In order to defend the country from the threat of international terrorism the government has at its disposal some extraordinary powers which involve deploying high tech measures that, while they may make us safer, also erode traditional British liberties.

At the heart of that matter is a fundamental shift in the relationship between the citizen and the state, and nowhere is that shift more apparent than in the push to introduce identity cards for the whole population.

While the government’s control orders, restricting the liberty of people who have not been charged let alone convicted, will only ever affect a relatively small number of people, ID cards will put everyone under surveillance.

The ID card will contain biometric information including iris scans and fingerprints which will be kept on a database run by an independent body, a quango that would not be directly democratically accountable.

If the police or the security services have exhausted their own resources in pursuit of a suspect they can request a search of the ID database to identify individuals through their biometric material. It seems very unlikely these requests would ever be turned down.

The effect of such a move, in principle, is that it makes everybody on the database a suspect until they are eliminated from an investigation, a complete break with current arrangements in which a person is only investigated if there is a proper reason to do so. “There is no question that this would create a surveillance society, there is no doubt about that,” says Simon Davies, director of Privacy International.

By way of an alternative, Davies points to a model for ID cards put forward in a recent report by academics from the London School of Economics. Their study on the viability of the government’s preferred ID card scheme found it “neither safe nor appropriate” and warned it was “too complex, technically unsafe, overly prescriptive and lacks a foundation of public trust and confidence”.

Instead, they called for a system based around information that members of the public would genuinely find useful to have stored about themselves. Davies said that such a move, while counter-intuitive, would lessen the impact on the relationship between state and citizen, and could in fact see the state working in the service of the citizen.

“We are saying, why not put the information on citizens into the hands of the citizen, into the hands of the user. The user controls disclosure and thecollection of that information,” he told Blue Skies magazine. “If we had this lighter system, controlled by the citizen rather than the state, then I think it would be acceptable. At least, it would move in the direction of becoming acceptable.”

The possibility that the government would be open to such a compromise, however, seems unlikely – unless concessions are forced on ministers when they attempt to get the legislation on to the statute book.

Ministers insist that they are acting for benevolent reasons, protecting the public from the possibility of a major terrorist attack as well as dealing with other crimes such as identity theft. But having a national database with information on each and every citizen could easily prove a double-edged sword. Critics warn that having such a store of data with centralised records could make the problem of identity theft even worse.

The plans, which will rely on technologies which are not yet fully developed, is not the fulfilment of George Orwell’s dystopian vision of 1984, but it is certainly a major shift in the relationship between citizen and state.