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Answered by Gerard Batten

I don’t think so. The ID cards scheme, as you are well aware, is a bit of a red herring. It is not the ID card that matters, it is the information database that lies behind it, in which they will have... Show more »I don’t think so. The ID cards scheme, as you are well aware, is a bit of a red herring. It is not the ID card that matters, it is the information database that lies behind it, in which they will have all the information about a citizen on a safe database. There’s around 50 different categories of information they are going to have about you. It is very very dangerous to put all this in one place because if one of this isn’t secure, anyone can hack into it. It isn’t secure enough – when all your information is in one place, criminals can get hold of it that much easily. Extremely dangerous – I don’t trust the State to have this information, neither do I trust its security. Your personal information would become public property. I don’t think we owe the State that. [About tapping], all electronic communications are tapped anyway. Any communication you have by phone, fax, e-mail all goes through GHQ in Cheltenham and they can look at that whenever they want to. It’s a fact of life. They deny it is not. The security services have that ability to do that; the Americans have a system called ‘Echelon’ which can track any electronic communication in the world. It’s the nature of it now for electronic communication that this can be done. And while of course there are billions of messages every day, the security services look for special keywords and sophisticated searching device in order to track terrorists. And this is how many of the terrorist threats are actually countered and uncovered. That’s a fact of life. It happens. There’s no such thing as private or secure communication. If they want to tap you, they can and they will. What I’m saying is that these can be used in court and since the Security Services do use it, let’s regularize it and insert the circumstances when they can do it. Show less »