ID card details emerge?

The BBC have a sudden amount of detail on how ID cards will be kept up to date.

Curiously, there are a lot of fines if you have a card and fail to change information (names when married, etc), but at the same time:

There will be no penalties, civil or criminal, for not applying for an ID card.

Is that a long term plan? Are they no longer mandatory?

Also, we should note the prison terms for accessing or disclosing information on the database:

Anyone found guilty of unauthorised disclosure of information on the national identity register or an ID card application, would face up to two years in prison, while anyone found guilty of hacking into the ID database could be jailed for up to 10 years.

Not too bad then. Given that British identities are worth about £80 (hey, that's less than a Nintendo DS), crims can do a fairly simple cost-benefit analysis depending on the current state of the economy to work out if it's worth it or not.

Monitoring is crap, for kids/MPs

Resuscitating ITM momentarily to pause and take note of government plans to record the UK's raw net data, via "upstream" "black boxes".

I've decided to keep this one short and simple, so here it is in keyword form.

Constant Monitoring



Nannying Culture



Untrusted/Bored Citizens Subjects Suspects



Detachment &
Desire for own space



Rebellion



Constant Monitoring

So, quite frankly, when Hazel Blear yabbers on about political disengagement, she's only got themselves to blame. Monitoring us makes us want to break free, not wrap ourselves up even tighter in chains.