The cost of surveillance

The (British) government’s identity-card scheme was hit by a double whammy yesterday. The first — on costs — was not a surpri...

The (British) government’s identity-card scheme was hit by a double whammy yesterday. The first — on costs — was not a surprise, but the second, a devastating critique by Richard Thomas, the information commissioner, warning of the dangers of the government creating a surveillance society, was unexpected… The first report raises doubts not just about the cost of the scheme, but also about whether it would work; the second suggests the proposed scheme would breach fundamental principles both of privacy and data protection.

Primed by leaks from a team of 14 professors at the London School of Economics who have been examining the plan, Tony Blair sought to get his retaliation in first. Speaking at his monthly press conference, he suggested the ID card was “an idea whose time has come”. He noted that developed countries including the EU states, the US and Canada were all bringing in biometric passports, containing one or more items of identification such as fingerprints and iris or facial patterns. The costs of ID cards over and above the cost of the introduction of biometric passports were marginal: less than 30 pounds per person.

He was not persuasive, not least when he was asked by a journalist whether he would then cap the cost at that level, but declined. He ignored the fact that 30 per cent of people do not have a passport and failed to mention the costs of integrating the ID database with all the separate government department systems — a huge enterprise — to ensure ID cardholders’ access to public services. The LSE study released yesterday put the minimum cost of an ID card at 170 pounds and a medium estimate of 230 pounds.

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It was on this last point that yesterday’s two indictments overlapped. Richard Thomas had given an earlier warning of how Britain could be “sleepwalking into a surveillance society”. But yesterday’s statement was much more detailed. He expressed two deep concerns. The first was that the government was collecting and retaining too much information, ranging from all the addresses where people had lived to logging and recording every use of the ID card. The procedures would allow governments to build up a detailed picture of how an individual lived which was both “unwarranted and intrusive”.

His second concern, like the LSE team, was the broad sweep of purposes: national security, crime prevention, immigration controls, ending illegal working and delivering public services. If there were to be ID cards, they should be a tool within the individual’s control. Instead the proposals risked “an unnecessary and disproportionate intrusion into individuals’ privacy”.

Excerpted from an editorial in ‘The Guardian’, June 28

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