Are freedom and technology compatible?

Our ease of movement has contributed to the development of a less cohesive, more chaotic society

Yesterday the passport office rang with the unwelcome news that the mugshots I'd sent of my 10-month-old son weren't quite sharp enough for its scanner. New ones, against a plain white background and endorsed by a suitably elevated acquaintance, would have to be submitted. Our caller conducted himself with some sympathy and charm. The passport office is clearly well apprised of the difficulties involved in achieving perfect photographs of squirming infants.

How lovely it would be to indulge in the luxury of fulminating about the absurdity of elaborate baby identification documents and the grotesquerie of a controlling state that demands that even those citizens who are as yet unable to smile or raise their heads unaided must stand up and be counted.

Sadly, though, such a reaction would be irresponsible. The unpalatable fact is that the practice was introduced to limit the numbers of children being abducted in custody battles. In 1996, the year the baby-passport idea was born, no fewer than 374 children were taken out of the country in just this way. If anyone deserves to be fulminated against, it is the people who kidnap their own children.

Nevertheless, the whole process has provided a sobering illustration of how quickly the world is changing. I was 26 when I had my first passport photographs done, while my parents, like their parents before them, have so far found no need to acquire such things at all. Even my four-year-old spent some months with nothing but a scant line in my own passport to herald his arrival on the international scene.

It's very recent, this development whereby even new-borns need their own passports if they are to travel abroad, and it is a totemic indication of how a wider, freer, more accessible world can also be a more chaotic and dangerous one, in which the outrageous, illegal acts of the few may demand tighter constraints on the many.

It is the less controllable aspects of easy international travel that lie at the heart of David Blunkett's enthusiasm for what he calls entitlement cards. While benefit fraud, bank fraud and identity theft have been cited as reasons why Britons should think about adopting identity cards, Europe's big political headache is fear of illegal immigration. It is getting some control of this, couched in the most positive terms as an assault on abuses of the minimum wage, which is surely the big attraction for Mr Blunkett.

France has fingered Britain's lack of identity cards as one of the characteristics that make Britain attractive to economic migrants, while many in Britain seem certain that economic migrants are coming to this country specifically to milk the welfare state for all it is worth.

With entitlement cards, such largely paranoid beliefs could be far more easily refuted. How tempting it must be for Mr Blunkett to believe that the solution to his headline-hogging, vote-losing, illiberal-looking problem might be as simple as persuading the nation that it is positive and worthwhile for us all to co-operate in keeping closer tabs on who's getting what.

The battle lines for the next six months of consultation and debate seem to be between those who are concerned about privacy and civil liberty and those who believe the good citizen should be relaxed about such threats in the cause of the greater good. And it is true enough that this sort of implication of technology needs to be debated. But actually what's going on is a lot more interesting even than that.

There's a deeper issue here, which involves us taking a long, hard look at whether the ancient liberties we are so keen to protect are compatible with the modern freedoms we want to take for granted. In much the same way that the proliferation of international travel has led to passports for babies, the proliferation of liberal freedoms may lead to the need to prove our qualification for many of our rights.

There's a strange paradox in the idea that such things as biometric technology should be embraced as a means of bringing about a more transparent society, in which the honest need have no fear and the crooked will stick out a mile. Essentially, we're being asked to consider whether the order such technology ostensibly provides is a replacement for the sense of community we feel we have lost. Only a couple of generations ago it was rare for people to travel abroad, and not unusual for them to remain in or near the place of their birth for all of their lives.

While it is sentimental to suggest that these not-so-distant days were in any way a golden period, the truth is that ease of movement, within and across international boundaries, has contributed to the development of a less cohesive, more chaotic society, in which the rule of law functions ever more creakily. Even the proliferation of drugs relies on ease of travel.

More stable communities, where populations were intimately known to each other, were presumably easier to contain, because everybody knew everybody else's business and was quickly aware when anything out of the ordinary occurred. The obsession with getting bobbies back on the beat is an expression of a longing for that kind of local intelligence to be recaptured.

Further, that was the background, on our island, under which our civil liberties, many so very peculiarly British, developed. Even the legal system retains safeguards designed to function in communities where information about people was abundant and information about systems less easy to access. Now it is the other way round, and procedures that once protected people are now mercilessly exploited by them instead.

Today many people barely know the names of their neighbours, let alone what they are up to, and it is far harder for communities to provide checks and balances among themselves. Mr Blunkett yearns for checks and balances and for citizen accountability. Technology seems like a way of delivering them, imperfect perhaps, but the best on offer.

But the real question the identity card issue poses is whether being accountable to family, friends and community is actually at all similar to being held accountable to a vast data-entry-and-retrieval system, and whether, even if it is not similar in the least, there will come a time, quite soon, when we are willing to put up with it.

I don't think that Mr Blunkett will have his way this time around. I think his proposals will fail, in just the way that others before his have failed, or at least be watered down so much that the card will be nothing more than a reformatted passport or driving licence. But I don't think that the great barrier will be civil liberties. First it will be cost, and second, vagueness about the benefits card-carrying will bring and the abuses it will stop.

It seems to me that the estimates we are being given for the cost of our community-replacing technology are more than optimistic. The suggestion that a card-system costing £1.3bn might be worth having is nonsensical. Unless the system is extremely hi-tech, it will be easy for those who wish to abuse the system to get around it.

And if it is extremely hi-tech, then it will cost much more than the £3.1bn upper ceiling that Mr Blunkett is willing to believe in. Maybe Mr Blunkett will be happy to introduce a card so basic as to be virtually meaningless as the thin end of a wedge that carries his hopes for an ordered future. Even then, it may prove to have been carrying only his nostalgia for an ordered past instead.

d.orr@independent.co.uk