Transcript of interview on the BBC Radio Suffolk Drivetime programme, November 15th, 2006

Stephen Foster:So, as expected, the Government is pressing ahead with ID cards. That was one of 29 bills announced in the Queen's speech today. And it looks like Ipswich will be home to one of 60, or nearly 60, ID card centres. Borough councillors today approved plans for one to be set up at Crown House, in the town centre. The campaign group, NO2ID, demonstrated outside council headquarters. And afterwards, one of the protesters, Geoff Brace, voiced concerns about the future.
Geoff: We had only recently a report from the Information Commissioner, saying that we were the most subject to surveillance of any society outside of North Korea, which is the last bastion of Stalinism. This system will provide far more information than the Stasi ever managed to aquire on the population of East Germany and they were pretty notorius for their ruthless control of the population. And although we are often assured that the intentions of these things are entirely benign, we have no guarantee of what a future Government might do. And to put these kinds of powers into the hands of politicians for an unlimited period in the future is in my opinion very, very dangerous.
Stephen Foster: It's clear that this Government is hell-bent on ID cards, it was mentioned in the Queen's speech today. So really unless there's a change of Government nothing much is going to change, is it?
Geoff: I think even this Government may from time to time be open to argument. Yes it is hell-bent on it, it will attempt to put it in place. To do it will require probably the most complicated and advanced computer system that the world has ever seen. This will be one of the largest databases ever created, it will be a database containing sixty million (that's the number of people in the UK) sixty million separate records of some fifty entries just for the personal information, plus all history information. On top of that, for the biometrics to work, there has to be a system of fingerprint and iris recognition . These technologies have been sold as very effective for controlling access to buildings; it might be possible to use something for the control of access to this studio, but where you are talking about discriminating accurately, and we are talking often for levels of legal proof. If you want to identify somebody as being a known terrorist, then we need a standard of proof beyond reasonable doubt. So this is not an accuracy of identifying this person as merely being one in sixty million, but to perhaps a hundred times better than that, we want to be certain. We might allow one percent doubt, but is that beyond reasonable doubt? To work on the ID system, I doubt that there are enough people in the world with that expertise to man a project such as this. And of course, the Government is expecting that this is going to come in on time and on budget. Just look at the track record. Over-runs in time by years, look at the last passport system, huge over-runs in budget, functional failures of systems to actually perform as defined. All taking place, in many cases the contractors who have been asked to do it have made a small fortune on it, failed to produce the work, and then we've heard such wonderful things as "it is not appropriate [inaudible] on this contract. And in some cases, I believe, on the passport system,the contractor was actually paid additional money to make the system work for the first time. So it's quite possible that we will actually see the introduction of the ID card system and it will then collapse in an enormous heap at vast expense.
Stephen Foster: The thoughts there of Geoff Brace, from the campaign group NO2ID, talking to me earlier this afternoon here at BBC Radio Suffolk.