Some bits and pieces. Firstly, go and read this paper on previous British ID card schemes and their lessons for the present day by Jon Agar (whom some of you will have heard on a ``Long View'' programme on a similar subject earlier in the year). The one-sentence history of the two previous ID card schemes is that the first one (during the First World War) failed, because the population didn't have to carry their cards and had no incentive to keep their records in the Register up-to-date; the second (Second World War) scheme, was -- on its own terms -- more successful, because its designer gave the scheme a parasitic vitality by linking the scheme closely to the rationing of food; everyone had to have an up-to-date ID card in order to get a ration book. (OK, that was a long sentence.) Jon carries on to argue,
The purpose of the second identity card system was clearly understood and articulated. Once the political backing was secure, civil servants such as [Sylvanus Percival] Vivian [then Registrar-General, and architect of the scheme] identified weaknesses -- in particular the public's reluctance to keep the card -- and designed solutions to overcome them. In contrast, the purpose of the first card had been poorly understood and articulated. It was driven by a Cabinet argument that, once resolved, left the card high and dry. Contemporary proposals for identity cards bear much more similarity in this respect to the first card than the second. Again, we find the purpose of the card remarkably hard to pin-down. Certainly, there is no evidence that measures to give the contemporary card a `parasitic vitality' are being given the thorough consideration necessary for success.
I'm not so sanguine. The link between the new ID card and so-called ``designated documents'' -- documents which can only be obtained with an ID card, or by simultaneously applying for an ID card (passports and Criminal Records Bureau check letters are suggested examples) -- could well be intended to have the same effect of lending parasitic vitality to the National Identity Register. As Jon points out, with parasitic vitality comes function creep; but it's not worth complaining to the Home Office about function creep in the present proposals, because the functions of the new NIR are precisely intended to creep -- hence the single identifying number and the fantasy of economising the delivery of public services.
(As an aside, the 1995 Michael Howard proposal linked ID cards to driving licences; as now, the idea that an ID card might become a valid international travel document was also held out as a -- probably illusory -- carrot.)
Some other comparisons with the previous schemes stand out. One trivial one is that both the 1915 and 1939 systems were called ``national registration'', and were implemented by National Registration Acts. There was no attempt to mislead anyone into thinking that the ID cards themselves were the object of the exercise. Contrast that with today's ``Identity Cards'' Bill, which is, of course, all about... national registration.
Another interesting item is a 1950 memorandum on ``The Future of National Registration'', written by a civil servant in the General Register Office, pondering what should be done with the Register and the ID cards, with half an eye on the end of the system of food rationing which it parasitised. (This was mentioned by Jon Agar in a seminar on the subject I attended in September; he's kindly sent me a copy, which I've stuck on the web since it seems likely to be of wider interest. This also exposed me to a new kind of copyright idiocy -- well, new to me, anyway. Public records are Crown Copyright, but the nice people in the government have waived copyright in them. However, the waiver doesn't apply to ``images, including copies of documents''. So I had to retype the thing, and I can't stick a scanned copy on the web so that people can refer to the original if they find a typo in my copy. Sigh.)
It's an interesting document. Two things stand out: first, the detail of the cost-benefit analysis of National Registration as it stood in 1950; in estimating the benefits of the system, the author frequently goes into all the gory details of how particular information-processing tasks could or couldn't be accomplished without the Central National Register available, for instance:
[...] This would perhaps consist of (a) entering date of birth (from National Registration records) on to every reference leaf, (b) checking the old reference leaves against the new after every re-issue, (c) copying date of birth from old to new reference leaves after every re-issue. Date of birth would be asked for at every request for replacement of lost ration book and perhaps at every request for a new book at the annual re-issue. It is not easy to say how much of the above the Ministry of Food would decide to put into operation, or whether they would adopt some alternative plan (e.g. using the old National Registration Maintenance Registers, re-sorted into alphabetical order, as a permanent check register).
I think the modern equivalent would be a memo which broke into PL/SQL half-way through to explain how some particular governmental task should be accomplished on the department's database. Somehow I doubt that anything like that is circulating in the Home Office today.
Secondly, unlike the Home Office's pronouncements, the memo is not quite silent on the dangers of national registration:
it is true that if this country went communist or fascist the National Register would prove a very handy means of finding any individual whom the authorities did not like...
-- admittedly, this was a private memo for office consumption.
However, the analysis is not free of inconsistencies; compare paragraph 22: (emphasis mine)
Other irreplaceable services rendered by National Registration are as follows:--
(i) To the Police. The demand for production of an identity card provides the police with a first-class means of checking the account given of himself by any person whom they may be interviewing. [...] Alternatively if he fails to produce the card or has altered the card to conceal the truth, he can be prosecuted under the National Registration Act, and this often results in a bad character getting a punishment he deserves even if there is insufficient evidence to charge him for the primary offence for the sake of which the National Registration offence was committed.
with paragraph 33:
[...] To such arguments it is fair to reply that it has been the consistent policy not to use the Register [for] the detriment of individuals except in cases of serious crime or for purposes of national security.
Similarly, the argument that under a totalitarian régime we would not have had too much to fear from the existence of the Register, since it could not be used by such a government to pick out classes of people, is a little undermined by one of its own examples:
The National Register cannot pick out the Jews or the Bougeoisie or the Roman Catholic priests or the agents or members of any political party. All it can pick out is [for example] persons who had a particular occupation in 1939 or some later date.
A person whose occupation was ``Catholic priest'' on registration in 1939 or whenever was relatively unlikely to have changed jobs, I think.
The uplifting bit of the second ID cards saga was, of course, the story of Clarence Willcock, who in December 1950 refused to show his ID card with the immortal words, ``I'm a Liberal, and I'm against this sort of thing.'' As a second bit of mindless link propagation, therefore, I point you at the winter 1997/8 issue of the Journal of Liberal Democrat History -- see pp 16--17 for an article by Mark Egan on Willcock v Muckle and the demise of National Registration in 1952.
I probably owe you holiday photos for the above, so here are two:
Matthew draws our attention to a recent statement allegedly by a senior police officer advocating either that the police be armed routinely, or that capital punishment be reintroduced for the murder of police officers. This, of course, was provoked by the recent tragic murder of Pc Sharon Beshenivsky. Now, almost nobody is in favour of murdering police officers (the obvious exception presumably being the murderers themselves), but nor is it obvious that capital punishment is a sensible response. Matthew plots a graph of the number of police officers murdered over time, which doesn't show any very significant upward trend since capital punishment was abolished in 1964.
Here's a slightly more detailed version of the same chart, with the total number of homicides (civilian and police) also plotted: (the data here are for England and Wales only; numbers of police are drawn from this House of Commons Library paper while the number of police killed is from the Police Memorial site, excluding Scottish police and a number of English police killed by terrorists in Cyprus in 1956; and the total homicide statistics are from the Home Office):
Matthew states that the number of police killed doesn't seem to have increased sharply since capital punishment was abolished. The data fit a Poisson distribution pretty well (as you'd expect) and similarly have no serial correlation (the number of murders in year N doesn't depend on the number in year N - 1); therefore we can estimate the rate at which police are killed in any given year by generalised regression, giving something like this over different periods of the last century:
-- naively, there is an increase in rate, but the confidence intervals are pretty broad and overlap heavily (because there isn't that much data), so the estimate of the increase is pretty inaccurate. Varying assumptions make quite a big difference; the change, obviously, becomes a bit smaller (+33% rather than +48%) if we exclude the victims of domestic terrorism, or if we include the slightly more violent inter-war period in the `no hanging' data (+16%, or +5% if terrorism excluded).
(NB that none of this demonstrates an effect of the end of capital punishment, just that something coincided with it.)
But the most striking thing about this is the comparison between the risk of death for on-duty police and the overall homicide rate, which (apart from a spike during the Second World War) remained roughly constant from about 1930 until the early 1960s, and then rose sharply, approximately doubling from about 6/million/year to about 14/million/year (see, e.g., the House of Commons library paper above). In fact, the overall homicide rate is now roughly the same as the risk of death for police officers on duty.
Anyone know how much of this is down to better classification of deaths into homicide and non-homicide? Whether or not a police officer is killed on duty is a fairly unambiguous question: either they are or they aren't. That should mean that the rate of murder of police officers shouldn't be affected much by (e.g.) improvements in medical science or inquest practise. Less so for the general population, where some methods of killing (poisoning etc.) may be put down as accidental death or natural causes. So perhaps improved detection could be responsible for the difference in rates? However, I can't find any positive evidence for this (in particular, long-term data for number of homicides by method) -- any suggestions?
An old joke: Tom and Harry, two employees of the local council, are seen working their way down a certain street. Every ten yards, Fred digs a hole while Harry stands around leaning on his shovel. When Tom has finished, Harry fills the hole up again from the spoil. After watching this performance for some time, a passer-by asks them what's going on. ``Ah,'' says Tom, ``normally, see, there's three of us on this job. I dig the hole, Dick puts the tree in, and Harry fills it up again. But Dick's off sick today, so it's just us two.''
On a related theme, last weekend I went to Wales to help my friends Ed and Becca plant an orchard. This was good fun, although planting an orchard turns out to be bloody hard work. I shall look forward to the first products in five or so years' time, which by itself is a somewhat sobering thought.
Elsewhere, Martin draws to our attention the web log of Neil Harding, who is pretty much the only pro ID cards web logger in Britain. At that rate he'll soon have written as many posts on the subject as I have, though he doesn't seem to be posting a holiday photo to go with each one. Unfortunately, none of his arguments are all that new (or all that good), but still, it's nice to see at least some variety of opinion in the ``'blogosphere''.
The Identity Cards Bill itself has limped forward into the Lords, where it enjoyed its Second Reading; sadly, there's no TheyWorkForYou for the Lords (yet -- Francis and Julian have written the parser, so if you enjoy writing PHP code, there's a project for you), so you have to read it on the wretched Houses of Parliament site. For politics junkies, though, there is one new feature there: semi-real-time Today in the Commons and Lords transcripts. As usual, the quality of debate in the Lords was a bit better than that in the Commons; we shall see what happens there in committee.
And in other politics news, our glorious leaders are to ban smoking in pubs (which serve food). Now, since I detest the smell of cigarette smoke, you might expect me to be in favour of this, but in fact I'm pretty ambivalent, given that most of the pubs I find myself in are either non-smoking already, or sufficiently well-ventilated that cigarette smoke isn't too troubling. Anyway, the argument in support of the thing is that pub (and other) employees oughtn't to be exposed to risks from passive smoking, which seems fair enough.
The policy is being advertised as prohibiting smoking in pubs in which food is served (leading, of course, to the philosophical question of whether pork scratchings are food). As ever with this government, it's worth checking what the proposed legislation actually says. The relevant bits are sections 2, 3 and 4 of the Bill which:
So: the legislation bans smoking in every pub, but we (or, at least, those of you who smoke) are expected to believe a promise from the Minister that she will then allow smoking by order.
If I were very attached to my right to pollute others' air with tobacco smoke, I'd be disinclined to believe that promise, given its source. Others' mileage may vary.
Moving on, I hear that David Blunkett is not going to resign. I haven't been following this story all that closely, so I'm not sure whether his Galbraith score is now one or two. Anyway, I was intrigued to see his statement that he will cause his shares in DNA Bioscience to be sold; I'd always thought the point of these blind trust arrangements was to ensure that the original owner of the shares couldn't influence how they were held/traded/etc. Ho-hum.
Changing subject yet again, there has been various discussion of the suggestion of Thomas Schelling that, if Iran were to make a nuclear bomb, the United States ought to supply the Iranians with devices to secure their bombs from unauthorised use, called (in American terminology) ``PALs'', Permissive Action Links. The argument here is that it's in nobody's interests -- and particularly not the potential targets of the weapons -- for them to fall into the wrong hands. Frankly, given the President of Iran's recent statements it's not obvious that such a bomb wouldn't start off in the wrong hands, but for the moment let's imagine that at least somebody in the Iranian chain of command would not be keen on committing national suicide. In any case, generally speaking you'd expect the owners of nuclear weapons to be quite keen on retaining control over how they were used, so PALs look like a no-brainer.
Now, tied up with Permissive Action Links are ``Environmental Sensing Devices''. The idea here is that if you have (say) a nuclear bomb fastened to a missile, you only want it to explode if the missile has actually been fired, rather than if somebody nicks it or a technician drops the thing on his foot during maintenance. So you wire a bunch of sensors into the thing which make sure that it can't be armed unless it's experienced acceleration from the missile launch, free-fall and near-vacuum at the top of the missile's trajectory, and then deceleration and increasing air pressure as it descends onto its target. This means that if THE TERRORISTS or some Bond supervillain nick a missile warhead, they oughtn't to be able to trivially hot-wire it and make it go bang.
Another thing you can do with ESDs is to make sure that, if the missile malfunctions and, say, falls short, the bomb won't go off. That could help prevent embarrassing international incidents in which country A fires a missile over country B at a target in country C. If the missile goes wrong it would be unfortunate if the warhead went off wherever it lands in country B.
The same thing goes for shooting down missiles. Suppose (and I should warn you that I'm asking you to suppose fairly hard here) that the Americans actually manage to build a working giant-LASER-in-747 which they fly up and down near Iran in the hope of shooting down any missiles which the Iranians might launch. The game here is that you try to blow up the missile while it's still in ``boost phase'' (i.e., while its engine is firing) on the grounds that it's (a) easy to see and (b) relatively vulnerable at this point. This approach does not guarantee that the missile's warhead will be destroyed, but it does guarantee that, if it is not, it will fall short of its target.
So, imagine that -- in the presence of the imaginary LASER gun thingy -- Iran fires a missile at (picks a random example...) Israel. The LASER thingy shoots at it and destroys the booster; the warhead continues on a shorter trajectory in the same direction. That means that it will fall either within Iran, or on one of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait or Saudi Arabia, depending on where exactly the missile was launched from:
If the Iranian bomb is fitted with environmental sensors which prevent it from going off until it has reached its true target, all well and good. Otherwise... assuming that the warhead is not damaged and does not malfunction, it will explode where it falls.
Now, presumably that wouldn't prevent the Americans from shooting down such a missile, but it might well discourage any American allies in the region from letting them base bits of their anti-missile gadget in their country (for instance, airbases for the carrier plane, or RADARs or whatever).
Scale things up, and consider a bigger missile fired from Iran against a target on the eastern seaboard of the United States. Much of Europe is underneath the possible flight paths:
Again, the same logic applies. If an Iranian missile heading for (say) New York is shot down in boost phase, the warhead will land somewhere short of that (exactly where depends on how soon after launch the missile is shot down; presumably the operators of the anti-missile gadget will try to do this as soon as possible, therefore minimising the distance the warhead travels from its launch site, but will be limited by the line of sight from their aeroplane to the missile). Again, whether or not the warhead could go off when it lands depends largely on decisions the Iranians make.
Presumably the logic here will drive the Iranians not to fit such a safety system to their warheads, and to advertise this fact, in the hope that doing so will deter people whose countries lie between Iran and its enemies from supporting a US anti-missile scheme to whose success they are essential. Even if this doesn't succeed, they haven't lost very much (and gain slightly by, e.g., not having to add additional complex safety features to their nukes). So, I'm not sure I would expect the Iranians to take up an American offer of shiny made-in-the-USA nuclear bomb safety devices.
Anyway, that's the end of this week'd dose of nuclear paranoia. Since I mentioned ID cards above, you get a holiday photo:
Update: as Helen points out in the comments, the caption for the above photo should have read ``Giraffe-painted cranes...'', not ``Leopard-painted'' -- now corrected. In other news, if you are in Cambridge tomorrow, there is a Cambridge No2ID meeting in the Regal, from 8pm. And if you're in Norwich on Saturday, please come to the Norwich ID Cards Forum, 10am to 5pm in the United Reform Church on Redwell Street -- Charles Clarke MP especially welcome.
This is all done with wwwitter.
Copyright (c) Chris Lightfoot; available under a Creative Commons License. Comments, if any, copyright (c) contributors and available under the same license.