ID Cards - A Bad Week For Freedom

A couple of posts have stood out to me this week, high-lighting not just why ID cards are bad policy but also why they are the enemy of freedom and an absolute evil in this country. The first one comes, via the eagle eyes of the Moai, from Boing Boing. It details a leaked government document that includes the startling and frightening phrase "Various forms of coercion... are an option to stimulate applications in a manageable way." That's right, the government is looking at ways in which to coerce you into having an ID card. Fuck any rhetoric about you being able to chose whether you have a card or not, you're going to be coerced into it.

And guess what? A lot of people in this country are going to have to pay a fucking fortune for the privilege. I'm not just talking about paying through your taxes and the £89 or whatever the government wants to charge you for having your identity robbed. As Mr Eugenides shows, it is actually going to cost some people thousands of pounds to be treated like a pet; to be fingerprinted, to have their DNA coerced from them, to be herded like cattle into the database state.

This has no place in a liberal democracy in the 21st Century. Fuck Godwin's Law, coercing people to surrender their fucking identity to the state and them charging them for the privilege is the politics of Stalin, of Pol Pot, and, yes, of Hitler. This ID card scheme represents the slide towards totalitarianism, to the day where we all have microchips, and are the property of the state. We have to fight ID cards, because it is the fight for our identities, and because it is the decisive battle as to whether the state is the servant of the people, or whether we are the servants of the state. The astounding arrogance of our *leaders* cannot and must not be tolerated. We need to stop this now, before people in this country are called for "interrogation". Take the pledge, join the groups, stop ID cards. Stop the scheme now, before it is too late.