Proposals for the national identity register have sparked concerns about invasions of privacy, says Roger Smith

The Law Society has taken a creditably agnostic view of the case for identity cards.

Those still supporting home secretary David Blunkett's grand plans might care to read the draft Identity Cards Bill, now published by the Home Office along with a consultation paper.

The Bill makes clear that identity cards, as such, are not actually the issue.

The real core of the proposals is the national identity register (NIR).

The NIR is a vast database that is intended as a register of almost all of those lawfully in the UK.

Death itself provides no escape, for its date is but the last of a long list of 'registerable facts'.

Most of these are what you would expect: name, date of birth, current address, biometric identifiers.

However, also included are all previous addresses, plus residential status at each address.

The history of all those student flats will remain with you for life.

Second or holiday homes in the UK also go in.

So too will NHS, national insurance and other numbers allocated for identification purposes together with information to which they relate, such as a criminal record number that will indicate whether a person has a conviction or caution.

The Bill, rather optimistically, allows us to volunteer additional information, though it wisely allows the home secretary to turn down such offers not 'practicable' or 'appropriate'.

Most contentiously, an entry in the register will also include 'an audit trail' of all those who consult it and, presumably, why they have done so.

This gives the NIR a dynamic quality because presumably logged on it will be every exit and entry to the country, every time you have to produce your driving licence, and every other time when you will have been required - or have offered - to produce your identity card or your identity has been checked.

You can learn almost everything else about your own entry except who has been checking it and why.

Applying to join the register will not just be a case, as now for a passport, of filling in the application form, sending in some photos and getting a countersignature.

You may be required to attend a specified place at a specified time, have your photograph, fingerprints or other biometrics taken, and 'provide such information as may be required by the secretary of state'.

In the second phase of implementation - from around 2013 - the secretary of state may order you to attend without your making a prior application.

You may also be registered without your consent.

Rebel against compulsory registration and you might end up in the Kafkaesque legal territory of 'civil penalties'.

These are not criminal fines but they bear a heavy resemblance and can leave you up to 2,500 the poorer.

A key issue is, of course, who can check the database.

As you would expect, disclosure can be made 'in the interests of national security', or 'for purposes connected with the prevention or detection of crime', or as otherwise specified by the home secretary.

However, no one will bother much with tiresome justifications like this because clause 20(2) allows pretty well Uncle Tom Cobley and all to have access to your file 'for the purpose of carrying out any' of their functions.

Thus, GCHQ, the security services, the National Crime Squad and National Criminal Intelligence Service can get in pretty well by asserting that they would like to do so.

Bear in mind that optical recognition systems will allow automatic linking of any picture of you with the definitive picture on the database.

The home secretary has made much of the prohibition in the Bill of any requirement that we will have to carry a card with us at all times.

The primacy of the register makes this provision irrelevant since your biometric and other details can be checked directly with the central register.

The card itself is simply a handy copy of the entry in the register.

There is no doubt that the card and the NIR are major invasions of privacy.

The legal question, correctly posed by the Law Society, is whether such invasions are justified because they are a proportionate response sufficiently specifically targeted to meet a justified need.

The political question is whether the public, once the full nature of the proposals becomes clear, will actually maintain what is currently taken for its support for this idea.

All existing polls suggest, in any event, that there may be majority support for this as an abstract idea but little for having to pay anything like the 35 cost estimated by the Home Office.

The home secretary, giving evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee, notably backtracked from saying that the arrangements would do much to combat terrorism.

This is particularly so because any aspiring terrorist wishing to avoid an identity card should simply enter on a three-month tourist visa.

It might be more prudent - and more effective - to avoid the grand gestures in this draft Bill and undertake some pragmatic cleaning up of existing databases, combined with more thorough checking in relation to entry.

Roger Smith is the director of the law reform and human rights organisation Justice