White Rose is a protest blog collective focusing on civil liberties in the UK.
It was set up to point a finger at the erosion of personal freedom in the UK.
Government's active measures introduce new means of control such as identity cards and surveillance cameras, the passive measures such as weakening of double jeopardy and presumption of innocence.


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Gabriel Syme and Perry de Havilland of Samizdata.net to rally the Anglosphere behind the UK.
White Rose contributors are those bloggers and non-bloggers who oppose restrictions on personal liberties.

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Thursday, August 28, 2003
Biometric passport 'back door to ID cards'
Gabriel Syme (London)
(0)   Identity cards

This Telegraph article gives a slightly different angle to Guardian's story yesterday as it talks about the ID pilot scheme in the context of a new biometric passport:

David Blunkett was accused yesterday of using a pilot scheme for a new biometric passport as a test run for a national identity card. Civil liberties campaigners said the Home Secretary was disguising his true purposes in a backdoor attempt to gauge public reaction to ID cards.

Over the next few years, passports are to be adapted to resemble credit cards containing biometric information, such as iris patterns or fingerprints.

Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty, said:

The Home Office is being disingenuous. They know that they can't trial ID cards without parliamentary approval, so they are doing it through the back door... They have admitted that the information gleaned from this so-called passport trial will be used for the purposes of an ID card.

The state is not your friend.