Civil Rights Protection Platform, 8 May 2012: 'Registration-conscious or -conscious in historical perspective'

On Wednesday evening, 2 May, the Amsterdam Resistance Museum four lectures and discussion took place on the question to what extent population registration in the 1930s and 1940s can be compared to the current situation. Alongside Annemiek Gringold (Hollandse Schouwburg), Peter Romijn (NIOD) and Bob de Graaff (Utrecht University), Vincent Böhre took part in the debate on behalf of Privacy First:

"Vincent Böhre, chairman of the Civil Rights Protection Platform and working at Privacy First, drew some telling parallels between the biometric passport, on which he conducted a WRR study in 2009, and the 1940 Personal ID. "First of all, both the Personal ID and today's biometric passport were introduced in 'wartime'; where World War II was raging at the time, today we accept all kinds of registrations partly due to pressure from the War on Terror which has been going on for a decade. Moreover, there is propaganda involved in both; the government information leaflet states that the new passport is there to prevent fraud. That the biometric passport serves four or five other purposes, including criminal investigations, has never been told in information campaigns."

Furthermore, both the Personal Identification Card and the biometric passport were considered a prestige project of the Dutch government, both were presented as a state-of-the-art product with which the Netherlands played a pioneering role. Finally, identity cards are used as a control tool; biometrically mapping a population is a powerful tool to break down resistance. In Iraq and Afghanistan, too, ID cards are used to fight insurgents.
According to Böhre, the resistance in the Netherlands today is there, but through other avenues. "There are currently several lawsuits against the mandatory fingerprint in passports. Instead of a bombardment of the Central Population Register, today we can speak of a legal bombardment.""

Read HERE the entire report of the evening on the website of the Civil Rights Protection Platform.