renew for freedom

Over here: Avoid this:

Once you are on the Register, you will never get off until it is abolished. But you'll be exposed to all the risks and dangers of the scheme immediately. The Home Office is building the most complex and intrusive ID control system in the world. It will certainly go wrong.

Once you are on the Register — with or without a card — you will also be forced to keep all the details that are kept about you up to date (and sort out any government errors).

Once you are on the Register you will face penalty charges for not telling the Home Office if you move house or if any other of your registered details change.

Far from being 'foolish', renewing your passport to avoid all this is just plain common sense. In the 10 years that follow, NO2ID and many others will be working to end the ID scheme and keep Britain a free country.

Renew or replace your passport in May.

Comments

[Jimmy Doyle]

People in the Home Office need to be forced to watch Brazil, in an Alex-Clockwork-Orange stylee. (And A Clockwork Orange, come to think of it.)

[Alex]

No, no, no, Jimmy. (Unless you mean just for fun.)

The Home Office must be abolished. That's the solution. Kill the head and the body will die. Drain the swamp, torch the mangroves, concrete it over, shoot any surviving alligators crawling about like roaches in a jar and toss their carcasses on the fire, then build some sort of cautionary monument on top. Either that, or nuke it.

Burn the files, wipe the hard drives with magnets, hold a big silicon car boot sale and sell Marsham Street to the Saudis. It's the only way.

[jamie]

You forgot ploughing with salt. Also, pack up the rubble and launch it into geostationary orbit, preferably around Pluto.

[Jimmy Doyle]

No, no; fine. But we make them watch Brazil first. Then at least they have a chance of understanding why their annihilation is necessary and right.

[moorethanthis]

Freedom is a tricky thing. I will be out of the country until at least June. Short of clinging to the underside of the Eurostar for my return, is there a way to get round this?

[jamie]

As I understand it, the ideas of renbewing in May is a political gesture. You may be alright doing it in June, though I'd e-mail the site organisers for confirmation of that:

JD: I've just had a horrible thought. Michael Palin as the information retrieval specialist in a Charles Clarke mask...

[moorethanthis]

Probably not much difference between Clarke and the horrible, squint-eyed baby face...

I need to watch that film again.

[Chris Lightfoot]

May vs June -- the significant change (from the point of view of current passport-holders) is whether you get a passport with an RFID chip in it (referred to as a "biometric passport" or "ICAO Machine-Readable Travel Document" or probably by various other confusing synonyms). The privacy risks of the RFID chip have been overstated but it's also fairly clear that the security implications of using RFID in this application haven't been properly thought through -- ICAO give every impression of making this up as they go along -- so you may wish to improve your chances of getting an un-chipped passport by renewing earlier rather than later. On the other hand, it may be too late already to avoid this -- the Passport Service seem to be rolling this stuff out pretty quickly now.

The other change which will happen later this year is interviews for first-time passport applicants. If you already have a passport you don't need to worry about the interviews until they start rolling out biometrics other than facial photo -- in particular, fingerprints are planned from (IIRC) next year some time. Of course, they might decide to start interviewing renewal applicants before they start fingerprinting, just for the hell of it ("The Home Office -- Because We Can, and you'd better like it, sonny").