Dom

ID cards come in two quite distinct flavours - the nasty one, where they use the cards to police you, and the nice one, which you use to establish and protect your rights and identity. Simple? Actually, I lie when I say they're distinct flavours; in reality nice isn't absolutely nice, the two bleed most horribly into one another, and what we should really be busying ourselves with is establishing clear lines of distinction then defending them.

If we don't, then ten years hence, ID as establishment of personal rights and identity will inevitably come with free, added control and monitoring. By happy coincidence, here in the UK we've recently been presented with pretty good examples of nasty, nice, the blurring between the two and how that blurring happens. The Home Office's plans for compulsory ID cards had an unfortunate accident last week, while the day afterwards the Office of the e-Envoy launched a smartcard consultation exercise. I accept that it's a little premature to categorise the e-Envoy's consultation as nice, but it is (at least at the moment) a fairly neutral presentation of the state of the art, and is soliciting comment from the standpoint that the widespread adoption of smartcards would potentially be an enabler of e-government, e-commerce and of benefit to the individual citizen.

Maybe you agree with that, maybe you don't, but you probably do agree that smartcards as extensions of credit cards, membership cards, transportation tickets and a host of other credentials systems cannot be stopped. In which case we're all better employed getting some decent shackles on the beast than wasting our time trying to shoot it.

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