>> 10 Things You Should Know About Schools Fingerprinting Children <<

In the letter my wife and I handed out to parents at the school gates, which nearly caused the Head Teacher and his deputy to forget their anger management training, we made no mention whatsoever of ID cards.

Curious, then that in the reply he distributed to all parents the next day, the Head spent a whole paragraph going to great lengths to deny any such link.

"Many of the issues raised by the parents are concerned with the issue of identity cards. Whatever our own views are on this issue, it should be recognised that this is a separate matter and should not be confused with the introduction of a library system..."

We can't help wondering if this was recommended procedure, or even part of a prepared text. If you receive or have received a similar denial at any point, please contact us to let us know.

But since you raised the matter, Mr Head Teacher...

Tony Blair says that state management of your identity is 'modern' and beneficial. He is wrong.

21 countries in Europe have ID cards. Almost all got them decades ago. Almost all the systems were imposed by dictatorships or under Nazi or Soviet occupation. Almost all have been used to harass political opposition, bully minorities, or facilitate mass-murder.

Everywhere - without exception - the purpose has been monitoring the people for official purposes.

Tony Blair is not Hitler. But he is building the tools of totalitarianism. The identity scheme he is pushing is more controlling than any Europe has seen before. He can give no guarantee how it may be used in his lifetime, let alone the lifetimes of our children.

Some practical freedoms - personal privacy, confidentiality, anonymity, going about our business without need for official permit - are so familiar to us that they are unnoticed, like breathing. This ID scheme will choke them. It seeks to replace the trust in our society with formal validation by officials.

Numbered, indexed and tagged, your identity subject to approval, the simplest things in life will no longer be under your control. Tony may have faith in the future, but who else will have that power? In 10 years? In 20? In what back room? Help NO2ID stop it, before it is too late.

Widespread reliance on biometric identification may yet turn out to be a Pandora's Box that encourages organised identity theft on a vast scale, since unlike a PIN number or password, "fingerprints are a bit like faces in that their images are 'left behind' in many places, e.g. on most things that we touch... the iris pattern also is no secret; e.g. the face of Bill Gates has appeared so often on the cover of magazines that his iris patterns are fully public, in high resolution." Professor John Daugman, OBE, who developed iris recognition technology at Cambridge University (2006) . He adds that "face detection (as opposed to recognition) is very unreliable."

As far as countermeasures to protect against biometric spoofing and identity theft are concerned, the professor admits "such technologies are imperfect, and it is all a bit of an arms race with James Bond gadgets and counter-gadgets. (Remember the arms race? For each anti-ballistic missile, there was an anti-anti-ballistic missile... etc etc.)"

And speaking in 2004, Professor Daugman stated "I am quite worried about the way that national ID cards will work out if the wrong camera is chosen."

"Education, Education, Education" Tony Blair     "Consent, Consent, Consent" Parents

We are campaigning to have the widespread use of biometrics in schools debated in Parliament, and henceforth strictly regulated and closely monitored, with a statutory requirement for explicit parental consent wherever biometrics are used.

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