arden forester

Will Tony Blair have an ID Card from the New Labour thought police? If so, then some devious civil servant could spill the beans - how much did he pay for that house in London? Is Cherie declaring all her income such as book signings? Big Brother could come to haunt you Tony along with Big Sister and Big Daddy!!! That would be the Mother of all problems! :roll: :shock:

C_steam

No, that was done with a young person who died at an early age. At what age would an ID card be required by law.

Hartlepool

Thats probably why the celebration of the Battle of Trafalgar was not held on the 200th Anniversary date (21 Oct 2005.)Also,by having it early it will/would not cause embarrasment to the French right in the middle of Bliars EU Presidency. Remember, the Govt is involved in treachery and deciet and always plans well ahead. We have a period of 6 months in front of us while Bliar is EU Pres,lets make it really uncomfortable and embarrasing for them all by us planning ahead instead of stumbling from one thing to another. Its time to get organised.

TomPhil

Looking at recent polls, it seems that a slim majority of people support them, but this majority quickly becomes a very small minority when you mention paying for them.

A number of polls I've seen recently have shown many in favour of ID cards if they are "free".

The Government could get round this so easily. Simply launch a new stealth tax to pay for the cards, then announce that they're being given away "free".

__________________
"A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government."

In Labour we trusted and now we are busted... again. It's the economy, stupid.

chikrodah

If only! If there were only 49 items of information per id card, you'd be talking of approximately 2.9 billion (thousand million in old money) rows of data.

That's probably around 100kb of data, not including storage-intensive data such as biometrics, voice recognition etc. Not a problem to store 'so little' information on today's smart cards. But a duplicate set needs to be stored in a central database, and that's where the problems start.

As a conservative estimate, that would mean an identity database of around 290,000Gb - or just under 2000 large (150Gb) hard drives.

BUT

Realistically, each ID card will hold more than one entry for most 'items of information' - and heaven help you if you travel around the country to find work.

A more likely estimate would be double the original (very conservative) estimate. So we're now looking at 600,000 Gb, or 4000 home PCs.

For reasons which the other techies on this forum will appreciate, the number of drives needs to be quadrupled at a bare minimum, just to allow for backing up the data safely, logging all the data input etc.

So that's 16,000 home PCs worth' of data - 24,000,000 Gb.

Then you need to double that, because you can't retrieve data from a database of that size whilst data is being constantly input - you need to duplicate that data and store a copy elsewhere, and constantly update the copy as well.

So that's 48,000,000 Gb of data and drive space, or 32,000 home PCs.

:roll: :evil:

It gets better! As an example of what we can expect to be stored about us, how about this (using a famous example):

Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas Mountbatten
Admiral Mountbatten
Admiral of the Fleet Mountbatten
1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma
Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas Battenberg
Lord Mountbatten, Viceroy of India
Lord Mountbatten, Governor-General of India
Lord Mountbatten, First Sea Lord
Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas Mountbatten KG, GCB, OM, GCSI, GCIE, GCVO, DSO, PC, FRS
Serene Highness Prince Louis of Battenberg
Marquess of Milford Haven
Lord Mountbatten, Governor of the Isle of Wight
25 June 1900
Windsor Castle, Windsor, England
Male
Broadlands, Romsey
Cambridge
Osborne & Dartmouth Royal Naval College
Sligo?
German nationality?
British nationality
ID card number
Military ID card number(s)
WW2 ration card entitlement number(s)
National Insurance number
NHS number
Passport number(s)
VISA numbers for every country ever visited
ID documentation for India
ID documentation for North Borneo
ID documentation for Eire
ID documentation for Australasia
Birth certificate register number
Marriage certificates
Deed polls
Naming/baptism/bris etc. certificates - or the equivalent for non-Judaeo-Christian religions
Company payroll numbers for every company he ever worked for
Driver's licence number
Sailing Master's licence
Membership ids for all hobbies, organisations and associations that are deemed to be 'designated documents'
Loyalty card numbers - if deemed to be 'designated documents'
Expiry dates for every id number listed above
All information (including every change to this data) relating to anything listed above 'that has previously been recorded in the register' - in other words, an audit trail relating to his promotions during WW2, his diplomatic work, his work for charities, his travel to and from the UK, India, Borneo, Australasia and Eire, etc, his education, his career progression, his driving licence endorsements (if any) and so on.
A further audit trail for validation purposes, including how the applicant's id is verified, steps taken to produce an accurate set of records on the individual, etc.
Yet another audit trail relating to who has asked for this information, how they've asked for it, when and why.
Date of death
Date of applications for registration (?)
Date of any changes to registered information
Date of applications under the Data Protection/Freedom of Information Acts
Date of requests for modifications made under the Data Protection/Freedom of Information Acts
Date of every application confirming the contents of his entry (with or without changes)
The reason for any omission from the information recorded in his entry
Whether each such card is in force and, if not, why not
Particulars (in addition to its number) of every ID card issued
Particulars of every person who has countersigned an application by him for an ID card or a designated document, so far as those particulars were included on the application, e.g. Winston Churchill, the Queen, Government of India, Taoiseach, etc. - How much detail?
Particulars of every notification given about lost, stolen and damaged ID cards
Particulars of every requirement by the secretary of state for the individual to surrender an ID card issued to him.
PIN number
Security code relating to the PIN number
Security questions relating to the security code relating to the PIN number

- and this is the House that Bliar built...

:evil: :evil: :evil:

Roger Gough

Did he have any points on his licence? :wink:

Paul Birch

This doesn't add up. It doesn't need anything like that much. Most would fit in fields of about 8 bytes or less. Some in only one bit. It could probably be crammed INTO phpbb_less than 1kB in all.

60 million times 100kB (I'll assume you meant bytes rather than bits) is only 6000 GB, just two dozen moderate sized (250GB) hard drives. Cost today, around £3000. Add backups and RAID arrays and all the rest and it's still trivial.

John Carter

True.

I'm not so sure about that.
Especially after I change my name to "Mr. Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysilio gogogoch Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious".

__________________
There are three kinds of people in this world: Libertarians, fascists, and those who haven't been paying attention.

Paul Birch

What, you've never received letters addressed to Mr Llanfairpwll? Or possibly, Mr Llanfairpw-1? Seriously, truncating very long names and addresses is common. Anyhow, the next stage is likely to be the prohibition of unauthorised names (like the French). Changing your name will probably be banned too.

Aardvark

I think that Chikrodah is the one with the more accurate calculation. As he/she says this doesn't include the biometrics. The calculation changes quite markedly once biometrics are incorporated.

There is more to having a database than just putting information in store and leaving it. As Chikrodah points out, this database will be live. There will be 2-3000 new entries every day in perpetuity. Every house move is to be recorded. There will be tens of thousands of searches every day from an as yet unknown number of 'readers' - every police car, every ambulance, every hospital, every school (try collecting someone else's kid without ID), every local and national government office (many with multiple readers), every military base, utility companies etc etc. To input all of this data will take a massive amount of time - having inputted lots of data when working as an IT consultant I know how long it took me to input a few lines of information and run it. Even if we have an all hands to the pump approach and have people queuing at local government offices nationwide this database will still take months to compile and verify before it is of any use.

This is not going to be run on a couple of dozen hard drives and to suggest so is to misunderstand the nature of the IT systems we have.

The countries that already have ID cards have never tried such a system as the one proposed by this government. Nobody in the world has considered such a system with such detail. The fact that nobody has to carry an ID card and the fact that the Irish don't even have to have them, although they may enter this country over a long and leaky land border without a passport, defeats the whole object. The system is already dead in Northern Ireland before it even kicks off.

I know the fear is 'Islamic terrorism' but 3000+ dead in the Irish conflict, the overwheleming majority at the hands of Irish citizens, suggests a complete lack of reality on the counter terrorism issue - the 9/11 bombers were all carrying valid passports whilst the Madrid bombers committed a major terrorist act in a country that has had ID cards for decades. It's all drivel put out by control freaks who want to be seen to be doing something.