Justice Stanley Burnton, the presiding judge, made an aside on the hopes of anti-ID card campaigners that the Gateway Reviews might prove damning to the programme as a whole.
“If there were a ’smoking gun’ in the reviews, the case for disclosure would, on one view, be considerably strengthened,” said Burnton.
“I have read both reviews. There is, in my view, no ’smoking gun’,” he said.
It stands to reason, he said, that if there had been a smoking gun, then the government wouldn’t have gone ahead with the ID Scheme in the first place, would it?
As Burnton isn’t an IT expert, we can probably reserve judgment on that argument until the reviews are published. It quite puts the whole question of this case for transparency in a logical deadlock: the whole thrust of the requests after all was the belief that the government pressed ahead with the scheme in total disregard of any amount of sensible advice that it shouldn’t. So yes, Burny, it well might.
More: ID Card Challenge Batted Back
Source: http://www.theinquirer.net/
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