A passport to safety?

WHEN the man then considered the most hard-line Home Secretary in recent years outlined his plan for identity cards, he was careful to adopt a neutral tone. He said he could see the "distinct advantages" of such a scheme, particularly in combating crime, but fear of public opposition to Government snooping into our lives meant he stopped short of endorsing it.

Nine years on, the mood is very different. That Home Secretary, Michael Howard, is now Tory leader, and his Labour successor, David Blunkett, has no qualms about promoting ID cards, so much so that he admits he wants to make them compulsory.

For Blunkett has few worries about an adverse reaction, few fears that the public will rise up to defend cherished freedoms and tell the State to keep its nose out. Opinion polls regularly show 70-80 per cent support for ID cards, and one of the principal reasons for this is the heightened fear of terrorism since September 11.

Countering terrorism is one of Blunkett's trump cards in promoting his scheme. The argument goes that biometric cards, containing data on fingerprints, facial dimensions or an iris scan, or possibly all three, will make it very difficult for terrorists to change identities, perceived as an integral part of staying ahead of the security services.

And, while ID cards provide no guarantee against terrorism, they could well be effective, argues Dr David George, expert in terrorism and counter terrorism at Newcastle University.

"Anybody who thinks it is going to stop terrorism in its tracks is living in cloud cuckoo land," he says. "It is not going to stop all terrorist attacks forthwith, but that is not a reason for not having them.

"But terrorists use multiple identities and this will prevent them doing that. It means it is much easier to follow where they're going and who they're seeing. You are adding another tool for the police and security services, and it is making it more difficult for the terrorists to operate."

As well as how to make bombs and use a Kalashnikov, an essential part of training for terrorists, particularly those who trained in Afghanistan, which includes many al Qaida operatives, is how to forge credit cards, passports, and other means of ID. Cards containing biometric information will be much harder to duplicate, and so will restrict the terrorists' ability to move undetected from one country to another.

AREGULAR counter to this is that the terrorists involved in the September 11 attacks were using their own passports, and had no need for false identities, and that those responsible for the Madrid bombings managed to achieve their goal even though Spain has compulsory identity cards.

But Dr George says the September 11 terrorists were identified beforehand by the FBI - the failure was not in gathering the information, it was in failing to do anything about it. "If America had got its internal intelligence organisations talking to each other, then this sort of information would have been acted on," he says.

As for the Madrid bombers, they were carrying ID cards, and Dr George's hunch is that this did prove effective, although not in stopping the atrocities themselves. "I was struck by how rapidly the Spanish police have been able to sweep up not only those involved in the bombings, but also their associates," he adds.

The man said by police to be the bombers' ringleader blew himself up, along with three other suspects, when his apartment at Leganes, south of Madrid, was surrounded by police earlier this month. Another 18 people have so far been charged in connection with the bombings, six of them for mass murder.

ID cards are also sold as being a tool to combat benefit fraud, organised crime, illegal immigration and identity fraud, which is estimated to cost £1.3bn a year in Britain.

"It could be argued that just for its benefits in countering terrorism, it is probably worth it, and certainly if you add all these other factors in then it is undoubtedly worth it," argues Dr George.

But the scheme's critics are not about to concede, even in the face of widespread public support for ID cards. Civil rights group Liberty, one of the scheme's most prominent opponents, have both practical and philosophical objections.

"We have always worked on the assumption that, where the State believes it needs to have information about the individual, it needs to have a convincing reason for getting it, that shows it is for the benefit of the wider society," says a spokesman.

'BUT what is being proposed is that the State would have an automatic right to this information and the individual has an obligation to provide it. If you refuse to provide that information, even if you have committed no crime, it will still be a criminal offence.

"The individual becomes subordinate to the State, and that is a sign of a totalitarian society."

One of the reasons why identity cards command broad support is that we are so used to carrying around one form or another of ID, another one seems a small sacrifice. But maybe part of the reason for this is that it is voluntary. If we want to travel abroad, we get a passport, but if we don't want a passport, we accept we won't be able to travel abroad.

Even though Blunkett's ID scheme will be optional at first, an optional system may prove ineffective, and the Home Secretary himself has been pretty clear that he wants it to become compulsory.

On a more practical level, Liberty's argument is that a national database containing confidential information, including medical records, and operated by a private company, as is the Government's wish, will be highly vulnerable to infiltration. Details held on every one of us will be hugely valuable to everybody from insurance companies to fraudsters, and the risk of them falling into the wrong hands is both real and worrying.

The argument that if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear from ID cards, could fall down if it places us all at risk from being impersonated, defrauded or otherwise betrayed.

"It means everything there is to know about you, including your DNA, will be stored on a massive central computer, which means there is a possibility of unauthorised access, computer failures and mistakes. People would end up with the wrong identity, or false information on their records," the Liberty spokesman says.

People will be able to find out what their database entry says, with a view to correcting it if it's wrong, but they will have to pay for the privilege, just as we will have to pay for the system itself. The estimated cost of £3bn will be met from increasing the price of passports, which will also act as identity cards from 2007, from £42 to £77, or charging £35 for the identity cards alone. Critics say there are more cost-effective ways of fighting terrorism than on ID cards.

IF the scheme were to be both foolproof and effective in combating terrorism, it would be worthy of support, but history shows that the former will be far from the truth, and there is no evidence of the latter, according to Liberty.

"It would be a colossal waste of money," claims the Liberty spokesman. "I'm baffled as to how compulsory ID cards are going to fight terrorism. The problem for the security services is not that they don't know people's names, it is that they don't know who the terrorists are. In a sense, it is totally irrelevant whether they have got the right name or not, it is whether they have got the right person that's important.

"David Blunkett says that if he doesn't introduce ID cards then Britain will be a soft target for terrorists. But if they won't be properly introduced for ten years, is that saying we're going to have ten years of being a soft target?"

The last time Britain had compulsory ID cards, they were accepted as necessary when the country was under siege from Adolf Hitler. In the post-war atmosphere, they were seen as a source of resentment and were swept aside by Winston Churchill. Today's Home Secretary must be banking on the terrorist spectre making it feel more like the dark days of the Blitz than the freedom-loving 1950s.