John Lettice’s article on the Home Office’s consultation documents for ID cards takes you the “Stand.Org” pages – not people I’d heard of before. Linking to it a few minutes ago, I got this error:
“A Cynic’s Guide To Entitlement (*cough* ID *cough*) Cards … Warning: Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket ‘/tmp/mysql.sock’ (2) in /data2/vhost/www.stand.org.uk/docs/sql.php3 on line 115”
I wonder if they’ve been slashdotted? I posted some comments on the Environment Agency’s post flood problems the other day, which were picked up (on steroids) by a writer who clearly knows a thing or two that I don’t. Bill De Hora (and there’s an accent there which I can’t figure out how to get here), which I’ll come back to another time, is worth a read.
Stand, it turns out, are “a group of volunteers who originally came together in 1998 in a vain attempt to fix the worst aspects of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIP) Act. Backed up by a list of over 3000 supporters, we disseminate information and motivate the interested about issues around privacy and censorship, particularly with respect to the Internet.” I didn’t come across them during the RIP hoo-ha.
John and I have talked about ID cards before and pondered the theory of perhaps linking a smart card to the travel cards that are soon to become common on the London Underground (and presumably in the rest of the country) – after all, how many more cards do you have room for in your wallet/purse/pocket? I’m not close to the consultation process so far, but now that it’s drawing to a close it must be time for me to read up and figure out what will happen next.