Maryon Jeane

Shropshire

Self-employed

Point taken - and I have also flagged my MP on the www.theyworkforyou.com site so if (heaven help him!) he wavers from his current anti-ID card stance, I will be grabbing him by parts of his anatomy he'd rather keep private!

However I have to disagree with the sentiment that if ID cards would reduce the terrorist threat then they would be acceptable. It reminds me of that old slogan: "Fighting for peace is like f***ing for virginity" - it's absolutely pointless giving up some of the really precious things such as our freedom to live our lives without scrutiny or undue outside control to fight against domination by outside forces.

ID cards (or rather their underlying databases) are about the control of individuals by governments. They are unsafe in every respect, from their being used as was the information as to who was Jewish/homosexual etc. in Nazi Germany through to a male authority figure (policeman, civil servant) threatening a woman with the revelation of some piece of personal information (an abortion, underage sex) to force her co-operation.

It currently takes a good private detective a couple of hours to find out a subject's personal details (bank accounts, ex-directoy telephone number and personal relationships, for example). This information is for sale because it's available in databases. Can you imagine what it would be like if *all* your personal information was in one database, up for grabs to the highest bidder and/or the most knowledgeable hacker?

The idea of "if you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear" is a nonsense. Jewish people weren't ashamed of being Jewish in Hitler's Germany but, by heaven, they needed to hide it. I don't exactly hide the fact that I go to the loo, make love, am not a Catholic, use contraception, or whatever - but I don't necessarily want my employer, my bank, the policeman on the beat who stops me for speeding, the government or anyone with the requisite nosiness and money to know these things about me. It's known as a private life and it's one of the few things that is genuinely mine. It's also a protection, that people don't know these things about me.

The only people to benefit from ID cards and central databanks of personal information about every citizen will be governments who want to control people (and every government does), people who want to nose out others' personal lives and, of course, terrorists - who will have their lives made very easy if all the data they need is in one place...