Meeting Report: Meet Up of North West Anti-ID Groups

Dave Page | 31.05.2006 22:38 | Social Struggles | Technology | Liverpool

Sunday 28th May saw a gathering of North-West groups opposed to ID cards meeting at the Basement in Manchester to share ideas and combine efforts in opposing ID cards. Many groups were represented, from Nottingham to Liverpool and beyond, and loads of interesting discussion was generated, as you can tell by the length of this post! The meeting lasted for around five hours, including a lunch break.

We discussed groups to target and liase with. We decided that public sector workers and council employees would be useful allies, since they will have to deal with the expense and upheaval of incorporating the National Identity Register into their systems. We talked about local councillors and how Liverpool council passed a motion opposing the ID Card and Register schemes. Nobody was certain what Manchester City Council's position was, though some suspected that they had already passed a motion in favour. NO2ID's website [1] only lists motions opposing the ID Card scheme. I did find a message on the Manchester Indymedia mailing list [2] from March 2005 where a motion opposing ID cards was proposed, and a search on the council website [3] states that the motion was defeated.

We also discussed the Manchester Refugee Week and considered getting in touch with refugee groups who are already having to deal with the bureaucracy of identity schemes. We considered that job centres would be a good place to target, since people reliant on benefits may be the first victims of the Government's machinations.

There was a discussion about the technology behind the ID card scheme, and how it was doomed to failure. We talked about how it was hard to convince the public with technical arguments, since they don't know or respect the opinions of the security and technology experts who have opposed the scheme. A representative from Nottingham Defy ID pointed out that reducing the argument to that of poor technology legitimised the technology itself, implying that the scheme would be acceptable if the technology were workable. He presented us with a well-written leaflet concerning ways of arguing the ID scheme without reinforcing the Government's straw men arguments in favour. We discussed whether it's better to argue from a perspective of oppression of minority groups, which might not attract the attention of many people, or from the point of view of self-interest, which ignores wider yet related social issues. The consensus was that both approaches are valuable, and in a sense exemplified by Defy ID and NO2ID, and that once people were interested in the issue for whatever reason, they would be more willing to consider other arguments.

As a tangent to the technology discussion, we agreed that we could successfully report instances of abuse of technology and of access to information to the public. It was mentioned that the Labour Party have called for 18,000 Criminal Record Bureau checks on Manchester residents ahead of their Party Conference here in September, at vast and unnecessary expense. It was also mentioned that the CRB scheme itself is vulnerable to abuse, with employers calling for full, time consuming, expensive and intrusive checks for employees where only basic checks (or even no checks) are needed [6].

There was also an interesting short discussion of people's self-identity, especially as it relates to ID cards. We discussed the meaning of the word "activist", and how people have different identities, or partial identities, to different people. We concurred that the Government's Register would try to fit people into discrete groups to allow micromanagement, and how this would go against the way that humans naturally interact.

We talked about ways to disrupt the introduction of the Identity Register, by disrupting the biometric registration process. Methods included using pineapples or pineapple juice to slough fingerprints and make them unreadable (we should really test this!), convincing people queueing for interview to leave, or to not turn up for appointments, returning letters calling for interview with "not at this address" and so on. It was mentioned that by answering the interview questions in certain ways, the process could be dragged out to three hours, but more details are needed on this. We discussed entering false information onto the register, and multiple registration, swapping identities with other people and so forth.

We discussed direct action at the companies involved with the ID register, and pointed out that these companies would have to be favourably located for action to be noticed, to generate more interest. Nottingham Defy ID has a good list of companies involved in the scheme, related to information from Corporate Watch. We talked about inviting the press to such events.

The Manchester representatives mentioned the planned day of flyering we have organised for Saturday 1st July, and other groups said they'd be happy to support us and bring bodies. The remaining half of the Manchester Defy ID "Ministry of Truth" was produced from storage in the Basement, and we agreed it would be a good thing to have on our day of action. We discussed giving out leaflets, taking petitions for NO2ID, and asking people for contact e-mail addresses for the Manchester NO2ID mailing list. We'd like to sell T-shirts as well to encourage people to spread our message for us.

Suggestions for the day included inviting people to take part in a "special offer" whereby they pay us £300, and we take their personal information and sell it to the highest bidder. This will be promoted as being a great deal for them, and if they refuse we can point out that at least we're giving them a choice to opt out. It was also suggested that we have people wearing CCTV cameras (or cheaper cardboard replicas) on their heads following members of the public and claiming it's for their own protection (and of course leaving them alone if asked). Inviting people to apply for Irish passports if they are of Irish descent would also be good. The freeBEAGLES [4] and Freedom to Protest [5] websites were mentioned as good resources for legal rights information.

We talked about issuing combined press releases, with the bulk of the content identical, personalised for each local group to forward on to their local press. A "wiki" (see "Actions") would be a good way of doing this. We discussed having leaflets designed with an overall theme, each containing specific information about one aspect of the ID register.

Actions
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- All groups present will subscribe at least one member to the national Defy ID mailing list, which will be used to co-ordinate future meetings. These members will act as liasons between their local groups and other groups in the northwest.

- The Defy ID team, particularly Nottingham Defy ID, will revamp their website and set up a "wiki" (a collaborative website) to share resources such as press releases and artwork among groups initially in the northwest but eventually nationwide. The wiki will be password-protected to stop random spam, but this access password will be freely available to group members.

- Manchester people to keep other groups posted with information about their flyering day.

I'm sure there's stuff I've forgotten, so feel free to mail the list with corrections or addenda. Thanks to everyone who showed up, it was a great and positive day!

Dave

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