Thank you for posting this.

The above article states (wrongly) that "...His (Blunkett's) decision follows a consultation exercise which found strong public support for ID cards in the wake of terrorist alerts after the September 11 terrorist attacks."
Details here:-
 http://www.defy-id.org.uk/

I don't know if this is true but I read somewhere that in Australia they tried to introduce ID cards in the 70s/80s (cant remember), and it was just the standard stuff like Blunkett wants, but a memo was leaked that said something like it will be neccessary to tone it down and then we can add more stuff later, and there was a big scandal and they had to quit the idea or something.

Anyway regardless of whether or not thats true, what with Total Information Awareness, which in a few years will probably be up and running and destroying all civil liberties and privacy (a huge database of EVERYTHING- what books you read, what you do, where you go, credit cards, etc), and TIPS (government information program which supposedly had 2-3million volunteers in the cities for the trials, although that sounds pretty high) [both in America], and all this new surveillance stuff they're bringing in like face-recognition cameras, biometric stuff, and so on, the world is really turning into surveillance states, although Idont want to sound paranoid.

They want to keep tabs on everyone always, and also give loads of state money to high-technology companies (stuff like face recognition is supposedly really crap and always comes up with false-negatives and false-positives).

if you're worried about current capabilities of surveillance, control of dissent, never mind reshaping life itself, wait till you check out info on nanotechnology/atomtechnology!

Try www.etcgroup.org for starters - their report the Big Down gives good info and overviews.