Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Any sufficiently advanced technology...

Article on the Register about biometrics and ID cards to clamp down on immigrants...

"The Government has also previously been at pains to deny claims that the ID scheme will operate as a tracking network, so Blair's use of "track" as a synonym for 'log' or 'identify' is unfortunate."

As the Reg points out, the details of the technology are left for another time... but isn't that always the way? After all this time, no-one's really sure whether biometrics will work as planned on the whole - some trials were done, and now the discussions has quietly dropped out of the limelight. Does that mean that they're being rethunk? Or just turned into technical specification documents, ready for production? One of these days, I'll do some research into such things...

Still, the extent to which Blair places his faith in technology ("Jesus would have had an ID card") is paramount to alluding to the use of magic as the solution to all those hard-hitting socio-political problems that just keep popping up... Reports of cries of "Immigrantis Expellionus!" coming from Whitehall's inner chambers are currently unverified.

Hmm, calls for wisdom and some details in the policy process? The sky must be falling somewhere...

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