UK Pub Transformed Into 1984 Theme Park In Protest Of Starmer’s Digital ID Dystopia

‘Britcard’ isn’t British

Liberty, Technology and Policing

DOMINIC ADLER

Most police officers could posit ways of creating a world in which crime would be very, very difficult to commit. The problem is, relatively few of us would want to live in it. A ‘crime-free’ society would involve unprecedented levels of surveillance, conformity and, yes, repression. Furthermore, it wouldn’t necessarily solve all crime – do you honestly think the Soviet Union was crime-free? China? I’m talking about crime as in theft, burglary and assault, not the Starmerish thought-crime version. After all, one of the Soviet Union’s premier sex offenders was Lavrenty Beria, the head of Stalin’s secret police.

Nonetheless, I suspect many coppers would go along with implementing a notional Zero Crime regime. Why? Because police officers are task-driven, as opposed to ideological (as their ham-fisted approach to non-crime hate bullshit demonstrates). Give a copper a process and they’ll pretty much follow it, albeit with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Then, take away their discretion (which our Blairite, rights-focused approach to law indubitably has) and add a performance regime based on stats not outcomes? You’ve a recipe for a British version of North Korea. A half-arsed Temu version, perhaps, but authoritarian nonetheless.

This isn’t to say a high-crime society is, somehow, an inevitable price of freedom. My preferred version of liberty involves the freedom to not be a victim, too. Britain’s failure to manage crime is a problem entirely of our own making. Actually, not ‘our’ making – the making of a weak-kneed elite, suddenly stunned (stunned, I tell you!) by squadrons of feral chickens flapping home to roost.

Which brings me to the UK Government’s decision to introduce mandatory digital ID, for all Britons, by 2029. This is, ostensibly, to curb illegal immigration and will ONLY BE USED FOR EMPLOYMENT PURPOSES, HONEST, GUVNOR! Stop giggling at the back. Having spent my career in policing, I can make a fairly educated guess as to how this one’s gonna pan out.

Do mandatory ID systems have advantages? Absolutely. Disadvantages? Oh, yes. The question is are they worth paying? What are the unintended consequences? I recently watched Jeremy Corbyn making an argument against mandatory ID. I found myself nodding along in agreement. Corbyn’s someone with whom, it’s fair to say, I share few political views.

We can’t both be wrong. Can we?

Jezza’s right. I never thought I’d type that. Well done, Sir Keir.

This piece will concentrate on the unintended consequences of data-collection, and how policing’s appetite for information is a ratchet that moves in only one direction. This involves law, procedure, politics and culture and isn’t (I promise) as dry as it sounds. The other issues around digital ID systems – and their numerous vulnerabilities – have been discussed at length by experts more knowledgeable than I am. This piece, by the excellent Andrew Orlowski, is well-worth reading (pay-walled). I also wrote about the increasing reliance on technology by UK law enforcement here.

First, though, let me demonstrate how centralized data fundamentally changed policing, via the medium of the humble motor car. Yes, this concerns traffic law (soz), but please bear with me.

I’m sure police and ex-police readers remember the humble HORT/1, usually referred to by the public as a ‘producer’. If you’re stopped under the Road Traffic Act, a police officer can require you to demonstrate possession of a valid driving licence, insurance and MOT. If you can’t (you aren’t legally obliged to have them on your person), then the officer can issue you a little yellow slip ordering you to produce them, within 7 days, at a police station. The form is called a HORT/1 (Home Office Road Traffic f.1).

HORT/1 still exists, as does the Road Traffic Act. However, technology means they’re hardly ever used. Why?

1. Driving licence data is already stored on the Police National Computer (PNC).
2. So is every correctly-registered UK vehicle’s insurance details.
3. As is MOT data, which is why the little paper tax disc was abandoned a decade ago.
4. And a shitload of other stuff, because although the PNC isn’t technically an intelligence database, it holds a wealth of information about people, for all sorts of reasons.

This means a copper can check your details simply by checking your vehicle registration over the radio. He or she doesn’t even need to get out of a police car. Thus, no more fiddly HORT/1s, right? Data has made all of our lives easier!

Or has it?

1. Police seldom stop cars these days. This means criminals are less likely to be interdicted while driving around and getting up to naughtiness.
2. Records are often inaccurate or out-of-date. Registration plates are cloned. Driving licences are spoofed. Criminals simply switch to using hire vehicles or ‘pool cars’, shared between gang members.
3. Officers become over-reliant on computerised records. They interact with the public less, which means crimes are less likely to be detected via the magical serendipity we used to call ‘patrol.’
4. Everyone with a car or driving licence is on the system, innocent or guilty. Now, depending on your politics this might be no drama at all. Or it might. Think of it like this; once upon a time, the police needed to ask you for your details. The onus was on them. Now they don’t. This is fine if you trust the police to be fair with your details. It isn’t if you don’t. Discuss.
5. It’s never been easier to blag data via sloppy information management procedures, corruption or data leak. If data is like water, then public authorities are like colanders. I speak as someone who investigated insider threats for five years.
6. And guess what? Due to all sorts of reciprocal information-sharing agreements, it isn’t only the police who enjoy PNC access.

I mention this to show how centralised data aggregation is a mixed blessing. Given the mandatory ID proposed by Labour – the ‘Britcard’ – will be available to law enforcement, I’d suggest your antecedent details will become as accessible as your car’s MOT status.

It really will. You heard it here first.

Which brings me to an example of how events drive process – the tragic Soham murders in 2002, and the introduction of the Police National Database (PND). It offers a solid example of how digital ID data will be progressed, shared and acted upon – usually for benign reasons. But, as ever, the question remains – who watches the watchers? And are our police forces fit to face the challenges of insider threat and proportionality, especially when faced with politically-motivated allegations of though-crime? (the answer, incidentally, is no).

The Soham murders were a genuine watershed for police intelligence-sharing.

The facts of the Soham case are the murderer (Ian Huntley) was known, to his home force in the north of England, as a sex offender. His car also featured in an attempted abduction investigation. This information reached the force where Huntley committed the murders, in Cambridgeshire, too late. Crucially, Huntley was a caretaker at the school his victims attended – he should never have been given the job in the first place.

As a result, it was decided the police should create a national database, and PND was born. I was PND qualified and saw its benefits and drawbacks, although it’s probably changed significantly since I retired. Interestingly, facial imaging recognition was baked into the system architecture from day one. In short, PND allows for a police officer in, say, Leeds to search on any other force’s intelligence systems. There are, naturally, layers of access – sensitive reports require forces to negotiate access. Nonetheless, vast swathes of fairly mundane data is freely available – especially information relating to safeguarding children and vulnerable people. Crime reports. Mobile phone data. And so on.

Now, I don’t think PND is bad. In fact, I found it to be a game-changer. It unambiguously helps the police catch bad people and protect the public. However, I noticed how access began to widen – ‘dare to share’ really is something intelligence-ignorant senior officers encourage. It’s easier, come the Public Inquiry, to say ‘hey I told everyone!’ than ‘I chose to manage the information flow.’ What does a compromised source mean to the average chief constable, anyway? Intelligence is an art as much as a science, something they don’t teach at the College of Policing, with its patronising decision-making models designed for institutional arse-covering.

This means, as per my PNC example above, all systems eventually become over-exposed. They grow. Less mission creep – more mission sprint, especially when a sensitive or media-grabbing investigation hoves into view. I’ll say it again, for the people in the cheap seats – ‘Britcard’ data will end up on databases like PNC and PND. So? I hear you ask, I’ve done nothing wrong. I don’t care.

That’s okay, until you’re accused of something you either didn’t do, or is utter bullshit. I’ll finish this piece with an example.

I once investigated a vicious assault where the suspect bit his victims. And I mean bit. This fucker thought he was Jaws – I’d never seen human-inflicted bite wounds like it. I swabbed the victims’ injuries, hoping to acquire the suspect’s DNA via saliva. That didn’t work. I also checked the Met’s intelligence system, known as CRIMINT, and ran a series of searches against known biters. Biters, interestingly, are relatively unusual. CRIMINT returned a number a possible suspects (my search on a name hit a flag with another force, who successfully ID’d my suspect).

One suspect (who wasn’t my man) I’ll always remember – it was an old report naming someone as a ‘known biter’ who’d (allegedly) gnawed a victim like Hannibal Lecter. So, trying to be a half-decent detective, I dug further. I found perhaps thirty or forty reports on the bloke, several of which mentioned his propensity for highly aggressive, GBH-level biting. Then, going back further, I discovered the origin story for his modus operandi – and it was inaccurate. Yes, he’d bitten someone. No, it wasn’t a GBH. It was a long time ago. As the report was cut-and-pasted over the years (something police intelligence researchers are wont to do) an exaggeration of the facts (reportedly from an unverified third party) became fact. Calcified. Layers of ‘truth’, built around an exaggeration.

Need I say it again?

Your Britcard ID details will be matched to these systems, errors and all. You might never have been arrested, remember, just featured in an investigation. Or your name might match an offender’s. Now, add the Non-Hate Crime Incidents the police keep insisting they want to get rid of, even as they continue to arrest thirty people a day for social media messages.

Yes, the State is legitimately entitled to hold your details, to ensure compliance with statutory obligations. Such as, for example, owning a car. Owning a car potentially impacts on the safety (i.e. liberty) of others. You should maintain it and be qualified to drive it. Yes, if you commit a crime, you should expect the state to keep a record, lest you end up committing another. And so on.

What you shouldn’t be obliged to do, Tony and Keir, is provide the State with evidence you merely exist and would like to take a bloody job. It’s your role to safeguard our borders, not punish me because of your incompetence. And I view the State aggregating my information a potential punishment because I no longer trust you. You’ve politicised policing that much.

Is there an answer? Yes. We could control our borders properly and implement sensible immigration policies. The policies a majority have wanted since the 1970s. We could also put most Blairite law written since 1997 in a boat. Then sink it in the middle of the Atlantic. We could have a professional police force that was compliant with a more elegant data management regime than the quagmire of MOPI, GDPR, FOIA, RIPA and the rest of it. And this is even before I vent my spleen about the bloody Online Safety Act.

Yes, there are reasonable arguments for mandatory digital ID. Of course there are. However, they also run contrary to every principle of the freedoms we take for granted on our rainy little island, before Tony tried to make us a province of Europe.

Which, remember, we no longer are. Sorry, Keir.

So I would simply ask people consider the concerns of those of us who’ve worked with information and intelligence. People who want more effective policing. I’m not a defund the police leftist or a tinfoil hat-wearing libertarian. I’m simply arguing an over-reliance on data aggregation is dangerous. There will be a reckoning. And being a Cassandra is exhausting.

So please, if you have any doubts (whatsoever) about Labour’s plans, please sign this.