Database nation

When I moved from my native Canada to the UK in 2003, I thought it was ironic that the Doctorows had returned to Europe. My father was born to Polish-Russian parents in a refugee camp in Azerbaijan just before the second world war ended. My grandparents – deserting Red Army conscriptees – destroyed their documents and became, in the parlance of the day, Displaced People.

When the war ended, they went west again, but when they reached Russia, they kept going. When they reached Poland, they kept going. They moved with the great refugee herd into Germany, to a camp near Hamburg (where my aunt was born), before boarding a refugee boat and sailing to the port of Halifax, where an immigration official truncated their names – Doctorowicz became Doctorow – and gave them a train ticket to Toronto, where my great-uncle Max and his family lived.

My grandmother is still alive, and sharp as a tack. I asked her recently why they didn't stay in the Soviet Union. Despite her aversion to military service, she was a war hero. She had gone through her adolescence as a civil defence worker during the hard years of the Siege of Leningrad, digging trenches and hauling bodies as a girl of 12, until she was evacuated to Siberia at the age of 15. Her family still lived in Leningrad – mother, father, baby brother. Leningrad is a majestic city, cosmopolitan and vibrant, even with the war scars on its face. In Toronto she knew no one, didn't speak the language. Her years as a refugee would stretch out for decades until she could truly consider herself a Canadian.

I asked her why she didn't stay, and she shook her head like I'd asked the stupidest possible question. "It was the Soviet Union", she said. She waved her hand, groped for the answer. "Papers," she said, finally. "We had to carry papers. The police could stop you at any time and make you turn over your papers." The floodgates opened. They spied on you. They made you spy on each other. Your grandfather wouldn't have been allowed to stay – he was Polish, they wouldn't let him stay with the family in Russia, he'd have to go back to Poland.

My head bobbed unconsciously as she told me this. I knew all of it, by way of innuendos and hints over the years, but I had never heard her say it all at once. I'd even seen it firsthand, when we visited the family in Leningrad in 1984, having our conversations cut short when they strayed into political territory, with over-the-shoulder looks for the snoops who might be listening in and waiting to turn my family in to the KGB.

Half a century later, the Doctorows came back to Europe. I set up residence in London, working for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an American civil liberties nonprofit, running the European operations. I was privileged to be given status as a "highly skilled migrant" (the only visa category I qualified for, given my lack of a university degree). A few years later, I was living with my partner, and had fathered a British daughter (when I mentioned this to a UK immigration official at Heathrow, he sneeringly called her "half a British citizen"). We were planning a giant family wedding in Toronto when the news came down: the Home Secretary had unilaterally, on 24 hours' notice, changed the rules for highly skilled migrants to require a university degree. My immigration lawyers confirmed it: people who'd established residence in the UK for years and years, who'd built businesses and employed Britons here, who owned homes and given birth to British children, were being thrown out of the country, taking their tax-payments, jobs and families with them.

My partner and I scrambled. We got married. We applied for a spousal visa. A few weeks later, I presented myself in Croydon at the Home Office immigration centre to turn over my biometrics and have a visa glued into my Canadian passport. I got two years' breathing room. My family could stay in Britain.

Then came last week's announcement: effective immediately, spousal visa holders (and foreign students) would be issued mandatory, biometric radio-frequency ID papers that we will have to carry at all times. And I started to look over my shoulder.

Once again, it seems as though the Doctorows may have to leave Europe. The identity card I'm to be issued when I renew my visa is intended to be linked to all my daily activities: my medical care, my use of transit, my banking and finance, my tax – a single identifier that will track me through time and space, forever. The dossier thus gathered on me will be managed by the same agencies that have lost (literally) tens of millions' worth of records on British people in the past year alone.

It will all be tied to my biometric identifiers, such as fingerprints. Unless you wear gloves at all times, you leave these identifiers behind continuously, everywhere you go. These identifiers are not only available to law enforcement and the state, but to anyone who cares to lift them off any smooth surface you happen to touch. Once these identifiers are compromised, there is no means – short of amputation – to change them. Consider the case of German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schauble, who advocates biometric IDs: his fingerprints were lifted from a water-glass at a public debate and published on 10,000 pieces of acetate by a group of media pranksters with no budget and who stood to gain no financial benefit from the stunt. Will well-heeled identity thieves who can use these biometrics to commit crimes and empty bank accounts be less resourceful?

The identity card will emit my personal information to people who are at a great distance from me, without my knowledge or consent. The RFID tags in the cards are advertised as only being readable at a few centimetres' distance, like an Oyster card, but, like an Oyster card, security researchers have shown that these cards can be read at tens of metres, and can be cloned using cheap, off-the-shelf technology.

So it's fortunate that I got my spousal visa when I did, before these identity papers were made mandatory. Indeed, it's fortunate that I received my spousal visa at all, as Labour moves to limit the number of annual new visas of all kinds to 20,000 people, meaning that Britons who marry foreigners can no longer be assured that they will be able to settle and raise their families in the UK.

The national ID card does not exist in a vacuum. It is part of an unprecedented, unparalleled programme to use technology to spy upon and control the movements of people in the UK. Our internet connections are censored and wiretapped by advertisers. Soon, our ISPs will be forced to log and retain the details of all our online activity for snooping by governments, bored employees, or any crook who can hack or bribe his way into the surveillance databases. Our image is captured hundreds of times every time we leave the house. Our number-plates are photographed hundreds of times by traffic cameras, creating a record of where we've been. Our Oyster card data is logged and made available to police, snoops, crooks and anyone else with the resources to get hold of it.

We can be arrested and held for weeks without charge. Government tells academics which freely available information about terrorists they are allowed to study and what they are not allowed to look at.

We are encouraged to spy on our neighbours and report their suspicious activity. We can be stopped and searched with no particularised suspicion, and during these searches, police officers can and do examine such things as the books we're reading and the personal notes we've made.

Every one of these measures was beta-tested on less-advantaged groups before it was rolled out to the general public. CCTVs used the be the exclusive territory of bank vaults and prisons. Network wiretapping and censorship began in schools, "to protect children".

Now, we immigrants are to be the beta testers for Britain's sleepwalk into the surveillance society. We will have to carry internal passports and the press will say, "If you don't like it, you don't have to live here – it's unseemly for a guest to complain about the terms of the hospitality." But this beta test is not intended to stop with immigrants. Government freely admits that immigrants are only the first stage of a universal rollout of mandatory biometric RFID identity cards. What happens to us now will happen to you, next.

Not me, though. If the government of the day when I renew my visa in 2010 requires that I carry these papers as a condition of residence, the Doctorows will again leave their country and find a freer one. My wife – born here, raised here, with family here – is with me. We won't raise our British daughter in the database nation. It's not safe.