I was following a story over at The Register, which involved the UK government’s ID card forum. The original article contained allegations that some of the supporters of the ID card scheme were in fact students who had just sat through a presentation by Jacqui Smith (the Home Secretary), and not bona fide people who had registered to actually discuss anything. It appears that the wonderful Labour spin masters had taken parts of the pupil’s original messages (anything pro-ID card obviously), renamed them to Shooter1, Shooter2 etc. Messages querying whether Shooter1 et al were genuine were not answered at the time. (The Shooter part of the user names was based on the school the talk was given at (Shooters Hill College, Greenwich), not anything to excite conspiracy nuts 🙂 ).
Anyway, the forum has now been shut down (as planned), but the discussions that took place appear to show that the alleged (by the government) majority support for ID cards amongst young people may not exist. It will be interesting to see if this sort of public experiment in gathering actual opinions is repeated any time soon for other controversial topics.
Oct 24 2008
Caught Out, Closed Down?
Comments Off on Caught Out, Closed Down?