The Politic points us towards an article in the Telegraph.co.uk outlining new identity card requirements in the UK - they seem to be missing the point, compared to what the law does travel times are the least of their worries.
Labour will force everyone to give fingerprints at ID card interview centres
Ministers plan to force all adults to travel miles at their own expense to fingerprint scanning units so their details can go onto an identity card database. From 2009, everyone will have to attend one of 69 “interview centres”, whose locations are revealed today for the first time.
A few weeks back a few of us were standing around with out smokes and coffee discussing why it seems to be that the best big brother type movies come out of Britain. The classic 1984 topped every bodies list, with V for Vendetta, and Children of Men, being at, or near the top.
– the answer seems to be that they have to live with the greater threat of an intrusive big brother government on a regular basis.
The Politic asks if our charter could protect us, personally I doubt it. If we have laws that allow us to toss people into prisons without formal charge or trial, if our laws allow us to keep them there indefinitely without right to confront either their accuser or the supposed evidence that put them there, our laws are already more than suspect.
That being the case the larger question is whether or not we as free people would comply if such a law were passed.
Hopefully the people of the UK are contemplating doing more than simply complaining about the distance they have to travel to comply with this law.
I don’t think it would go down in Canada, at least at the moment. In the UK, I think the big-brother government has been gradually preparing people for more and more controls over the past ten years, so each time their freedoms are eroded, it is no longer cause for alarm, and it is all in the name of keeping things “safer.”
In Canada, the government hasn’t been doing that nearly as much, and we haven’t been subway-bombed yet, so I think there’d be more resistance to it.
And the people we imprison without recourse to trial, well, they’re not really Canadian, anyways, and they must have done something wrong, right? For us to imprison them, right? And they have long names that are difficult to pronounce, and probably they have dark skin, or something scary, right? Oooh, but once they start to imprison real Canadians without recourse to proper justice, well, then we’ll get REALLY pissed.