Speaking of biometric identifying documents, I ran a workshop at the weekend with a group of Open University associate lecturers on the UK's proposed national identity card. We focussed on the practicalities of the technology and didn't get into the complex debate on potential civil liberties implications.

I did a survey before we began and found about 28% of the audience were in favour of the proposals, 28% were undecided and 44% were against. Interestingly enough, at the end of the workshop we checked again and these numbers were unchanged. Yet nearly eveyone in the room was convinced that:

The national ID card is a "solution" looking to solve a huge range of problems (terrorism, benefit fraud, immigration, NHS and other public service access, unpaid parking fines... the list is endless)in vague unspecified ways.

That in their current stage of development biometric technologies are unreliable.

There is not a computer scientist in the world that could secure a centralised database of the size and complexity and with the remote access requirements of that needed to underpin the proposed ID card.

That the government has not got the best record in commissioning and implementing large information systems and has not done anything on this scale before.

That ID card system trials were severely hampered by technical problems, didn't get started until 3 months after the proposed start date, were rushed and had nowhere near the planned 10000 volunteers that were initally planned to include.

That at least one of the large existing goverment IT systems that the national ID card systmem will have to talk to, the benefits system, failed catatrophically just last week.

That the proposed system completely fails to solve any of the problems it is allegedly intended to deal with and in many instances will make the situation worse e.g. in relation to the already over-worked law enforcement authorities, who whilst processing the 20 to 95% of us who will have serious errors in our electronic profiles, will be so swamped with electronic garbage that they won't have sufficient time/resources to engage in the kind of intelligent policing required to target and apprehend so-called "bad actors."

That the system is so complex and so insecure, due to the need for hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people in public service jobs requiring access just to do their job, that it will be error prone and repeatedly subject to malicious changes and intent, by a small number of inside and possiblly a larger number of external bad actors.

That there will be a whole serious of complex emergent properties, some positive and some negative.

That it will cost an absolute fortune and that it is clearly not worth the money, let alone the other costs alluded to above.

So why, amongst a group of smart, thoughtful people from a wide range of backgrounds (technology, science, arts, business, social science, languages) were 27% still in favour at the end of the discussions? This has to do with values and emotions rather than practicalities. And you see that's the thing - security, which is what a large part of the ID card debate is often reduced to, is about feelings as much as reality. On each occasion that I've done this workshop asking people to think about the practical implications of deploying the technologies in the way that is proposed, those in favour of the ID card rarely change their minds. Largely because the idea of an identity card "feels" right.

Tony Blair and David Blunkett understand the power of emotions and tailor their pro ID card campaign accordingly with soundbites like "nothing to hide, nothing to fear," which though meaningless, taps into people's feelings. The anti campaign are severely on the defensive, since they have not come up with anything like an equivalent soundbite, with the requisite pithiness. All I can offer is Jeffrey Rosen's "people have a right to avoid being judged out of context in a world of short attention spans." That takes 5 seconds to say. Blair and Blunkett's takes 1 second. Sadly 5 seconds is too long and in today's world if you have to explain, you've lost the argument...