---

Identity Cards Bill

I have had some difficulty in trying to follow this argument. Noble Lords opposite seem to live in a rather different world from the one in which I live. In my world dealings are based, perhaps wrongly, largely on trust and the idea that most people obey the law most of the time. As regards the technology, of course this will be an enormous database but that is now possible. In the technological world in which we now live it is possible to have such a database. In the past acres of accommodation would have been required to store the paper records. Incidentally, such a system would be considerably less secure than the computer storage of encrypted information. To my mind it would be much more profitable for people to hack into certain other government databases. Noble Lords seem to think that is a very easy process. I am no computer expert, but I know that hackers are clever people who can make a lot of money but do not break the law, because they are good computer experts who hack for fun and not for profit. But if it were possible, hacking into the passport database, the social security database or the income tax database would be much more profitable than trying to hack into the national register, for the simple reason that it would allow dishonest people to make money out of it—that is presumably a major reason why they would want to do it. I do not see how enormous sums of money could be made by taking information out of the national register, except by stealing someone’s identity and then going through a long process.