraudulent use of personal information. The link between your unique biometric information and limited data identity held will make it incredibly difficult for anyone to try to use your personal information fraudulently.”

“IPS will make the register as secure as possible, building on an excellent track record with the current passport database, which has 80 million records,” the Home Office’s spokesperson added. “The level of security classification will match some military databases.”

George Parker and Jimmy Burns write in the Financial Times:

Gordon Brown went head to head with David Davis yesterday over civil liberties, insisting the government was right to use “21st century solutions” such as closed circuit television, biometric identity cards and DNA databases to fight terrorism and organised crime.

The prime minister gave a hastily arranged speech on “security and liberty” as Mr Davis, former shadow home secretary, prepared to launch his campaign to win back his Yorkshire seat in a “civil liberties” by-election.

Mr Davis announced his resignation as an MP last week after the government’s victory on 42-day detention, paving the way for a by-election next month in his Haltemprice and Howden constituency. He is expected to resign formally today with a by-election expected on July 10, which Mr Davis wants to turn into a vote on defending Britain against the “surveillance society” and the “database state”.

Although Labour is not expected to field a candidate in a campaign that Mr Brown has labelled “a stunt which turned into a farce”, the prime minister accepts the need to fight Mr Davis on the issues.

Andrew Sparrow, writing in the Guardian, outlines what Brown and Davis have said on the main issues:

Identity cards

Davis

We have the most intrusive identity card system in the world … We’ve witnessed … the creation of a database state, opening up our private lives to the prying eyes of official snoopers and exposing our personal data to careless civil servants and criminal hackers.

Brown

We know that as many as one in four criminals use false identities – and with terrorist suspects it is almost universal. One September-11 hijacker used 30 false identities to obtain credit cards and a quarter of a million dollars of debt. Many terrorist suspects arrested since 2001 have had large numbers of false identities. No one is suggesting that an identity card scheme will stop terrorist attacks overnight. But if it can make it harder for people not just to travel across borders with multiple identities, but also to raise money or rent safe houses or buy sensitive material – all anonymously – it can potentially disrupt the operations of terrorists or other criminals – something we must surely be making every effort to do.

The full text of Gordon Brown’s speech is available from the Downing Street web site.

Fergus Shanahan writes in The Sun:

Three pensioners are hauled off by cops at Heathrow.

Were they plotting to hijack a jet? No. They were wearing “Stop Airport Expansion” T-shirts. And that was all the police needed to deem them a threat to national security.

There you have exactly what David Davis means when he says the time has come to stand up to the heavy hand of the State.

Davis has quit his Tory post over the 42-day detention limit. His enemies say he has made a bad miscalculation. I’m not sure he has.

Although Davis is mocked in Parliament, the mood in the country is different.

Davis has hit the nail on the head. We HAVE allowed ourselves to be browbeaten by fears of Islamic terror attacks into abandoning too many of our freedoms — something I have said for months. Many Sun readers agree with me.

They aren’t soft on terror any more than I am.

But like me they worry that this is ceasing to be a country we feel at ease in, or the country we once knew.

A country of ID cards and databases, secret cameras, tax snoopers who can barge into your house and council spies who can fine you £200 just for dropping a crisp.

A country where any minor official can intercept your emails.

A country where any NHS manager can access your private medical records.