John Welford's Home Page |
Welcome to my home page! Several years ago I wrote an article for Computer Weekly on the potential confidentiality 'Big Brother' problems posed by government computer databases and the use of a unique 'universal personal identifier' (UPI) for each citizen. At that time it seemed possible that the UK Driver Licence Number might be turned into our very own UPI. Moreover, it was clear to me that in due course this identifier would then inevitably be used to integrate all the large national databases, creating a vast superdatabase, with undreamt of intrusive state powers. In order to highlight this huge threat to our privacy I therefore used the above photo displaying my own unique number, WELFO 402200 JA9CK, to accompany my article. Fortunately, good sense and people's widespread concerns about data privacy prevailed, and so we still happily retain a good measure of confidentiality within the UK. However, since the present Labour government has decided that data privacy should be abolished and that everyone should be compulsorily numbered, fingerprinted and issued with a comprehensive biometric ID card, I thought that it was time to dust down my old photograph, and use it again! Concern within the country is, of course, growing rapidly as people find out more about what the imposition of ID cards and the accompanying National Identity Register will mean for them. But beyond that, people are at last beginning to wake up to the ultimate nightmare prospect of a government-created Stasi-like meta-database, twenty times more intrusive than anything else on the planet. So what is the likely financial 'all in' cost of such authoritarian, Orwellian madness? It could, for example, amount to a staggering £500 per card, as estimated by the London School of Economics. Meanwhile, remarkably the government appears to be unwilling to tell us precisely what the true purpose of such a costly and intrusive scheme would be. And all of this despite the fact that former MI5 spy chief Stella Rimington recently declared that the scheme would be "absolutely useless". If you have misgivings about these deeply worrying developments and the threat to our democracy you should consider giving your support to the NO2ID campaign. I recently became the local coordinator for NO2ID Edinburgh, and to view my most recent publications on identity card issues, see: Edinburgh Evening News 7 Jan. 08., Peace News Feb. 08, Edinburgh Student 19 Feb. 08 and The Big Issue (Scotland) 27 Mar. 08. Finally, here is information about Edinburgh's very own ID Card Interrogation Centre and groundbreaking news about our campaigns against The Scottish ID Cards Scandal and The English ID Cards Scandal. The BrainWareMap
Background
Dr John Welford
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For several years I ran Brainware Creative Learning workshop programmes for students at the University of Edinburgh. Recently, presented with the challenge of making the workshop materials readily available on the web I decided to structure these in the form of a clickable map based on the graphical design concepts developed by 
