Re stops and searches / audit trail:

The police man who stops you should also be required to put his fingerprint against the record of all stops that he makes so that abusive officers can have a full audit of everyone they stop made, available to the police complaints commision and any person who files a complaint against the police.

Imagine that.

How many people do you think the police would harrass if they thought that every time they did it their "stop record" would be displayed, along with the "race" of the people they stopped?

They would probably react and behave like traffic wardens, stopping an equal number of peoples of different appearances so that their numbers remain balanced. Ill leave it to you to figure out what that means.

Of course all of this is moot. In order for the above to work, sensitive details about "race" religion and other details would all have to be stored on the card or in the database, and that really would create a "Genocide Card".

It is interesting that the ID cards page of the home office site is within the Community & Race section rather than Crime & Policing, Terrorism, Immigration & Nationality or Passports, all of which are much more relevent in terms of the arguements the Home Office, Blunkett and Blair have been putting forward.

Does this point to the original thinking behind the scheme? It certainly seems a little ironic.

The Draft ID Card Bill, being written in the usual overbroad, power grabbing Home Office style, would grant this Government (or any future even more authoritarian or extremist one) the power to add any other information that they feel like to the National ID Register and even to add people or information to it without their consent.

Bear in mind that the very first "authorised studies" in the new permanent gateway link between the Inland Revenue and the Department for Work and Pensions databases under the misleadingly named "Longitudunal Study" (c.f. http://www.spy.org.uk/spyblog/archives/000231.html) was to allow "ethnicity data for use in Geographical Information Systems (GIS)"