The innocent will hide what we damned well like

I find it difficult to even contemplate the folly that is the government's ID card scheme without the Brazil theme tune earworming automatically up out of my subconscious. Gilliam's heartbreaking vision of an England in which enemies of the state are forged out of misplaced commas seems more prophetic every day. But for me, the whole fiasco is just the state running to catch up with private enterprise. Two bloggers today make interesting points on the ID card fiasco. First and funniest from Peter Hitchens.

"The alleged Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, says she needs to be able to prove who she is. I agree it's a problem. It is hard to credit that this deeply unimpressive person holds the great office once occupied by Winston Churchill."

Second from Shane Richmond at the Telegraph, who raises the practical objection to the scheme,

"The Government has found it difficult to keep databases secure thus far. Let them show they can solve that problem before we give them an even bigger database to look after."

While I share both concerns - that a government of utter nonentities are the very people one would expect to develop a fatuous obsession with identity, and that they are also already proven to be the very last people we should trust with anything so valuable as a universal ID database - I have other concerns as well.

My first concern is honesty. Since ID cards manifestly cannot fulfil any of the functions for which government ostensibly desires them - prevention of terrorism and organised crime seem the most childishly simple to debunk since terrorists and organised criminals with access to planes, guns, bombs and currency laundering will just as surely access fake IDs with complete impunity - I would appreciate my government telling me honestly what it really wants these cards for. My suspicion is that it just wants them, and that rather as it is the nature of bees to collect pollen and the nature of teenage boys to collect fictitious tales of their sexual adventures it is the nature of government to collect information about citizens. If they cannot advance any sensible reason for wanting these things then we must conclude that they are driven merely by a compulsion, and should be treated like smokers or heroin addicts - with compassion, certainly, but without going so far as to indulge their craving.

Second I would like some admission on the part of the project's instigators that they are familiar with the concept of a sunk costs fallacy, or at least have become so since the Concorde project. That a lot of money has already been wasted on the project is really no argument to continue spending more money now. If there is no good cause to keep plugging away at the thing they can, and should, write the costs off now.

But probably my main concern is that, even if this whole debacle goes ahead as planned, it will be moot as soon as it begins. The government's apparent hope that by assembling a national database it will hold a lot of information about me is already being rendered irrelevant by my voluntary publication of everything about me in a various fora. In the age of social media, privacy is bunk. Anyone with the slightest inclination to do so can discover my phone number, my email address, my fairly bizarre political and religious views, a list of my youthful indiscretions sufficient to discredit me in the eyes of the sort of people whose credit I don't value and any number of photos of me doing more or less disreputable things. When I remember to use Buddyping you're welcome to know my location: when I forget you can normally discover it via my IP if you care. Find me on Livejournal and you know what mood I'm in; on Pandora and you would have known what music I was listening to today; on del.icio.us and you know what I've read of late. I am at a loss to understand what level of intelligence the government thinks it can assemble that I don't simply leave lying around on the web every day.

Not that this should prevent anyone from hiding their movements and preferences if they want to. As I never tire of quoting Michael Bywater: "the old saw 'the innocent have nothing to hide' fails to persuade us because it is a category mistake. Having something to hide is not contingent on guilt but on autonomy." But - autonomously - I share more data about my life on an average day than the government could be bothered to assemble or review in a year. Facebook knows more about me than HMG; as do Tesco and SixApart and T-Mobile and, of course, Google and Yahoo (the one I use for search, the other for email). ID cards are just the government's desperate effort to catch up.