I saw the following post on UK Liberty, in which it had a question at the end about Tesco, who are negotitating with the Government to collect biometric information for Jacqui Smith’s EU Regional Ministry of the Interior Home Office.

Jacqui Smith, Home Surveillance Secretary, is “regularly” approached by (irrational) people who want ID cards.

However, I suspect these are representative of a tiny minority of the population, particularly now that the cost of ID cards at point of sale is estimated to be roughly double what the Government has been suggesting (ID card enrolment £30 + fingerprint enrolment £20 to £40):

Biometric enrolment fees for passports and ID cards will cost applicants £20-£40 on top of the basic price, estimates released by the Home Office revealed yesterday. In a prospectus soliciting private sector partners for enrolment, the Identity & Passport Service said that the total market for these services is worth “between £120 million and £280 million per year.” (The Register)

I say this because only 16% of people are prepared to pay for ID cards at £30, and only 2% are prepared to pay over £50.

(By the way, I’d be interested to know how Jacqui will reliably tie the biometrics registered at your supermarket  to the supply of identity documents to the local IPS interrogation centre.)

Let me provide you with the answer to that question above.

Tesco ALREADY has a database about you bigger than the planned NIR. The only thing that Tesco don’t have, is the biometric data…., for now.

The Database is called CRUCIBLE. It is run by a Tesco subsidiary Dunnhumby and it operates outside the law.

As far back as 2005, the Guardian (those promoters of Liberal government) tried to get information about Crucible. They were stonewalled. So they tried legal routes using the Data Protection Act to no avail and then appealed to the Information Commissioner. Under a great deal of pressure, Tesco came up with a small amount of information on its Clubcard.

Dunnhumby’s chairman, Clive Humby, offers a few more clues. Companies such as Experian, Claritas and Equifax have databases on individuals and Crucible collects from them all, it collates information on every household, either through its own club card or through swapping information with other consumer groups, such as Sky, Orange and Gillette..

Any questionnaire you may have completed, any reader offers you responded to, are similarly bought to build up a picture of attitudes and habits.

Crucible also trawls the electoral roll, collecting names, ages and housing information. It uses data from the Land Registry, DVLA, Office for National Statistics and other bodies to generate a profile of the area you live in. Zodiac is employed to provide a more detailed profile.

You can read about Crucible, and the Guardian investigation here.
Read about it in the Times, Spyblog, and the telling fact that the Wikipedia on Crucible is both very short and heavily edited is worrying.

The government is now going to give Tesco’s ‘legislative protection’ to expand their database further, in exchange for collecting all your biometric data to be shared with the Home Office.

Scared, you should be. When an organisation that is supposed to be selling food knows more about you than the overbearing authoritarian Government currently in power, you really know that 1984 is here.

I put the link together between Blair’s Peoples Panels, ID Cards and Tesco’s database in December 06.

It also crossed my mind that over the past 5 years so much data has been ‘lost’ by government departments, yet mysteriously it never seems to have hit the criminal world, I wonder just where it could have gone. If you were in power and wanted to set up a private NIR before the politico’s were forced by public pressure, political expediency or a change of governing party to abandon theirs, where would you make sure all the data went.

But, There IS another way!

The Libertarian Party is the only party that has promised to put an end to this Politics of Fear, scrap all these intrusive databases, remove legislative protection for the organisations using shared data, and repeal the many thousands of draconian laws enacted over the past 11 years.

 


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Hat tip PJC Journal