I am the author of Card declined: how Britain said no to ID cards, three times over, published in March 2013. I live in West Oxfordshire in Britain.
I first wrote about the British ID card system in 2002 for Computing newspaper, wrote about it numerous times as it developed and in 2011 covered its demise for the Guardian.
I decided to write a history of ID cards in Britain because it is such a strange story, which as far as I could see no-one had ever told in full. The UK had ID cards during the Second World War, kept them for several years afterwards, then abolished them; legislated for football fan ID cards in the late 1980s but never introduced them; then both main parties planned schemes, with legislation passing in 2006, only for it to be repealed in 2010 under the new coalition government. And politicians involved in it got into so many messes. My one-sentence summary of the book is that it’s a battle for British liberty that often descends into farce.
In June 2013, I published a short e-book on ‘pump and dump’ stock spam, which is also available on Kindle (and can be borrowed free by Amazon Prime customers).
I have been covering IT as a journalist since 1998. I now focus mainly on healthcare IT, particularly in the NHS, as an analyst. I also work as a freelance journalist and writer, on a range of subjects.
You can find out more about me at my website or @samathieson on Twitter.
