47 Colombo Street
London, Greater London SE1
UK
Speaker: SA Mathieson, journalist and author of Card declined: how Britain said no to ID cards, three times over.
SA Mathieson will be talking about how the tactics of defeating ID cards worked, and what we can do again to fight PRISM. Speaking on his experience as part of an initially small group of campaigners and politicians who managed over time to dismantle the National Identity Scheme – and how future campaigners can put the same techniques to work.
The debate over privacy can feel like it is taking place on an endless slippery slope, in which surveillance states and unaccountable corporations remorselessly ratchet up their monitoring of innocent citizens. The reality is that British supporters of greater privacy have won significant recent battles, notably over ID cards – or more precisely, the National Identity Scheme and passports requiring fingerprinting.
Despite Edward Snowden’s leaks over the workings of the NSA and GCHQ – possibly because – there is every opportunity for further successes, particularly for those willing to learn from battles won like the abolition of ID cards.
SA Mathieson wrote about the UK ID card plans from 2002 for titles including the Guardian, watched as Home Office minister Damian Green fed some of its hard drives into an industrial shredder in 2011 and is the author of Card declined, an account of Britain’s love-hate relationship with identity cards.
Card declined is available from Amazon in Kindle and print, from theauthor’s website in other electronic formats, from some bookshops and at the event.