One of the Government’s many and varied excusesreasons for introducing ID cards is the reduce crime.

I won’t repeat the arguments so let’s take it as read that ID cards won’t significantly reduce benefit fraud and isn’t the best use of untold billions to fight terrorism. Establishing the identity of a suspect is not a big problem for the police.

So what effect will the introduction of ID cards have on crime levels? The total number of new offences created by the Labour Government since 1997 must be pushing 700 now. The ID cards bill will create “a string of new offences“, although mostly civil, rather than criminal, offences. However – if I understand this correctly – failing to pay a fine imposed as a civil penalty would be a criminal offence.

As people refuse to register for ID cards, forget to inform the Government of changes of address and miss appointments for biometric scanning (for example because their child is off school sick), excessive civil penalties will be imposed and criminal offences will inevitably follow.

Then there are the additional crimes that will be committed in order to work around the new system. Illegally gaining access to the database will surely be attempted, probably successfully on a number of occasions through insider access before hacking is even considered. And then there’s ID card forgery itself, a new crime that will prove popular with certain types of criminal gang.

This is obviously conjecture but rather than a concrete assessment, this is intended to make a point: that despite the Government’s professed intentions, ID cards could actually increase crime.

Apologies for the “what I ate today” post. There was a buffet lunch for recently-joined members of staff today at work today. Lots of nice food. Tried a vol-au-vent topped with caviar, which I’d not had before. Blargh.

That is all.

Speaking of libraries, and of people I hadn’t heard of until today, I was sent a link to a site about “legendary cataloger Sandy Berman“.

Berman, it turns out, is one of these awkward people who thinks he knows best and is prepared to take issue with authorities who disagree – and, in some respects at least, a good thing too. His most famous campaign seems to be an attempt to get the subject cataloguers at the Library of Congress to make their subject classifications more contemporary and reader-friendly (for example, using “Trucking” rather than “Transportation, Automotive-Freight”) and less discriminatory: Hennepin Country Library, where Berman was Head Cataloger, was using Apartheid as a subject heading in 1973; the Library of Congress recognised it in 1986.

In his 1971 book Prejudices and Antipathies: A Tract on the LC Subject Heads Concerning People Berman identifies unacceptable LC terms and gaps in terminology to do with ethnicity, religion, gender, sex, age, sexual orientation, labour, and developing countries, among others, and suggests replacements. Many headings that Berman created for “new concepts” and used in cataloging at the Hennepin County Library, such as “GAY RIGHTS”, “ACID RAIN”, and “PUNK ROCK MUSIC”, were later added to the LCSH.

Until this morning, I’d never heard of Ernö Goldfinger. Then I read this article from the Guardian Hay festival.

When the film Goldfinger came out, the architect was afflicted by spoof calls in the middle of the night. Callers would intone in bad Sean Connery accents, “Goldfinger? This is agent 007,” or sing the film’s theme tune, “an irritation still endured by members of the family who list their names in the telephone directory,” Nigel Warburton, of the Open University, told a breakfast-time audience.
…
Erno Goldfinger was one of the 20th century’s prime advocates of London tower blocks. He designed the often reviled Alexander Fleming House at the Elephant and Castle, Trellick Tower in Ladbroke Grove and Balfron Tower in Tower Hamlets.

This morning, Nigel Warburton’s book was there on the shelf at work, ready to be catalogued.