gallois wrote:
I don’t understand the UKs aversion to identifying themselves.
As @Cobalt says, an aversion to the ‘papers please’ feature of everyday life that has traditionally been a sign of incipient totalitarian rule. The aversion is not to identifying ourselves, but to being required to do so – for no particular reason other than to monitor our movements – by agents of the state.
gallois wrote:
Should everybody be given a number instead?
Everyone has a ‘national insurance number’ which tracks our state pension entitlement and record as a taxpayer. It might be convenient to repurpose it for other times one wishes to identify oneself, such as opening a bank account. That would mean a searchable register of NI numbers accessible to private companies, which would likely meet with resistance for obvious reasons.
gallois wrote:
Otherwise how can anyone, police aside be confident that they are dealing with the person they say they are?
This question shows the fundamental cultural difference. What legitimate reason do they have for needing to know an individual’s identity on demand? Their role is to prevent and detect crime, not to keep a general watch over the population and monitor who is doing what. If they suspect a person has committed a crime, they can arrest them. If a person is arrested and does not wish to disclose their identity to assist the police in their enquiries and thus facilitate their speedy release from arrest, then that is up to them. If the case has involved detective work and the arrest is a question of finding and arresting a particular named individual, then it is up to the police to identify and find them as part of their work. There would be zero support in this country for making that one aspect of police work easier by introducing a statutory requirement to identify oneself to the police on demand.
gallois wrote:
What are the checks and balances in the UK these days?
Checks and balances for what?
The NI numbers are not unique though. There are duplications, reportedly, due to IT cockups.
Peter wrote:
There has been a big change in Royal Mail procedures which coincided with brexit but it isn’t EU specific;
This is due to EAD (electronic advanced data) requirements and is primarily spearheaded by the United States but is now a UPU requirement. All international items now have to have electronic pre-advice sent to the destination country. Our post office (Isle of Man Post Office has nothing to do with the UK’s Royal Mail) here does it transparently for normal retail customers, but it’s probably not feasable for an operation the size of Royal Mail to do that so the customer has to fill it in before dropping off the package.
Well I was really thinking of eg. If i wanted to buy a plane from someone in the UK. I can check out who is the listed owner with the CAA, i can probably check out if there are any liens on rhe aircraft, but how do I know that the person standing in front of me, and to whom I am just about to hand a bankers draft for a large sum of money is actually the person he says he is?
Come to think of it, how does he know the banker’s draft is genuine? He might not know me from Adam. I have a draft from Lloyds Bank on my wall for £2800, as a reminder of how I nearly got caught out. It was sent by someone I had never met in payment for future services. Some gut feeling told me something was wrong. I contacted Lloyds bank to confirm whether or not it was genuine, they refused to confirm or deny.
My suspicions were confirmed some weeks later when the scam tried to go a step further.
I contacted Lloyds bank fraud department, I thought the fact that someone was issuing fake Lloyds bank drafts would be interest to them. No, they were not interested. Some years passed and by chance I found myself talking to a director of Lloyds bank. I scanned the fake draft to him and a few days later got a very apologetic reply from the fraud department saying they were looking into it.
What chance does the honest man or woman have in the UK these days?
That is true, and it is a problem, but in most scenarios it is obvious that the seller is the real seller. It just makes it easier to con somebody gullible. I used to know a guy who sold somebody a house, which he didn’t own. He went to jail (a few years later). But the buyer was obviously stupid. And I am sure that in countries where ID cards are carried the criminals find ways around that too. It is easy to forge an ID card. The only sure “ID card” is some biometric ID (e.g. a retina scan) which references to a secure database, and I don’t think that would go down very well, anywhere in Europe. And the verifier would need to possess a retina scanner… And I bet very few people on the mainland demand to see an ID card when buying say a car. Most people would regard that as offensive.
In reality, what you find is that scammers are using methods which are quite different from what you would have expected. A nice one is to hack the email account of a builder (most are on gmail, with some obvious pwd) and monitor his emails. At the right point, you send an email to one of his customers with “Thank you for confirming you want the house extension built. Here are my bank details; please transfer the £52676.23 to this bank account…”. It happened to me at work a couple of years ago; luckily we lost only 2k USD. There were clues but not strong enough: the scammer’s email was HTML-only whereas the real company used text+HTML (like everybody in business should). And the headers (which nobody looks at) made it very obvious…
Lloyds is a typical useless bank which, along with most others, is running around like headless chickens, with anti scammer measures which create misery for their customers.
So ID cards are almost nothing to do with the ability of scammers to scam people.
gallois wrote:
Well I was really thinking of eg. If i wanted to buy a plane from someone in the UK. I can check out who is the listed owner with the CAA, i can probably check out if there are any liens on rhe aircraft, but how do I know that the person standing in front of me, and to whom I am just about to hand a bankers draft for a large sum of money is actually the person he says he is?
You can ask them to prove their identity to your satisfaction, perhaps with a driving licence, passport, pilot’s licence, etc. None of those are conceptually easier to fake than a government-mandated ID card. In the case you describe they are almost certain to have a pilot’s licence, and the chances of a person trying to defraud you simultaneously being in possession of the unwitting owner’s aircraft and licence are so vanishingly small as to be irrelevant.
Individuals proving their identity to each other’s satisfaction in a private transaction that either can choose to walk away from is totally unrelated to government-mandated requirements to identify yourself on demand for the purposes of monitoring the activities of the population.
gallois wrote:
Come to think of it, how does he know the banker’s draft is genuine?
A banker’s draft is, theoretically, cleared funds. However you must be sure it is genuine, and the only real way to be sure is through familiarity with the genuine article. They are sufficiently rarely used these days (as someone approaching 40, I have never held one in my hand) that most people would be unfamiliar. Personally I would consider it suspect until cashed and cleared, much like a personal cheque.
The latest scam is people send a text to you claiming to be from Royal Mail, requesting a payment for a very small sum (e.g. £1.20) to redeliver a parcel (Royal Mail by the way doesn’t charge for this), and asking you to send your banking details to make an electronic transfer.
That itself isn’t the actual scam – the scammer can’t do anything with just your name, account number and sort code.
What they do is call you back two or three days later claming to be from your bank, claiming to be from their fraud unit. They phone up and say something like “Hello Mr Jones, your account number X sort code Y appears to be the the subject of a fraud, we need you to transfer your money into another account”. People are fooled by this because it’s a call out of the blue claiming to be from your bank quoting your name, your correct bank account number and the correct sort code. So people log onto their online banking and willingly transfer the whole contents to the scammer’s bank account while the scammer helps them through the process.
alioth wrote:
What they do is call you back two or three days later claming to be from your bank, claiming to be from their fraud unit. They phone up and say something like “Hello Mr Jones, your account number X sort code Y appears to be the the subject of a fraud, we need you to transfer your money into another account”. People are fooled by this because it’s a call out of the blue claiming to be from your bank quoting your name, your correct bank account number and the correct sort code. So people log onto their online banking and willingly transfer the whole contents to the scammer’s bank account while the scammer helps them through the process.
This is so widespread at the moment that all the banks have big, glaring warnings all over their online banking software stating that they will never, ever, under any circumstances call you up and ask you to move money to a ‘safe account’. When I want to transfer money to someone, particularly a new payee, I have to click past multiple warnings of this nature attempting to warn me off making the payment.
I’m not saying you have to be stupid to fall for this sort of scam, but you have to be trusting and fairly ignorant. Apart from anything else, anyone who knows the slightest thing about banking or software knows that the premise of your account becoming ‘unsafe’ in a way that was beyond control of the bank is absurd. If a bank suspects unauthorised access on your account they lock it and then inform you.
Graham wrote:
As @Cobalt says, an aversion to the ‘papers please’ feature of everyday life that has traditionally been a sign of incipient totalitarian rule. The aversion is not to identifying ourselves, but to being required to do so – for no particular reason other than to monitor our movements – by agents of the state.
I find it hard to believe that there is a public aversion in the UK of the government “monitoring our movements” given that the UK was the European pioneer in putting surveillance cameras in public areas. Still every time I visit London, I’m surprised by the sheer number of cameras. Especially as UK studies show that surveillance cameras do not reduce crime. They can help solve crimes, of course.
Airborne_Again wrote:
I find it hard to believe that there is a public aversion in the UK of the government “monitoring our movements” given that the UK was the European pioneer in putting surveillance cameras in public areas. Still every time I visit London, I’m surprised by the sheer number of cameras. Especially as UK studies show that surveillance cameras do not reduce crime. They can help solve crimes, of course.
While I find the cameras unpleasant and unnecessary, it’s a world apart from what I’m getting at.
It is one thing to have cameras recording everyday goings-on with the vast majority of the recordings filed away never to be looked at unless the police or other bodies are actually trying to solve some specific issue. It’s quite another to place a statutory requirement on a citizen to identify themselves on demand.
I would far rather be filmed going about my business than stopped whilst doing it with the words “papers please!”
I’m not especially trying to convince you of anything, but hope that the fact that surveillance cameras were introduced with relatively little protest, while ID cards have been shouted down at every turn and we hang onto our notion of a policeman being your servant rather than your boss gives you a flavour of the UK attitude to this stuff. The fundamental cultural difference seems to be that the UK does not permit wide-ranging discretionary powers to interfere with private citizens to be vested in relatively low-level state employees, or indeed any state employees.
